When I was a child, we rarely went on big family trips.
Part of that is generational. I was born in the 60s when the lives of children and their parents were more separate. Air travel was still special and reserved for the adults in my family. There was something innate to it. We had a vacation house in the same state as our real house, and when vacation time rolled around, that was where we went.
In my own life as a parent, I leaned hard the opposite way. I have a picture of my son at 2 peering into a fancy bathtub at a hotel in Paris. Before he was 10, he had traveled to China. I didn't take an international flight until my junior year of college.
Our 2020 trip to Japan is now planned for later this year due to the Pandemic and put our journeys on hold for a while. It seems that families aren't leaving anyone home with the babysitter because everyone is on the move. Hotels have stopped using children rules in their rooms. Generations are going off together, often with grandparents and grandkids sharing their own adventure and leaving parents out of it. The shift in how we vacation inspired me and my colleagues on The Times to put together a special package on family travel that was published this week.
Why do I bring the kids along? I think that those who do hope our children will be more curious, more tolerant and more able to negotiate the world. We take our children to museums in hopes that our love of culture will rub off, we explore the natural world, hoping to get them to look up and experience the earth's beauty, we mix in some history to help them understand the tides that continue to carry us along.