10 Benefits to Traveling with Children

Without a doubt, traveling is a life-changing experience. For some parents, planning any travel while their kids are young is impossible for various reasons. Parents often put off family travel until the kids are older due to the expenses involved, inconveniences during the travel, noise, food, and additional luggage of carrying diapers and baby wipes. However, it turns out taking your local or international travel with a child comes with many benefits. Below are some advantages and reasons why you should consider traveling with children. 

1. It Creates Strong Family Bonds

Life in the current era is getting busier, faster, and stressful. Most parents spend a lot of time at work, sending their children to events, like music, sports, and tutoring. Additionally, downtime in most homes is spent on screens, causing further social isolation. Therefore, enjoying shared experiences with your family, such as going on parent travel with a child, brings families closer. 

Opting to travel with children creates more time and space for better interpersonal bonding. Going for a hike, riding a roller coaster, sitting around campfires, or swimming alongside dolphins create a fantastic opportunity to spend time together as a family. This is because you strip off from the normal pressures and tangles of daily life, such as school and work, for intimate family moments. This is often a great place to create a strong family dynamic for a better understanding and supporting family. 

2. It Makes the Kids Flexible and Adaptable 

Spending your time during the travel with a child abroad in an unfamiliar culture creates several new and unknown or unpredictable situations. By taking your child to a new environment, where there are different languages, transport modes, customs, and food, expect a lot of unpredictability. While you may start your adventure days with a well-planned schedule of the day’s occurrences, unexpected long queues, delaying buses, bad weather, or fascinating scenes will often lead to changes in the day’s plans. 

Such travel experiences are important as they make your kids learn patience and flexibility as they grow. Kids often learn by watching their parents adapt to different situations. The experience gained during your travel with a child abroad takes them out of the comfort zone. You will also realize that your children will easily adapt to new situations, such as trying new foods. 

3. It Ignites Your Child’s Curiosity and Spirit of Adventure

As kids grow, they often have a strong feeling of excitement and wonder about things around them. They are often in awe about the environment around them and curious about it. With advancing age, the innate feeling of curiosity and sense of adventure dulls. As such, you should take advantage and explore such curiosity by organizing international travel with a child. 

Travel can ignite the kid’s curiosity as early as during the planning stage. As you plan for the trip, discuss with the child about the destination, possible sceneries, weather, and other activities that will trigger much curiosity even before the trip commences. 

4. The World Becomes Your Kid’s Classroom

Traveling with a child gives them real-world educative experiences outside the classroom environment. Even in the current digital world with amazing apps such as Google translate, multilingualism still has some space. Going on travel with baby child exposes him/her to various languages, which greatly help the kids improve their relations with other cultures. 

Encourage your kids to take some time before the trip to learn some key phrases which they will put into practice during the travel. Other benefits of traveling with a child are that they will learn various geographical skills, including mapping, weather and climate changes, terrains, different time zones, and the size of various countries. Travel with a child on an airplane also provides new experiences to your kids. 

5. It Teaches Children to Celebrate Diversity 

Traveling with children abroad teaches kids to embrace different diversities. They will understand that it is normal for different people to look different, eat different foods, and have different values; and social and religious norms. Through this, your child will learn to accommodate and make friends with anyone. 

6. IT Encourages Responsibility and Independence 

Travel can teach your child about social responsibility and independence in many ways. For instance, you should allow the children to pack their suitcase before travel. Also, during the journey, allow them to look after their belongings. Children can also help with moving some items from one place to another, cleaning, and repacking their bags when it’s time to head back home. Kids can also take various roles, such as photographing during the trip. 

7. You Will Get More from Your Vacation

Among the many underrated benefits of traveling with children is that you will travel slower but see more. You will travel at a slower pace when you have young children. Kids may also cope with the endless visits to castles, ruins, markets, national parks, or temples. As such, you will have to slow and reduce the daily visits to accommodate their pace. Through this, you will notice even the little things that would have otherwise gone unnoticed if you were on your own. 

8. It Rekindles Your Inner Child

When you travel with children, you automatically get the license to bring up your suppressed inner child. Don’t let the visits to amusement park rides, cuddle and feed animals or engage in zip-lining go to waste. If you had done such activities individually or as couples, you might draw some strange looks. However, doing it with your children seems very normal. 

9. It Opens Unexpected Doors

Traveling as a family often leads to the formation of unexpected friendships. Children often find an easy common ground to initiate conversations with strangers than parents. However, parents often find it easy to follow suit once their kids have initiated the talks. Kids are also matchless icebreakers, especially in cultures that adore children. 

10. A source of Unexpected Privileges

Going on international travel with a child is a good source of privileges and behind the scenes access. You can get access to sites where you might not have been allowed without kids. For instance, you can be invited to special areas in the zoo where kids can feed and cuddle animals. Besides, if you considered traveling with a child on an airplane, you might find yourself sitting behind the cockpit controls courtesy of the kid. 

Bottom Line

As you can see, there are several benefits of traveling with children. However, for the utmost convenience, make sure that you have every document for travel with a child. In most cases, most parents are advised to travel with their child’s birth certificate to prove their relationships. If you have done this before, share your experience in the comments section below.

 Author’s Bio Amalia Liberman is a wife and a mother of two, as well as a novelist and writer. The author has been featured in Women’s Health magazine, and other lifestyle magazines.  Her passions lead her to seek out knowledge, and  she doesn’t mind sharing her findings.