What Do Kids Get Out of Travel?

On the border between India and Pakistan

I started Soles of a Nomad in part to give myself a forum to try to answer a question: why do so many people (including me) sacrifice so much to travel? And for the most part, I explore why I travel. Because that is what I know.

But I am not usually a solo traveler.

I traveled for a whole year with my wife and my three teenage daughters.

What Do Kids Get Out of Travel?

When people on the road met our kids, they often told them how lucky they were to be getting such an amazing experience while they were young. And my kids agreed. They knew it was a wonderful experience, and they were very grateful to have had it.

But it was also hard for them.

Do you remember being a teenager? Do you remember what was the most important thing in your life? Without question, it was your friends. And friends were something my girls couldn’t bring along with them. They missed their friends quite a bit. At one point, in rural Sri Lanka, they could barely even get enough internet to log into their social media to let their friends know they were still alive (their words!).

And while having the internet and being connected to people back home was a great blessing, it also constantly reminded them of all the things they were missing. All the parties and beach days. All the hugs and tears and tantrums. All the warm summer evenings, watching the light fade while sitting with friends, talking about nothing although it felt like everything. All the group laughter. All the bonding.

Basically, all the things that make up the memories of my youth.

And I deprived my kids of a significant part of that.

To be fair, I gave them some pretty good memories as well. My kids have snuggled baby elephants, kayaked through caves, lived in a Karen village, met refugees, studied languages, swam with bioluminescent plankton, and participated in amazing festivals. Those were great memories, too.

But I still wondered . . .

Was what my kids were getting out of travel enough to more than offset the cost of what they were missing at home? Most days, if I asked them that question, my kids said “yes.”

But not every day.

And here was the thing: they didn’t really get to decide. My wife and I made the decision to bring the family on this adventure. And while we would have listened to any strenuous objections from the kids, the ultimate decision was ours. And that’s a lot of responsibility. We had to decide if what the kids would get out of travel was worth what they were missing. Was travel really in their best interest?

So I had to ask: what do my kids get out of travel, anyway?

Contemplating beauty

What Do People Get Out of Travel?

There’s a standard answer travelers often give to the question of what do people get out of travel. Ask them what the benefits of travel are, and they’ll say something like this:

Travel is deadly to prejudice and intolerance. It teaches us that people are people and we’re all basically the same. It helps us respect other cultures and be more open-minded.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that simply isn’t true.

Take, for example, a study that looked at students who had signed up for a study abroad experience. Some of the students lived abroad in the fall semester, while some lived abroad in the spring, leaving a winter semester to compare the group that had already gone with the group that was yet to go. There was no measurable difference in cultural open-mindedness, tolerance, or almost any other trait you might hope travel would nurture.

Travel didn’t have a measurable impact.

And that made sense to me. Here’s why: whatever you already believe about the world, you will likely see evidence that you're right by getting out there and experiencing as much as possible.

If you already believe people are the same everywhere, you’ll find evidence for that. If you believe your way of doing things is right and everyone else is wrong, you’ll find evidence for that too.

Like anything else, you're most likely to interpret your travel experiences in a way that reinforces what you already believe.

What MY Kids Get Out of Travel

But I was OK with this. Because my wife and I had worked hard to teach our kids what we believe are really good values. So if travel reinforced those values, wonderful!

For example, we are from the US, where I find far too many people are distrusting of Muslims. The last thing I wanted was for my kids to grow up suspicious of millions of people based on the actions of a few extreme examples they saw on the news. So we talked about that. I used logic and evidence to convince my kids that Muslims are like everyone else: most are good, a few are not so good.

So when we showed up in Malaysia during Ramadan and joined locals at a public bazaar to break the fast—ordering food, placing it on the table, and waiting with everyone else for the call to prayer—my kids got more than a meal. A man asked if we were Muslim. When we said no, he told us we didn’t need to wait. But we replied that if those around us were waiting, we would too. That small gesture of respect sparked something. The locals welcomed us in, corrected our food order (gently), explained how they break their fast, and walked us through the ritual. My daughters saw firsthand: when you treat people with respect, they treat you with warmth.

New friends in Kochi, India

And any time we took ourselves off the beaten path in a country where we didn’t speak the language and had to rely on the kindness of strangers, my kids took that as evidence that people are generally kind.

And when we sat down to a terrifying dinner of fried tarantula, talking about how Cambodians hunted tarantulas to survive the Khmer Rouge era—and then the tarantula turned out to be really quite yummy—my kids took that as evidence that their way of thinking might be too narrow. And maybe they should try to be more open.

But those lessons stuck because we’d been teaching those values from the beginning. Someone else might have learned something entirely different from those exact same moments.

Travel didn’t make my kids into new, better people.

Travel distilled them. It made them more themselves.

The Verdict

Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, I’m not so sure about myself . . . but for my kids, it was a great thing.

There were other benefits of travel as well. I saw my kids’ confidence grow by leaps and bounds. And if independent travel doesn’t teach you tenacity, nothing will.

And maybe most importantly: all that time my kids would have been spending with their friends, they spent with each other (and with my wife and me).

My daughters had always gotten along fairly well, but I watched them grow incredibly close during our year on the road.

Our family became an even tighter knit unit. We enjoy spending time together. We laugh loud and often. We have so many inside jokes that other people may never truly understand us.

We had to be comfortable being ourselves around each other, because there was no escape.

It was hard at times, but it was also the greatest gift long-term travel gave me.

I love my kids. And I hope they understand me a little better because travel.

And that, all by itself, is enough for me.

Dinner together at a rooftop restaurant in Jaisalmer, India