Life gets busy and travel often takes a backseat. For young parents travelling with infants and toddlers can get stressful and when kids go on to higher grades in school, their schedules become tighter to accommodate frequent and longer travel itineraries. Where is the time to travel?
I once heard on a parenting podcast that we have just 18 summers with our kids. This perspective totally blew me away as I realised, we have just 18 opportunities to spend quality, undisturbed time as a family and make memories for a lifetime.
Think about it, sometimes all we need is a different perspective.
From then on, we have consciously made the decision to travel as a family as much as possible.
Some of the top-level benefits we have got so far are:
- Shared experiences: When we travel together, we have shared experiences of witnessing new sights, interacting with local people, and trying different activities. Some of our travel has had challenges too and when we resolve it, we have grown stronger together as a team who did it. We often have different memories to share from a trip together or remind each other of the situation and reminisce about it.
- Quality time: I absolutely love that when we travel together, we are away from the daily routine and the usual surroundings. We then have meaningful conversations or simply experience something together that is just unique to us.
- Knowledge and wisdom: Experiencing new environments encourages curiosity, allows the family to be open to different foods, smells, and sounds, encourages adaptability to the environment, and most importantly develops a broader understanding of the world. These shared learning experiences have allowed us to appreciate the uniqueness of the world and be more tolerant.
- Strengthening communication: Traveling as a family often requires planning, decision-making, and problem-solving together. Thanks to the pandemic and online education, most kids do have decent searching skills on Google. So, tapping on their existing skills, we enlist their help in areas such as finding out entry prices for attractions, knowing more about activities they can do, or even finding out the history of the location we are visiting. This shared responsibility has improved communication skills and enhanced the family’s ability to work together effectively.
- Creating traditions: From our experience of travelling together we have adopted some unique flavours in our food habits. We have also learned some songs during our travel that we hum together. This gives us to show up as a single unit and create a sense of belonging with each other.
Travelling needs a lot of planning, budgeting, and time too. This can be made easy when it is a team effort. Kids as young as 5 years can be involved to identify places to visit on the world map or a country map. Besides, travelling is way less complicated today because of the Internet and influencers. In our experience, planning a trip together has always been a conversation at the dinner table which rolls over into different activities, and then the excitement begins. A journey of a thousand miles sure starts with the first step.
Are you ready to take your first step?
Shared By: Surbhi Dedhia
Author’s bio:
Surbhi is a digital marketer by day and a travel planner by night. Her travel partners are her two kids and husband and together they have travelled to more than 20 countries. Follow their travel experience on @tell_with_bhises on Instagram.
