Letting Travel be The Teacher

Traveling with your children is like opening a door to a world of adventure. With the right intentions, any family trip or excursion can become an opportunity to expand the mind with new experiences and lessons they can't learn in the classroom.

It's important to be purposeful and mindful with the places you visit and how you use your time. But it's also important not to turn your family trips into a forced, "by the book" drag in the name of learning.

Try to avoid spending your travels lecturing the kids about lessons or trying to assess them on every little idea you're hoping they take away from the journey. You don't even need to tell them that they're going to learn things.

When kids travel, the world becomes their teacher and it's often better to let them soak up the experience on their own terms. This helps them to make up their own minds about the new ideas they’re exposed to and make their own meaning from their experiences.

After your travels are done, have a casual, open-ended conversation about the trip, but don't make it a pop quiz. Your goal is to see what THEY got out of it, not tick checkboxes on a curriculum plan in your mind.

Some good questions to ask are:

What did you like?

What did you dislike?

What were you surprised by?

Did it remind you of anything?

What do you wish you could have experienced more of and why?

What would you like to never experience again and why?

What was your biggest takeaway?

It's impossible for the kids to have meaningful experiences and not have learned at least one thing from it. They're likely to learn things you didn't even think of. Even if they can't connect the dots right away, they will later on in life, often when you least expect it.

The experiences you shared, the memories you made together, will resurface when they need them to and then it will have real meaning for them.