"Are we having fun yet?"
You haven't even arrived at your vacation destination yet,
and you're already fantasizing about leaving the kids at home with 14 pizzas and 84 videos.
This is not a good sign. |
Family vacations can be a time to renew ourselves and renew our family
connections. Taking a break from day to day routines, going to see new
sights, and enjoying new activities together are a terrific recipe for
family fun.
But, as we all know, family vacations can also be a recipe for stress
and unhappiness. Changing sleeping, eating, and activity routines can
throw everyone off kilter. Being together as a family for 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week is a lot more together time than most of us are used
to! Big changes in routine, even when done in the pursuit of fun,
can put a lot of pressure on grownups and children alike.
It's tough when we start out on a family vacation with such high expectations
for fun and excitement. You have been looking forward to this vacation
for months, but you've barely made it out the door and you're already
tired. You've just spent hours and hours getting ready by making the
reservations, doing the laundry and getting everyone packed, finding
the maps, closing up the house, arranging for getting plants watered
and pets cared for, loading the cooler, getting on the road or to the
airport, and...
"Mom, I'm hungry (bored, hot, cold, etc, etc.)!"
"She's sitting too close, Dad! Make her stop bothering me!"
"I don't want to go to the museum! I want to go to the water
park! Why do we have to do all these stupid things you want to
do, and we never get to do the fun things I want to do?"
You haven't even arrived at your vacation destination yet, and you're
already fantasizing about leaving the kids at home with 14 pizzas and
84 videos. This is not a good sign.
Let's face it: most family vacations are designed and managed solely
by the parents. No matter how hard you try, the best vacation plans in
the world can be quickly spoiled by kids acting like brats. Nevertheless,
I still think that family vacations are a terrific opportunity for building
family closeness and connections, if we want to approach family fun as
a joint project.
To begin with, parents aren't solely responsible for whether or not
their kids are having fun. Fun is the preferred byproduct, but not the
goal, of the vacation experience. Parents who try to guarantee their
kid's fun quickly become prey to blackmail--and they often sacrifice their
own enjoyment for their children's pleasure. Every self-respecting, pampered
kid will want to find out just how far their parent is willing to go
to ensure their "fun." "Can I have another ice-cream cone? Another
ride on the roller coaster? A trip to the water park instead of
the museum? Can't we go to Disney World instead of visiting Grandma's?"
A family vacation that is approached as a joint project will ideally
include the kids in the planning stages. This means simply giving the
kids some limited choices within the parameters that the parents are
willing to set. "Mom and I are planning to go to the beach for our vacation
this summer--which do you think would be most fun, a beach with a board
walk or a beach without a board walk?"
Another way to make a family vacation a joint project is to ask everyone
in the family a very important question: "What is the one thing that
you want to do the most while we are on our vacation?" It's a
simple question, but the answers are very important.
If--while we are in West Virginia for a week--Mom really wants to go antiquing
for a day, and Suzy really wants to learn to water ski, and all Mariah
cares about is cooking hotdogs over an outdoor fire while telling ghost
stories in the dark--then those can be planned on as the three most important
activities of the vacation. Taking those three wishes into account at
the beginning of the vacation allows everyone in the family to have a
voice about what they want to do the most. It also gives everyone's wish
an equal amount of respect in terms of setting the priorities for the
vacation. That alone can make a big difference in how much each member
of the family is going to enjoy themselves.
Giving every member of the family a part in the planning also gives
everyone a stake in the success of the vacation--for each other, as well
as for themselves. It also increases the probability that your family
vacation will be the kind of fun experience that everyone will want to
remember!
Emory Luce Baldwin, LCMFT, is both an experienced parent educator
with the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP) and a Family
Therapist working with families with children and adolescents
in Takoma Park and Kensington. For more information about
PEP classes and programs, call 301-929-8824 or visit www.ParentEncouragement.org.
To contact Emory, call 301-588-1451 or go to www.emorylucebaldwin.com.
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