Even after sending your children to the best school possible, enrolling them in after-school extra-curricular activities, and encouraging them to get the best grades they can, there still won’t be anything that can match the skills and experience children learn while traveling.
Traveling is an invaluable way to bond with your children through exploration, new experiences, and out-of-school learning. These six things will only be learned by children who travel.
Learning In Real Life Is Better Than A Classroom
Traveling allows for experiences that wouldn’t normally occur in the classroom. Traveling can also spark interest in creativity in young students that might not exist in school.
Think about your child reading about Mount Rushmore. Now imagine being able to hop out of the car and set your gaze upon the face of former presidents set in real stone. Can you imagine the wonder? Traveling with your children will allow them to appreciate what they learn in the classroom and realize that it can be even more exciting in real life.
A Never-ending Wanderlust
The ability to travel with your children is one many families are not afforded. Traveling with children from a young age will instill a love of travel and exploration in them. This will encourage them to continue to visit new places their entire life.
Many individuals were not able to travel until adulthood. But kids who begin traveling from a young age are gifted with a never-ending need to explore even more. This will allow them to become experienced, well-rounded young adults as they grow into their future selves.
How To Get Around Any City
Unless you live in a large city, many families don’t have a regular need to use public transit. And unless you’re formally “taught” how to use it, public transportation can be confusing and intimidating.
Knowing how to navigate around a city is an invaluable tool you can teach your children through traveling. During the next trip you take, explore all forms of transportation: ride the subway, hop on a train, take the ferry, or take the next stop on a bus. Your kids’ confidence will soar when they are no longer intimidated by getting around a strange city.
How To Prioritize
As adults, we know that we can’t always have it all. And while we’d like to try and give our children all that we can, we know that simply isn’t possible — especially while traveling.
New and exciting places have so much to offer, it can be overwhelming to try and pick just a few activities each day. Traveling allows you to show your little ones that prioritizing is an essential part of life.
The next time you go to a new destination, involve your children with the planning. Let them know all of the different things there are to do in a city. Now invite them to choose only one or two of their most favorite activities. Explain to them that while everything seems great, there is only a limited amount of time in each day, and certain decisions must be made. This is a great way to teach prioritization that will follow them into their future.
Time Is Of The Essence
Most children have a life that revolves around some type of routine. Wake up, go to school, do homework, go to sleep. This type of lifestyle doesn’t always lend itself to learning how to keep track of time, as a routine provides the stability of time for them.
When families travel, many activities revolve around keeping track of time. Does your child want to go to the waterpark and ride the fastest roller coaster in the park? They’d better get moving! Teaching your kids that everything has a time limit and life is affected by time is one of the greatest benefits of traveling with your children.
Great Experiences Make Even Better Memories
From a young age, children often identify having lots of “things” and “stuff” is what makes their lives whole. They think that having the latest toy makes great memories, when in reality, the only great “moment” is the five minutes after they receive that toy.
When they’re 10, 15, 30 years old, will they remember the time you got them that “cool” toy? Chances are, no. But they will remember the best camping trip any seven-year-old has ever been on.
Traveling with your kids will allow them to learn from a young age that possessions are not what is important in life; experiences with their loved ones are. Exciting memories made with family and friends are the ones they’ll carry with them forever and, maybe someday, pass this same ideology onto their own children.
