It baffles many parents, but children don’t often like the idea of going out on vacations. Travel can seem like too much work and too little fun. If this is the way your children feel, here are tips to help your children enjoy your family vacations the way they should.
Take longer vacations
If your kids aren’t going along with the idea of a proper, week-long vacation, it might occur to you to dangle the idea of a two-day or three-day vacation before them. You shouldn’t. It takes kids three days to adjust to a new environment. With short vacations, they never get a chance to get into the groove and actually start having fun.
Apply your money where it counts
As a grown-up, you’re sufficiently aware of your surroundings to care about where you stay. Children aren’t like that, however. They care more about fun than about staying in a very nice room. As long as what you’re getting isn’t a dump, you want to use as much of your vacation budget as possible on activities that your kids will actually appreciate.
Make extra sure that you don’t screw up with the weather
Kids these days quickly get bored with anything that doesn’t go exactly right. If you aren’t careful, you might end up planning an activity exactly when the weather forecast sees chilly winds and rain. Keep a very close watch on the weather — use this app instead of a thermometer in your room. Unlike a thermometer, a weather map gives you predictions.
Don’t cram too much into your days
Vacations should be about relaxing and having a good time, rather than jam-packed schedules. You want to make sure that your children have time to mentally process everything they are doing, see and experience. If they don’t have enough time to process and absorb, they aren’t going to remember much of anything, and they are going to get much use out of it.
Make everything educational
The mind learns best when the things it is presented with are placed in unique contexts. When you try to explain to your children how to read a map or the night sky, how do tides work, how to use math in specific contexts math or anything else when you are at home, they may retain very little of it because there is no specific context to place the information in. When you’re on vacation, however, you are in a place that your children’s minds haven’t started to associate with anything get. When you bring up valuable educational tips every now and then, however, their minds will have a new place to associate the information with. It’ll stick like glue.
Finally, bring homework
If you’re willing to do anything to keep your kids from whining about boredom during vacation, you might think it a good idea to not bring up the subject of homework, at all. Contrary to intuition, however, bringing homework on the vacation could actually be a way to help your kids enjoy the vacation more. To begin, it’s important to see that lack of structure makes anything less enjoyable. When a vacation is just a featureless stretch of travel and free time, your children will begin to lose perspective and appreciation. Give them some homework that they hate, however, and they will get to treasure every moment of the vacation that they get to be free. Structure has a way of helping the mind focus on the positive.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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