Hot Take: Leave Your Kids At Home

As a parent, I've provided my children with some extraordinary experiences growing up. I prided myself on that. But we also made a decision early that probably went against the conventional parenting playbook. We didn't build our family life around organized sports and extracurricular activities that consumed every evening and weekend. We focused much more on doing things together.

For almost eight years, I did something with my kids called Saturday Secret Adventure. Each Saturday morning I came up with something to do. Sometimes it was horseback riding or fishing. Sometimes I built a scavenger hunt. Other times we drove to a different city just to go to a different Chuck E. Cheese. Eventually I realized the activity itself barely mattered. The adventure was that we were going somewhere together.

One of our most memorable Saturdays was going to 7-Eleven and buying ten two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and ten packages of Mentos. We stopped at Home Depot for protective glasses and painter's coveralls, found an empty parking lot and spent the afternoon launching geysers into the sky. The whole thing cost about $25. My kids were enthralled. And I genuinely don't believe a five-star resort in Bora Bora would have made that afternoon any better for them.

That's my hot take on traveling with kids. When children are young, extraordinary experiences don't require extraordinary destinations.

When our kids were little, we rarely took big international vacations together. My wife and I traveled internationally and to tropical destinations by ourselves. Finding someone we trusted to stay with the kids wasn't an afterthought. It was part of planning the trip.

I know this sounds borderline sacrilegious coming from someone who's built a large part of his life around travel. But I believe that dragging small children around the world to iconic destinations is a waste of time and money. Not because traveling with your children is bad. I believe the opposite. It's mainly because you're applying your perspective to someone who doesn't have one just yet.

Take a three or six year old to Bora Bora. You see the flight across the Pacific, the water, the overwater bungalow, the culture and the rarity of being there. Your child sees a swimming pool. And they probably would have been equally excited about the one down the street.

Next time you're out traveling, look around at the families. Notice how many young kids are sitting on their phones in front of some iconic landmark, completely bored, completely checked out. Nobody at the Colosseum told them they should be grateful. They just don't have the framework yet to understand what they're looking at.

You cannot force perspective. You can't force appreciation. Those things develop with age and experience, and no amount of expensive airfare accelerates that timeline.

Try this experiment. Instead of planning some elaborate trip, put a tent in your backyard. Make a fire. Cook outside. Give your kids flashlights. Sleep in sleeping bags. To them, you might as well be crossing the Appalachian Trail.

That is not an argument against giving your children epic experiences. It's an argument for understanding which kind of experiences actually land with them at each stage of life.

Go camping. Rent an RV for a weekend. Take them fishing. Find a waterfall near your house. Build a scavenger hunt around your neighborhood. Get on bikes and ride somewhere you've never been. Let them choose a direction at every intersection and see where you end up. Stop dragging them to soccer every Saturday and do something none of you have ever done before.

Young kids don't need distance for adventure. They need novelty, attention and you.

This is the key until they hit a certain age and things change. Once my kids reached their teens, travel became completely different. They could understand where they were. They had context. They could participate rather than simply be transported. They began forming their own opinions about these places, people and cultures. They stopped being passive passengers and started becoming actual travelers.

And when they became young adults, it changed again.

Traveling with adult children is the absolute best version of traveling with your kids. Now they appreciate it. They contribute to it. You can sit at dinner and actually talk about what happened. You can challenge each other, laugh together, get lost together, do things that were impossible when they were six. You have real conversations. They bring their own views and observations to the entire experience. They surprise you.

Most importantly, you're spending meaningful time together at exactly the stage of life when meaningful time becomes hard to find. Your adult children have jobs, relationships, friends and lives of their own. You're no longer automatically together every morning and every evening. The casual daily connection that you took for granted when they were small is gone.

Travel gives some of that time back. So if you have young adult or adult children, my advice is almost the exact opposite of what I tell parents of toddlers. Go big. Plan the epic trip. Make it two weeks. Go somewhere none of you have ever been. Do the bucket list thing. Create a real mission around it. Give yourselves enough time together that you move past the normal family conversation and actually experience something together.

Some of the greatest memories I have with my children came from traveling together once they were old enough for the experience to actually land. And if your kids are still young, stop feeling like you need to fly halfway around the world to give them an extraordinary childhood. Save those places. Take the money you were going to spend dragging a seven year old through Europe and use some of it to travel with your spouse. Then come home and make Saturday remarkable. There will be time for the Colosseum. There will be time for Machu Picchu. There will be time for Bora Bora.

When your kids are old enough to look up from the pool and actually understand where they are, take them. That's when the trip becomes theirs too.