Why You Should Travel With Your Kids

Everyone in my family was exhausted when, late one night in the medieval Spanish town of Cáceres‎, my 3-year-old son simply sat down on the sidewalk and whimpered. He couldn’t walk any further.

We were halfway through a lengthy 2023 road trip and on this particular night had parked our rental van outside the old Cáceres‎ city center. That meant trekking into town with all our gear on our backs. As I prepared to hoist my son onto my shoulders—our modus operandi in these situations—I too felt like collapsing onto the ground. But my wife had another idea. She removed my son’s backpack and gave it to our 5-year-old daughter, who, without removing her own bag, threw the backpack over the front of her torso and became what she called a backpack sandwich. And so we continued on, sharing the burden—my son on my shoulders, my daughter with his bag, and our infant in my wife’s arms. 

As the summer draws to a close and many families conclude their final vacations of the year, this small moment keeps coming to mind. Travel is an extraordinary privilege for many reasons. It broadens horizons. It breaks up routines. It’s fun. 

But as I’ve journeyed in recent years with three small children, that moment with my son helped teach me that it can be something else, too: In a world that mostly pushes individuality to the extreme, travel gives families a rare chance to genuinely work together and forge a much-needed group identity. It turns families into teams.

That families benefit from functioning as a team is well-documented. Michaeleen Doucleff, for instance, observed in her book Hunt, Gather, Parent that traditional parenting styles across cultures produce self-motivated kids not via nagging or punishments, but by positioning children as “full-fledged, contributing members of the family.” Kids in many traditional cultures, Doucleff argues, “want to help their family and want to work together as a team.”

David F. Lancy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Utah State University, has made a similar point, arguing that toddlers naturally want to “collaborate” with their parents, which is how they learn essential skills and values. On the other hand, kids who aren’t “expected to assist or collaborate with others in doing family chores, fail to learn necessary life skills.”

In a similar vein, MIT Professor John A. Davis has observed that families tend to reap financial benefits and avoid squandering their wealth across multiple generations when they have a shared sense of purpose and a clear family mission. 

Davis was specifically looking at family wealth, and his observations hint at a concept known as the “corporate family.” A corporate family is one that works together at a shared enterprise — think of a family that runs a farm or shop— and it used to be very common. University of Minnesota Professor Steven Ruggles has noted that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 90% of American families were corporate families. Thanks to the rise of wage labor and factory work, however, corporate families steadily declined over the next century, and by 1920 had been replaced by male-breadwinner families as the dominant institution. Ruggles also argues that “in the past half-century, the long-run trend toward atomization of families has accelerated.”

The point is that in the past, many families defaulted to a kind of team-like structure because they were working together day in and day out. But today, that’s mostly gone; Ruggles estimates that fewer than 10% of American families in 2010 were corporate families.

A family that travels together evolves—even if for just a brief moment—into a team of collaborators, pilgrims who are part of something bigger than themselves.

Like many American parents, I’ve experienced this evolution firsthand. Despite my admiration for hunter-gatherer family values, or a desire to emulate the corporate family model, my kids and I spend our days doing unrelated tasks—me at work, them at school. And for all the myriad benefits of modern life, it’s nevertheless tough to create a common mission when the vast majority of our time is spent apart. I might tell my kids as we convene for dinner each night that we’re a team, but it’s a priori. Our opportunities to collaborate are limited and often contrived. 

But that changes when a family travels together. My daughter carrying my son’s backpack was not a made-up chore or something I could have done more easily myself. We were mutual participants in a shared venture. 

Of course, there are opportunities for this kind of thing in regular life. But traveling together concentrates these experiences so they happen again and again in rapid succession. For example, on a recent road trip through the American West, our kids became meaningful collaborators in deciding where to eat, how to arrange a hotel room for five people, which stops to make, and even what routes to take. They carried bags and takeout boxes. They helped each other surmount giant redwood stumps. These are tiny things, and not especially memorable or life-changing in isolation. But the effect of operating all day, every day as a group bends the dominant identity away from the individual and toward the team.

Researchers have observed similar results, noting that travel can strengthen family bonds, improve cohesion, and enhance communication. A 2013 paper even argued that family leisure may be “the single most important force” for promoting healthy relationships between husbands, wives, and their kids. In other words, travel hasn’t just nudged myfamily toward a stronger team identity. That’s what traveling as a family does for everyone. 

I’ve made this case often among friends and family, and one of the most common forms of pushback I hear is that traveling with kids is hard. And it absolutely is. Our flight home from that trip to Spain was 13 hours long and none of our three kids slept the entire time. You can probably imagine how that went. My wife and I typically end most trips with aching shoulders from having carried one child or another for hours on end. Sleeping in the same room with three small children for long periods of time is not a recipe for good rest. There are tantrums and spills and messy diapers and more. 

I am unaware of research on the quotidian challenges of travel with children. But as someone who has traveled often, my theory is that these challenges are actually part of the point. The brutality of traveling with kids is not a bug, it’s a feature. It pushes the family into a different paradigm, so that the experience is less a vacation—a word of Latin genesis whose entomology implies the vacating of some origin point—and more a journey. It’s the pilgrimage paradigm, where the purpose is not relaxation but enlightenment. And, of course, as pilgrims have always known, difficulty imbues a journey with meaning. 

Obviously, we all need trips that are not pilgrimages, draped in hardship and symbolism. Go to the beach. Sleep in. Have fun. This is not an argument against some moderate and occasional hedonism. And there are plenty of other reasons to travel as well. Couples need alone time. People have hobbies that take them far afield. Rick Steves—a surprisingly eloquent travel philosopher despite his reputation as an avuncular PBS host—believes that “travel teaches the beauty of human fulfillment” and serves as an antidote to ethnocentrism. Travel, in whatever large or small ways a person is fortunate enough to manage, is wonderful.

But for busy families with children, consider also that journeying together chips away at the atomization of modern life. A family becomes more than a collection of affectionate people who meet for a few hours each day to swap stories of their individual work, school, or extracurriculars. A family that travels together evolves—even if for just a brief moment—into a team of collaborators, pilgrims who are part of something bigger than themselves. 

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.