My friend J. – who’s a mom of a delightful toddler and is currently pregnant with her second child – likes to travel with her son (OK, and husband too), and is looking forward to traveling more with her children. Recently, she asked me an interesting question about traveling with children: When we travel, what should I expect from my son in terms of behavior and activities which he will enjoy as he gets older? We agreed that this was a very broad question and hugely influenced by the personality, disposition and developmental maturity of the child in question. So J. followed up with some more specific questions. I’ve tried to answer these based on my own experiences of traveling with my children. If you have questions on this topic, please leave them in the comments below and I’ll try to answer in a subsequent post.

When can I expect my son to remember a trip?

Before he was four, my oldest son had visited the U.K. and Ireland a number of times, Greece, Fiji, Australia and Peru. I know he doesn’t remember New Year in Lima or feeding kangaroos at a petting zoo outside Melbourne, but I know that he thinks he does because of stories we’ve told about those trips and the photos we took. Conversely, we visited New York when he was five-and-a-half and he has very clear memories of that trip. (Childhood amnesia or the paucity of memories of experiences prior to your fourth birthday is a pyschological phenomenon.)

When should I expect to do a trip without a stroller?

I frequently traveled without a stroller – even when traveling with a preschooler and a toddler. This is a choice which is a matter of personal preference. I used a Baby Bjorn when my children were infants, and a Kelty Kids Carrier for hiking and travel when they were preschoolers (this is what we used in Peru and in France). I had a cheap, Kolcraft stroller which I used (rarely).

Again, I stress, this is a personal preference based on your comfort level in using a carrier, whether a hard-frame such as a Kelty or a soft-frame such as an Ergo, and also on whether or not your child is used to being carried and so is likely to nap in a carrier or not – since facilitating your child’s naps without having to stay in a darkened hotel room is pretty key to everyone having an enjoyable trip.

At what age can a child pack and carry their own suitcase?

My now 13-year-old older son packed all his own bags for a recent school trip. Yay! This was a definite first. I’ve been encouraging my kids to pack for themselves since he was at least six or seven. Packing lists are a great help in this – although the best packing list in the world is not going to help your child stay focused and pack! Using a packing list early helped my children become more self-sufficient in their packing. I also “pre-packed” by taking out the clothing they would need to pack and leaving in an obvious place for them to find (on the bed, by the empty suitcase, etc). Neither of these things helped in any way with their habit of wanted to pack their entire bedroom for a trip.

Usually, I pre-pack by doing laundry and making lists in the days before we travel and I set aside time on the last day before the trip to pack with the kids. When they were preschoolers this meant having them pack with me for ooh, maybe 10 minutes before they lost interest and I turned on PBS kids to keep them entertained while I packed. At five, they were engaged packers and pretty good at finding the things on the packing list – but still highly distractible. By seven, I could trust that they would pack everything on the list but would ask them to keep the suitcase open for me to check. And, as I said, at 12 I didn’t even check the contents of the bag.

While it may seem discouraging that you’ll be packing for the next few years for your child, the suitcase story is much better. An ambulatory toddler can pull a kid-sized suitcase. A preschooler will likely insist on pulling his or her own suitcase and by elementary school ages, most kids can pull along a carry-on-sized suitcase pretty easily. When we were in Italy last year, since we were traveling by train, we all used backpacks – even BigB who was seven at the time.

One thing to keep in mind before you pack that cute little toddler-sized suitcase is how you’re going to carry it and your child if he or she is asleep when you arrive at your destination. If you’re flying internationally, this can mean juggling a child and a suitcase which is difficult for you to carry through customs and passport control – not fun.

How old will my son have to be before he will enjoy an art museum?

This is probably the hardest question for me to answer. Art galleries are not really my thing. I’ll make a detour for interesting walks and gardens and I love classical music and opera, but I sometimes find that I forget to leave time to visit art galleries – at home or while traveling. Hence my children haven’t visited many. Also, one of my boys has ADHD which means we are significantly more likely to plan outdoor activities or at the very least, stick to kid-friendly aquariums, science museums and the like. I felt as if I was taking my life in my hands by bringing my boys to Scuola di San Rocco in Venice last June (the boys were 12 and 7). It was a tremendous success – as measured by CAM’s exclamation on Tintoretto’s prodigiousness and their overall appreciation of the size, scale and impact of the works on display. We had a great visit to SFMoMA last November and we’ve since visited the Seattle Art Museum (on a wintry Saturday afternoon) also.

Check out DeliciousBaby for successful stories of visits to art museums with preschoolers.

My general advice with respect to museums and other more adult attractions is this: take advantage of naptimes while your child is an infant or toddler – it’s a perfect time for you to enjoy the art in peace and quiet. With an active preschooler, if you think he or she will be able to focus for long enough to appreciate one or two paintings, then go for it. Even if you dash through the galleries and leave without really seeing much yourself, it’s still a success – and then build on that. If you can, visit to a local gallery, look at paintings online, and use “find-the-whatever-in-the-paintings” games to engage your child at a visit to a larger gallery. One day, usually between seven and eight – or older for children with attentional issues – your efforts will pay off and you’ll be able to sit, as I did, admiring your child admiring a painting and have a perfect parenting moment

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I read Lenore Skenazy’s blog Free Range Kids for the first time last month. Seriously, I cannot believe that I missed last year’s media furore when she let her then 9 year old son ride the New York subway home alone – but then again, I’m a working mom and I admit, there are days (weeks even) when don’t have time to either read the newspaper or listen to NPR.

At any rate, when I found Skenazy’s blog , I was excited. I mean truly, jumping-up-and-down excited. I’ve lived my parenting life in the U.S. where the shadow of being an outsider butts into my interactions with the moms of my children’s friends all too frequently. It’s not something that keeps me awake at night, but it’s an annoyance I struggle with since, like any mom, I appreciate that my kids want to fit in and my “no, I don’t like peanut butter and jelly” oddities are a distraction they’d rather not have to deal with and I’d rather not saddle upon them. On Free Range Kids I’ve found a group of people who, at least on one parental dimension (i.e. freedom and independence in childhood), think as I do and act as I do.

I grew up in a small Irish town. I don’t remember ever locking the door or turning on a house alarm (in fact, we didn’t have one). I do know that I and my younger siblings walked everywhere and were pretty darn self-sufficient from a very early age. Such were the practicalities of my life. We didn’t have scheduled playdates instead our friends just dropped by. We were regularly told to “go outside and don’t come back until…” (at which point I would usually take a book and go read in the garden).

Growing up in Seattle, my children have had a very different experience and frankly I have failed miserably at managing their social calendar. It’s like meal planning. Really, I want someone to show up at my house daily with an expertly prepared repast. Instead, I avoid thinking about dinner until I have to and then I regret not having planned in advance. I have the best of intentions in terms of scheduling playdates for both of my children, but by the time I remember to call it’s too late and Johnny or Jane or Jim is already doing something else. The net result of this is that I have two pleasant, but not very socially adept children. They don’t even realize it.

However, when it comes to travel, I think my kids are better prepared than most of their peers. This may seem counter-intuitive. I mean, you might think that a parent would be more rather than less protective of a child when traveling. And it’s true, I was – with my first child. He’s challenging in many ways, but not when we travel. He’ll sit by me in an airport and bemoan the fact that he’s leaving Seattle again, but he’s never wandered – unlike my younger son. I’ve never been in such good shape as I was the year BigB (the younger guy) turned two. I chased him everywhere we went. He doesn’t run any more, but he does have a streak of independence a mile wide and the self-confidence to pick himself up and go follow his interests -wherever we are. He’s not yet NINE people!

BigB has disappeared out of sight multiple times: in big cities and small towns, in airports and shopping malls, in the U.S. and in random other countries we’ve visited. When he was two, as we walked down a Parisian street, he decided he was hungry and found himself a cafe – we found him pretty quickly. At four, he insisted on riding the (admittedly beginner) ski lift with his brother but without parents. At six, with much cajoling, my older son (the cautious one) proudly ordered his own glace (ice cream) in a French cafe – while we waited outside. At the same age, my younger son explored the shops around the town square in Albufeira, Portugal while his dad and I ate lunch. I’d be lying if I said that I was totally calm every time he disappeared into a store but each time he reappeared, he confidently waved to us and ran to the next set of trinkets without a care in the world.

When we were in Rome last year, rather than insist that my boys sit quietly in a restaurant while their Dad and I finished dinner, they ran off to explore the Piazza Del Parthenon. With lights and music and street hawkers on every corner they were in kid heaven. They came looking for us before we had even left the restaurant. As I walked through the square after dinner, a Bangladeshi street hawker stopped me an congratulated me on my son’s bargaining skills (who knew?).

This may sound like my parenting is a little too “hands-off”, negligent even. That would be an incorrect assumption. We’ve developed a strategy which we use when we’re exploring a new place. We always carry cell phones and require that our children know the numbers – thankfully we both have phones which we can bring with us outside the U.S. and we subscribe to AT&T’s plan which allows us to make calls at reduced rates while traveling. We agree on a meeting place or a place where Mom and Dad will wait while the children explore. We insist that they stick together – and then we hope that they don’t have a sibling quarrel and part ways. So far that hasn’t happened.

All children are individuals and some are born with a desire to explore. As Lenore Skenazy suggests, it is worse to constrain a child like that than to let him (safely) roam. My son craves more and greater independence every day. My parenting decision was to recognize where my children’s respective personalities sit along the spectrum of independence and to provide the individual support needed – and then to encourage each of them to spread his wings – in whatever form that takes – based on the relevant individual starting point.

And if you travel, the opportunities to do so are endless.

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