The time is always right to travel with kids

Visiting Vietnam with two-year-old twins

The time is always right to travel with kids, despite what some people would have you think.

Barbara Adam, who is currently traveling the world with her husband and toddler, recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post about that very thing. Many would have us believe that children don’t take anything away from travel and it would be better to leave them behind if selfish parents insist on traveling. They insist that children simply can’t appreciate the culture anyway.

Barbara countered with, “To me ‘culture’ isn’t found in museums and art galleries, it’s found on the streets, on the buses and the trains, in the village squares and the cafes and the supermarkets. The culture of a country comes to life in the way people interact with children, the way one parent acknowledges another in the street. It may be silent sympathy for the tantrum your little one is throwing or an indulgent smile at a sleeping child, but it’s a connection that never would have been made if you went without the kids or waited til the kids were ‘old enough to remember’.”

I believe, based on my many years as a teacher and years of research about brain development, that the benefits to children are tremendous and start with the very structure of their brains. Travel fundamentally changes the structure of developing brains and will shape children’s lives forever.

We will never know exactly what the effects of travel or any other experiences will have on our children’s lives, but we do know travel won’t harm them.

“Travel presents all kinds of learning opportunities,” Barbara adds. “Children get to see, hear and taste so many new things, new languages, new food, new modes of transport, new animals and, yes, even new flavors of gelato.”