When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
For our Disney(land) trip, we stayed at a motel ~ 1.5 miles from the park (Canadian walking distance) and the thing my kids LOVED was we walked by a 7-11 every day and I would buy them a slurpee on the morning walk to the gates. Probably $20 for the week (and likely not much worse for you than a typical vacation breakfast).
The "make your own waffle" station at the included breakfast was also a huge hit. The park and rides were satisfactory.
I've taken my older daughter to Disney (World) twice now (at ages 7 and 9). Her absolute favorite part: riding the Skyliner to EPCOT. On our second trip we went an hour out of our way to go ride it because we weren't at a served hotel that time.
When pressed for a favorite activity within the park, it was "that time we ran all the way from Japan to Soarin', dodging people".
A few months ago, we took our year-and-a-half-old daughter to Belgium and Spain for two weeks. Her favorite part of the whole trip was seeing horses, sheep, and geese (all of which, believe it or not, we have here at home in Canada).
When I was about seven, my sister and I were taken on a special trip to see the Giant Pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The pandas were fine, but we were fascinated by the chipmunks running around everywhere.
As a grown ass man, I make a point of visiting zoos in foreign cities if I'm in a city that has one. My lady is never as enthusiastic, but then quickly forgets about her lack of enthusiasm with the first glance of a meerkat
My gf and I went to Ronda in Spain a few years ago and stopped at the amazing bridge over the gorge. Looked around for a few minutes and then spotted a mother cat leading her litter of kittens through a field down below. We watched them, entranced, for ages. It's always the way with us.
Even as an adult I enjoy time when some other person I am spending time with is fully engaged and fully present, I’d call it quality time, but it’s just so rare…
Same - I hold onto friends for dear life who are capable of keeping their phone in their pocket. There is a time and a place for devices of course, but it's such a terrible feeling to be fully engaged in conversation with someone and all of a sudden they pull out their phone to get a bump of that endless scroll.
> My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.
Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.
Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.
So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.
I have travel entire Vietnam with people with kids. After seeing all the pagoda, park, cave, amusement park.. the best part of the travel for the kid was the pool at one hotel.
Our son loved the Monorail as much as the park, and when by luck of the draw we were the first in line at one of them, he was invited into the cabin by the engineer(? conductor?) and got to "drive" one was the highlight for him for years.
Wow, we did the exact same trip a couple years ago, and also stayed at that amazing cabin place. Took home 80 lbs of crystals! Highly recommend.
We also stopped by the Arkansas diamond mine and tried our hand at it. Way less fun, with a near zero chance of finding so much as a speck of a diamond.
My wife remembers going to Disney World with her grandparents when she was 6 or so. Her fondest memories were the hotel pool and the lizards that lounged around it. Those poor grandparents. Imagine spending a lot of money and then dealing with a tantrum when you say "Let's go to Disney World."
If they like that consider taking them clamming if that's a thing near you. I don't really eat clams and thought I might get bored digging in the mud, but somehow it hits some "natural slot machine" desire in my head.
yep, my parents took my sister & I to Florida. My mother went with my sister to Disney World. I didn't go, I stayed back at the place with my father & we played marbles. I got to see a turtle run down a hill. Great time. Thankfully they knew amusement parks weren't of interest to me already from when we'd gone to Universal Studios & I mostly remember sitting on a bench
We live in a walkable part of city. In a park 1 block from our apartment, there are "baby trains" (small electric trains, on rubber wheels). They cost ~$2 for 5 minutes, plus 10 minutes of your kid screaming "want more". Subway in Almaty is $0.2 (for adult), unlimited time. So when my son was almost 2 y.o. and walked well, I decided to take him to the real subway instead of enduring that vulgarity (granted the station is just 2 blocks away). He loved it a lot. Shouted "too-too" when the train was departing. Wanted more and more. He couldn't speak then, so he was turning my head with his hands, to make me see the approaching train. Also, it was a hot sunny day of +35°C, but in subway, it was 10 degrees cooler. The first time, we travelled 1,5 hours strait, 2-3 stations back and forth. I sweated because I had to carry a rucksack and a 6 kg of folded stroller. But that was unforgettable.
I have a tip for you, if you ever visit Vienna, get a 24(48,72)hr unlimited ticket and spend some time on the subway (U-Bahn) with your kids, riding the various lines. The entire subway system has different trains (some more like street cars, some more like urban rail) and tracks run in underground tunnels, shallow trenches and over open ground.
Honestly, one of my favourite aspects of traveling is simply using the local mass transit.
Coming from a city where it's a particularly bad joke, it's still a novelty, and it provides such a different perspective on the city than "where can I park within orbit of $specific_destination"
I must add, I just remembered another story: I needed to make an overhead cupboard and a small closet, and found out there was no time to do this without kids nearby. So I did it together with the son. He was happy to press the button on the drill and to drive dowels with a toy hammer -- I drilled extra holes in the exercise board for him. We did it in several sessions, and afterwards he'd proudly tell people he made two closets.
Once I had to go to a DIY store on a weekend, and to free my wife from sitting with him, took him too. I knew we'd be fascinated, and indeed he was, studying everything for 2 hours.
Certainly it's true that kids can get a lot of joy out of something that to an adult seems really small or boring. But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.
Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?
I think many adults also get distraught or enraged by tiny things - it is an emotional regulation problem, not an age problem (but adults can and should be better than children).
An analogy I've heard in the past is that emotions are like a button fixed in a box with a ball in it. When you're younger the box is smaller so the ball hits the buttons more often as there is less free space. As you grow, your box grows too, so your ball has more space in the box and more empty space on the walls for the ball the bounce off of, making the buttons less likely to be pushed.
That analogy seems a bit contrived, but the "button pushing" reminds me of something.
At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.
To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".
The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.
I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.
This "ball and button in a box" analogy is precisely the one that people told me about when I was processing grief.
Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.
From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)
When you're a kid, so many experiences are new, so the emotional response is higher.
A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.
As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.
Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>
They naturally take all the space they can get, learning their limits. Issue is, they don't hear "no" often enough early on, to know that there are limits.
I don’t think it’s an either or. They are two sides of the same coin in that “kids experience stronger emotions”, but my experience leads me to see multiple reasons for that.
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.
This really hits home. Like everyone, I tend to fall into routines and get comfortable with the familiar. But having kids constantly pushes you out of that comfort zone because they're excited by things that might seem small or inconvenient to you. Embracing their enthusiasm is not only good for them but for you too. It brings some variety and breaks the routine. I always have to resist the urge to tell my kids, "No, we're not doing that because..." Just going with the flow and joining in their little adventures is incredibly rewarding. It's not just about making them happy—you gain just as much. Their joy is just the bonus.
When I was a kid in suburban Australia my parents would organize a semi-annual ‘bus-train-ferry’ trip. It was a school holiday tradition where - in hindsight - we’d do the sort of daily commute that thousands of working adults would do every morning…except for a kid the magic of a bus to a train station, a train into the city, and then a ferry across the river was just great fun. A day ticket for a family back in the 1980s? Probably next to nothing, but a priceless memory.
I took a train to work for a few years, and a ferry to work for about a year later. Even if it's regular it's still magical.
A couple of times I took the bus to the ferry, walked to the light rail, took that to the airport, flew, then picked up a rental car and drove in to work. Maybe the airport train too. Pretty much all the modes but a bike.
I went to the transport office and got a map of all the local tram routes - we hung it on the wall, and my child and I rode every tram from one end to the other.
Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.
Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Great that you posted this. I told my story of riding metro with my son, but only after this one un-stuck my brain to think of other locations in my city we could ride to, for almost nothing.
Funnily, when I was in Helsinki, I did ride couple of trams to the terminus. But in my brain, this was stored in another department, "urban research going to the fringe". Not "going out with the kid".
For my middle child's 1st Birthday we realized we could give him everything he ever wanted for about $8. He opened a few boxes of bandaids, tissue boxes, and a roll of toilet paper. Played for hours.
Premise of article is wrong. Kids do get excited about the same things as adults; novel and intriguing things within reach. These things just aren't exciting any more to adults. That's the only difference. An adult that's never been on a train, but never could, or was never allowed, will find it exciting too.
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When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
They still talk about that trip.
The "make your own waffle" station at the included breakfast was also a huge hit. The park and rides were satisfactory.
When pressed for a favorite activity within the park, it was "that time we ran all the way from Japan to Soarin', dodging people".
Things a screen and all the gadgets and fancy engineering in the world can never replace.
Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.
Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.
Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.
So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.
also parents have gotten rid of BB guns and fireworks!
We also stopped by the Arkansas diamond mine and tried our hand at it. Way less fun, with a near zero chance of finding so much as a speck of a diamond.
The crystals were beautiful, and the kids could find them with ease. Tons of fun.
They each got their own pickaxe, which they loved.
They claimed they were already expert diggers because of all the hours they spent playing Minecraft. "We know how to dig, Dad."
I asked kids (7 or so yo) what was the favourite part?
He answered Singapore, because it was cold (aka air conditioning everywhere)
Coming from a city where it's a particularly bad joke, it's still a novelty, and it provides such a different perspective on the city than "where can I park within orbit of $specific_destination"
https://uncharted.io/@dominikgehl/exploring-the-stockholm-su...
Once I had to go to a DIY store on a weekend, and to free my wife from sitting with him, took him too. I knew we'd be fascinated, and indeed he was, studying everything for 2 hours.
Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?
At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.
To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".
The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.
I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.
Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.
Oof isn't this the truth. The tiniest things will drive my son into full meltdowns right now.
A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.
As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.
Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.
A couple of times I took the bus to the ferry, walked to the light rail, took that to the airport, flew, then picked up a rental car and drove in to work. Maybe the airport train too. Pretty much all the modes but a bike.
Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.
Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Funnily, when I was in Helsinki, I did ride couple of trams to the terminus. But in my brain, this was stored in another department, "urban research going to the fringe". Not "going out with the kid".
Trains and train stations on the other hand, even though I use them so regularly, are still super nice. I wouldn't say "exciting" but very nice.
That's why I'm so angry that the French government and railway company keep making trains and stations more and more like airports and airplanes.