Do you have any advice about traveling internationally with children? It makes more sense for people to think of travel as an investment in themselves, in their self education, self awareness, and world knowledge, rather than as simply a leisure activity.
I think traveling with children is a wonderful idea. A lot of people have postponed travel, they save up their wish list until they retire, and then find that they missed a lot of opportunities because they are getting older and also they miss out on the opportunity to benefit in a life long way from the lessons and the experience of travel. I think it makes more sense for people to think of travel as an investment in themselves, in their self education, self awareness, and world knowledge, rather than as simply a leisure activity.
Travel is big fun, make no mistake about it, but it also has tremendous rewards. I don't think there's any other educational activity or personal growth activity where there is so little conflict between what's beneficial and what is so much fun. One of the things you get out of travel is improved life skills, so why not get those skills as young as possible.
Surveys tend to bear that out that people who do get international experience as children benefit from it in a life long way and are better able to learn from and incorporate that into the way they do things and the success they have than people who postpone travel until later.
I think the biggest thing that can be done to bring children the benefits of international travel is for their parents and other older people to encourage them in it, not to say we are going to put off this trip until the kids are older. The encouraging thing that I am seeing in recent years amongst people of all ages is the career value, the educational value, the personal value of travel and more consciously our educational and personal growth. I am also seeing a growing trend toward parents or even grandparents taking more and more extended international trips to very diverse parts of the world to give their children a sort of world schooling in international cultural diversity.
People tend to be more cautious when they are traveling with children, but I am not sure that's really warranted. People in almost every part of the world tend to be more welcoming to children than to adults. There is a respect for children in much of the world and people will make a special effort to be accommodating to visiting children.
It is easier to travel with children than people think, partly because a lot of what is difficult is the work and in much of the world labor is cheaper and services are cheaper, so it's actually more affordable to have more services. Many people assume that traveling internationally with children will be harder when it's actually easier than traveling here in the States where labor is fairly expensive and you have to do a lot of it yourself. Whereas you can enjoy things more if you are in a country where you can afford to pay for more of those services.
