How to Get Up the Guts to Travel Internationally with Kids

February 9, 2017

Part Two of this article is forthcoming, once we get home from our first as-a-family international trip, and I’ll let you know then which of my two working titles I went with:

“How to Successfully Travel Internationally with Your Kids”

“Why I Am a Fool and You Should Ignore Your Urge To Travel with Your Kids and Just Stay Home and Maybe go To Great Wolf Lodge or Something”

We have taken our kids to a few places for trips in the states, but have yet to travel with them in the way I have longed to: experiencing new cultures, different languages, and interesting foods. But soon, my husband and kids and I all leave for Cairo, and by the time this publishes we should be home and able to tell you if it was life changing or an absolute disaster. Have I mentioned my kids are 8, 6 and 4? Most people we meet here in Dallas tend to act like we are crazy. Wish us luck.

Find your Motivation

Mine is humility. I spent my formative years in a Chicago suburb with academic and well-traveled parents. We did vacations, but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I went overseas…and my mind was blown.

I tell people now that I was raised with accidental ethnocentrism. Somehow, I had a notion (that was never explicitly said to me) that America is the best/only place to live in the world. I sort of pitied everyone else who lived in a less-than-best country and was shocked when I went to Italy, France, Switzerland, and England after graduating high school and saw that people were quite happy in all those places. And they did some things better than we did back home!

I am by no means ungrateful: I love the many blessings that accompany living in the United States, and there are just a million reasons to love Texas as well. It’s just that I look back and hate that it was a surprise to learn this truth so late in life.

Decide They Need to Travel

This past summer, my husband and I went on a trip without our kids. We went with a group of friends to tour ancient Biblical sites, and one family brought their young kids. These three kids were ages 10–14 and were amazing travelers. They listened to tour guides respectfully, they wandered around the sites taking pictures, and handled riding in a tour bus with broken A/C without complaint for several hours. (I was not as successful at withholding my dissatisfaction with our hot bus.)

Some friends and I asked their sweet mom, “Do you have them on Benadryl? Are they currently hypnotized? How is it that they travel so well?” And her reply was that they had practiced traveling with them since they were young. It makes sense—surely the first time you take kids somewhere is going to be hard no matter their ages. And if they get used to travel when they are younger, they will be pros when they get older. (Right??)

Get Kinda Contrary

In the states, people commonly insist that to travel with your kids, they need to be old enough to remember everything. Luckily, getting contrary isn’t really a problem for me (#justaskmyhusband), so here are my reasons that is ridiculous: We don’t skip celebrating a birthday when a baby turns one just because we know they won’t remember. We serve them cake and take a picture and trust that in every experience we are helping form these little hearts and brains of theirs. Travel is formative. Even older kids won’t remember everything.

Choose a Destination

I read aloud to my kids from A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer, which is a storyteller-style, chronological, clear history of the world. Reading this book aloud began to connect some dots for me in terms of chronology of history that I had not understood before, and I liked the idea of beginning our exploration of history and faith by starting with one of the Ancient Civilizations. So, we chose Egypt. We also chose Egypt because we are thinking that even my 4-year-old won’t forget riding a camel and seeing the pyramids. TBD.

Buy All the Books

In addition to the Child’s History (above), we have an excellent book called Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids by Jamie C. Martin that contains book lists that we work through by checking books out from the library. We have books of maps (and use my iPhone regularly) to look up where certain cities or countries are. We own the Audible version of The Story of The World by Susan Wise Bauer, which honestly still bores them at their ages, but maybe someday they’ll remember what they heard.

When I knew we were planning to go to Egypt, I bought every book at Half Price Books on Egypt, pharaohs, and pyramids for us to read. (In case I’m making myself sound like a supermom, their books are more common than their baths by a grand degree.)

On Christmas morning, the kids opened a box that had a bunch of books and a note that said “Let’s Go to Egypt.” They’ve been thrilled. Knowing we are actually going has also increased each of my three kids’ interest in Egyptian civilization tenfold, to my delight. They are studying the maps, reading the books, asking about the foods and the dress and the weather in a way that is no longer driven by me. It has become their own. They are so stoked.

Our hope is that seeing a part of the world that is so different from what they know will begin to form little hearts that are on fire for the world and for all the people in it. We pray they will see another culture with its food, language, money, government, and traditions and be able to better understand history as concrete. We hope we are not fools…pray for us!