This is Permission to NOT Take a Family “Vacation”
A yearly reminder for anyone who needs to hear it.
I’ve gotten a lot of new readers in the last year, so I want to take a moment to re-share with you one of my all-time favorite newsletters. For those of you who’ve been with me a while, I think this one is worth re-reading yearly, especially as we are deep into the heart of the summer travel season (and bookmark it for next winter when you start thinking and planning a little too optimistically about how travel might go the following summer!) If you have family trip reservations about traveling with young children this year or are already thinking about skipping something hard next year, this is your yearly permission slip to bow out of family “vacations” that don’t work for you.
My current family situation is that our oldest is nine and our twins are now four and a half. This July, we attempted this same trip to a family beach house I documented in the original post below for the first time since our disastrous 2021 trip. This year, as I anticipated, the twins were generally good travelers, and without strollers, diapers, or naps, they were much more manageable than three years ago. However, I would say our 2024 trip was actually way more difficult for reasons that are too fresh to detail and most of them didn’t have anything to do with the kids. (One kid-specific hardship I’ll share: a mid-trip barfing episode by one of the twins in an immaculately decorated, borrowed beach house. We somehow managed to just avoid getting vomit on the surfaces of a perfect Nancy Myers-inspired living room.)
I’m still processing the lessons of this trip, but it’s made me even more committed to thinking very carefully about what kind of trips actually work for us as parents and holding the line about that going forward. Between this post and my new unofficial beat as the nation’s chief summer camp critic, I’m a little worried I’m starting to sound like a summer-hating Grinch. But I think my critiques come from how we’re sold an image of summertime with kids as a joyful, carefree romp, (bolstered by all of those picture-perfect Instagram posts) which doesn’t match the economic and social realities of how so many families operate today. I do think there are better paths forward, for “vacations” and summer childcare, but they require us to challenge some of our own assumptions and think outside the box. I share some of those ideas at the end of this post.
So, without further ado, here’s a reprint of my newsletter with a few edits, The Case Against Family Vacations.
Let me tell you a little story about our first big trip as a family of five during 2021’s Hot Vax Summer. For obvious reasons, we hadn’t really traveled since our twins were born in February 2020, and having missed the annual trip the year before, we forged ahead with a “vacation” to my parents’ beach house with our 6-year-old and twin 17-month-olds. It was, in the words of my older son, “a nightmare.” The pandemic toddlers were at peak stranger danger, and every friend and relative who excitedly came to meet them were met with howling screams of terror, including their own grandparents, who they already knew. Any time they were outside, they would bolt in opposite directions and put rocks in their mouths. Trips to the beach required a short car trip and mountains of stuff piled into a dingy guided across a pond, backpack leashes to keep the twins from suicide missions of plowing into the ocean, lots of crying and not a single moment of relaxation for the multiple adults required to manage all three children. Halfway through the trip we had a dramatic falling out with the caregiver we had brought along to help us with the kids that compromised our childcare for when we returned. The trip required two plane rides each way, and on the final leg of the journey, we sat on the runway in Philadelphia, delayed for two hours due to summer thunderstorms. Long past bedtime, one twin eventually conked out while I held the other who just kept reaching new levels of maniacal exhaustion; howling, kicking, jumping on my lap, moving the arm rests up and down, grabbing my face and hitting the tray table. I felt my soul leave my body. As I looked down on myself from above, sitting in the back of this plane, praying they weren’t going to cancel the flight and we’d have to stay overnight in an airport hotel, the only two words I could think were, “never again.”
I am here today to give you loving permission to not travel with your small children. As a direct result of that trip, our twins did not spend the night away from our house for almost a year, and the following summer we completely skipped a “vacation” with the whole family. Maybe the unique burdens of having twins made us succumb to this absolutist stance, but it’s also allowed me to step back and question why traveling with young children has become such an unchallenged norm in middle-class and above social circles.
Why is it that we even attempt trips with little kids?
I think traveling with children a couple of times per year has become normalized because during the last few decades the social and economic conditions for travel were a lot better than they are right now. For many years, airline flights have been abundant and relatively affordable. But even before the pandemic, weather delays and increasingly poor service have made it tougher and tougher for families.
For those of us who took a big break from traveling at all during the pandemic, there may still be a feeling of needing to “make up for lost time.” I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to.
Who’s trying to convince you to travel?
Of course, there’s omnipresent social media full of happy family pictures, tricking you into believing everyone has a great time on their family vacation. There is also a $11.7 billion a year baby product industry pouncing on parents to convince them that it’s not the travel that’s hard, it’s just that you don’t have the right stuff. All you need is the right travel crib, the right portable highchair, the right easy-fold stroller, the right beach tent... These companies exist to convince us that we can purchase our way of travel woes with the right prep and the right gear. But remember, they do not care if you have a good time. They just want to take your money.
Be honest about the cost. When looking for places to rent within a few hours drive of my house in North Carolina for a week, even not fancy lodgings for large-ish families, peak summer in a desirable destination is going to cost probably around $5000. This 2021 survey found nearly 50% of people were likely or definitely going to take on debt to fund summer travel, with millennials and people with young kids more likely to incur vacation debt. The immovable bottom line for me is I really don’t want to spend that kind of coin and not have a good time myself. Obviously, many people don’t have any vacation budget. For more on this, I highly recommend Kathryn Jezer-Morton on vacationing with kids while broke.
Our 2021 “nightmare” trip was not expensive financially. We used credit card points for the airfare and stayed at my parent’s beach house. But it was emotionally expensive. It was incredibly stressful, and I came back more depleted, exhausted, and more burnt out than when I left. There was no mood lifting from a change of scenery, no breaks to give me energy for my “regular” life. It is ok to say no to traveling with young kids purely to save yourself the logistical burdens added to an already overwhelmed mental checklist, inevitable poor sleep and the overall negative psychological toll.
Some Solutions:
Use your vacation funds on yourself. Kids under five are likely not going to appreciate the difference between a day hike 10 minutes from your house and a breathtaking national park journey across the country. So if you do have a budget for trips, spend them on trips YOU will actually enjoy and find restorative, and leave your kids at home. Factor in babysitting costs for an overnight sitter if you don’t live close to family who could help. If a getaway with a partner is off the table, take turns going on your own solo trips or with your separate friend groups. If all of this seems impossible for whatever reason right now, skip a year of a taxing family trip and save the money for a trip you’d actually want to take, sans kids, for next year. If you feel like you don’t have anyone you can trust to leave your kids with, spend the year cultivating some of those connections to make this kind of travel more possible.
Invite people to come to you. Part of the motivation for travel is that so many of us live in nuclear families and are far away from extended kin, so seeing grandparents and other beloved friends and family means someone has to travel. But If you have kids under five, I would suggest aggressively but appealingly pitch people come to you. Spruce up your guest room, donate airline points, offer to chip in for an AirBnB, or treat everyone to a restaurant night out, or find a local attraction that appeals to your group and make coming to you feel like a win for everyone.
Know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Despite this entire newsletter about all the reasons you shouldn’t travel with little kids, kids grow up and become more fun to travel with. I know there is a rewarding summer family trip in our future with all three kids, but I’m not going to pretend that day is here yet.
I’d love to hear what you’ve learned about traveling with little kids, and if you think it’s worth it. Feel free to share your stories in the comments!
Join us for The Double Shift virtual hangout!
If you want to do something positive about the state of the world, but you get overwhelmed by what to do and how much time it will take, please join me to discuss the wonderful new book, Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in our Lives. I am so inspired by Emily Amick’s and Sami Sage’s ideas for how we can invest in the fabric of our society that I’ll be hosting a Double Shift member hangout to gab all about it. The book is full of easy and practical ideas around civic engagement. We’ll discuss how to figure out your “civic personality,” how to build a “civic pod” and why civic action is a meaningful tool for rebuilding our country. We’ll be meeting Monday August 5th at 1pm EST on Zoom. While reading the book is NOT a requirement for attending, the book is an easy, breezy. informative read, and you should buy it. Get your copy here!
Completely agree...I think the problem lies too in the semantics...it's not a vacation by any means, just a shift in living environments for a few days. Vacation implies rest, relaxation, exploration, expansion of self in some manner. But with children, we're simply doing bedtime in a new room, and dishes in a new sink. Don't even get me started on cooking while on vacation. I do think it gets easier once they're past the napping and diaper phase. But even with a six-year-old, I was missing having a stroller as we went on a week vacation this summer!
Needed to read this! Thank you. I have an almost-two-year old and I keep dreaming about lovely beach vacations like the annual summer family trip I grew up with, then the reality sets in that a trip right now would be dominated by logistics, lugging of stuff, nap times, chasing after toddler, etc. instead of lying on the beach reading a book. I've been trying to remind myself that the memories I have of the summer trip I grew up with are all memories from being an 8 year old or a 12 year old or a 15 year old, not a 2 year old. We will definitely wait to do true summer vacations until kids are older.