Travel vs. Kids
For those who believe there is a choice to be made
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In today’s edition -
The divide in my peer group.
An exercise to embrace traveling with kids.
Links to the parent travel content I’m loving this week.
My peer group has separated into two categories over the past couple of years.
On the one hand, some of my late twenties / early thirties cohort are embracing becoming parents, with news of friends’ pregnancies sprouting up regularly. Many of us got married in the years surrounding the pandemic and are now having the kids that have been in our plans for a while.
On the other hand, some of my cohort are embracing travel. Using remote work and the flexibility earned from years of career-building, this subset jaunts at leisure to far corners of the world, making up for the lost time spent grounded during the pandemic. A fair portion of this group are in relationships, have plans to become parents in the not-too-distant future and are intentionally choosing travel over babies for the immediate term.
What I find fascinating is the intersection of these groups.
The new parents are actively figuring out how to keep traveling with the kids they’ve added to the picture while the future parents are deciphering the ‘best time’ to pause their travel and have a baby. This time in our lives is quite a puzzle.
Really though, it is not travel vs. kids, but travel and kids. The choice between traveling and having children is a false dichotomy.
The way we travel changes out of necessity as parents. But, I’ve identified a factor that has helped me to feel like nothing is off-limits when dreaming about travel as a parent; it is simply a matter of timing.
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The realization that my peers have approached this short-term decision point, choosing between travel and kids for the next few years, has informed the beginnings of Carry On. And, another seemingly innocuous exchange crystallized my perspective on writing about the topic.
One of my close friends was traveling through Vietnam last year. She graciously shared photos over WhatsApp and I was happy to flip through them during a pumping session late one night.
When I reached the end of living vicariously through her photos, I typed out my favorite question: “So, could you take a baby there?”
Her response got the wheels turning.
While she did see parents traveling with young babies, she estimated the best age may be around seven - when the kids could be more independent, enjoy the activities available, and so on.
We joked about how someone should make a list of every destination and the best age to take kids so that we could plan to visit every place we’d like to after becoming parents.
Of course, a person of any age can visit a place like Vietnam. How empowering, though, to be well aware of the limitations of traveling with children and to understand that it could be a matter of solving for age that makes any trip possible.
For me, planning trips is a calming mechanism. In the early postpartum period, when I was comfortably nap-trapped, I often researched how to visit X or Y place with a baby. My searches yielded results of how to travel “with kids,” information that was irrelevant to the particular infant stage.
In that specific era, I needed to know about how to clean pump parts on an airplane and which cities reliably had high chairs in restaurants, not a list of the most fun playgrounds in town - though that would become useful in due time.
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Traveling before kids was all about where to go.
For me it was finding unique destinations, hitting multiple countries in a week’s time and jumping through logistical hoops to get where I wanted to be.
It was taking a tiny boat to stay in a treehouse on Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua and it was a bumpy truck ride through the desert sand to stay in a bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan.
It was discovery and total freedom and, perpetually, newness.
Traveling after kids may be all about what age to go.
I firmly believe any trip is possible with kids (how could I not, with my parents taking four children to Iceland in 1999). That said, there are trips better suited for certain ages and instead of fighting this, I hope to embrace what comes of leaning into travel that accommodates my daughter’s age.
Using the trip to Miami with our 11 month old as an example of this, we ended up ditching the chic Esmé Hotel I had originally booked in busy South Beach to instead stay at an Airbnb which provided a crib, high chair and separate baby bedroom in the quiet Mid Beach area. This turned out to be a wise choice and took potential stressors out of the vacation equation.
In my daughter’s second year, we are leaning into locations that have open spaces which are friendly to a toddler and prioritizing single destination trips that allow us to lean into our daughter’s curiosity and slower pace.
In both of these periods, I am choosing simplicity, reliable weather, and beautiful scenery over destinations with a significant amount of ‘must-do’ activities, even though many of those places remain on my list.
More to come in this newsletter on the planning process for our first trip as a family to Europe next month! I’ve taken my daughter’s age into account in the choice of destination, lodging and transportation.
Just like seven may be a great age to go to Vietnam (if you’ve been, share your thoughts), we can think about distributing the destinations we want to visit over the course of our childrens’ lives based on the nuances of their age at the time of the trip.
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One helpful way to think about what age to go…
In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins motivates readers to do a “time bucket” exercise.
In lieu of a bucket list, this activity asks that you create a list of all of the things you want to do in your life - the trips you want to take, the people you want to see, the goals you want to accomplish.
Then, you place each of those items into a life bucket of time, age 25-30, age 30-35, age 35-40 and so on.
In doing so, you are encouraged to see that not all activities can be accomplished in all life buckets; for example, embarking on the Camino de Santiago when you are retired at 75 may be physically challenging, so best to plan that one in an earlier time bucket.
Speaking of, I gained a new perspective after reading a post in this FB group about inspiring mom Jude who walked the Camino with her 8 month old! This proves that the extent of what is possible in traveling with kids is relative to your interests and desire to make it happen.
To continue down the exciting rabbit hole of walking the Camino with kids (teens in this case), check out this in-depth post from HeyTerra.
Back to the life bucket exercise, the goal is to make sure you do all of the things you endeavor to do in life and that you do not waste time, our single most valuable resource.
What if we looked at traveling with kids through a similar lens?
Naturally, it is not realistic to execute this type of planning to a T. There will be trips that fall outside of the scope of the ‘ideal’ time bucket.
And as any parent knows, striving for perfection with an exercise like this is a losing game.
Instead, the purpose is taking a stance of intentionality.
It is remaining conscious about how to continue to follow your travel aspirations as your life takes the form of a parent.
It is the realization that nothing is off-limits in traveling with kids, but simply a matter of considering when to do it.
A hilarious counterpoint to people saying that kids won’t remember the trips they take.
“That seems tiring” but parenting at home is tiring, too!
The chapters of traveling with kids.
“I get it. You’re probably not relaxing on the beach. But you may just find you prefer getting in the waves anyway.”
New to Carry On? Check out the archive where most recently I wrote about How to Travel *Without* a Baby.
Thanks for reading!