traveling with your kids (the adult kind)

The Joys of Traveling with Your Kids--the Adult Kind, That Is

No need for strollers or Mr. Bunny

      At the airport gate, the young couple was struggling with folding up the extremely complicated-looking double stroller. As the father finally got it locked to get it on the moving luggage track, the mother adjusted her baby-carrying backpack, soothing her crying infant while she tightly held the hand of another small child who had started to wriggle on the floor.

      On the plane, another mother tried to comfort the screeching toddler holding her hands to her ears, in significant pain most likely because of the air pressure of the take-off.

      At a café in Venice, we saw parents loaded up with card games, coloring books, word puzzles, video games—all to keep their young children entertained and not wandering off into a canal. At a restaurant in a Greek island town, where the menu choices included fried octopus giovetsi, the parents of a family of four were asking if they could please just get plain spaghetti—not too much sauce—for their youngish kids.

      As we moved through Italy and Greece, all around it seemed, were shrieking children, screeching children, wayward children, equipment-laden children. Even, sometimes, bored children. Mostly, they were just being normal children dealing with a different, strange environment. They just had needs that make travel—particularly international travel—more difficult.

      We also traveled with our children. The difference was we traveled with our adult children.

It’s a perk of age. You get old enough, your kids get old enough, you can travel with them as equals, not serving as babysitters or caregivers.

      You can talk with them about the history of the Parthenon and the reason the Bridge of Sighs is called the Bridge of Sighs. You can share a glass of wine with them, offer them a small taste of cuttlefish and not get a yuck back.

      It’s a great idea, of course, to travel with your young kids, to show them the world, expose them to different cultures, let them eat different foods and hear different languages. It will broaden their perspective, give them experiences they couldn’t have at home. And maybe the only reason you can even take the trip at all is because the kids are little and not yet in school or at camp.

      We did it back then; it was fun but yeah, it was complicated and grueling, too.

      The reality is that when they’re little, you’re schlepping all the stuff they need—strollers, diapers, toys. That special pillow. The raggedy stuffed animal. You’re busy paying attention to them, wiping their faces, grasping their hands, keeping track of them, and their stuff, maybe consoling them, frequently concentrating on them. And maybe missing the point of the trip in the first place.

      Traveling with your adult kids, on the other hand, can be a joy, a bonus. Our daughter, having studied ancient Greek in college, can decipher the Greek street signs in Athens. Our son, sturdier than we are now, can help lift our bags up into the airline bins. They can help figure out the GPS directions and they can go off by themselves and meet you back where you said you’d meet.

      Our kids know who Lord Byron was (who coined the Bridge of Sighs name). They buy their own tickets for the vaporetto. They don’t require extra equipment or video games to be entertained. They being their own equipment, including their smartphones and iPads. No strollers necessary.

      The adult kids are partners in this voyage. Unless, of course, they are themselves parents already and you are also schlepping the grandkids with you.  

In that case, oh, well.