Family dinners are about dinner, but first and foremost they’re about family. So here’s my final piece of advice for happier family meals: sit down and eat. Don’t wait on the table. Stay in your chair, enjoy yourself, have a glass of wine if that’s what you do. It’s not a family meal if you’re not really there, too.
nine
FREE TIME, VACATIONS, HOLIDAYS, BIRTHDAYS, AND OTHER ON-DEMAND “FUN”
We have never taken a family vacation during which I have not, at some moment, vowed never to take another. One of my favorite comments about traveling with kids came from Kristen Howerton (who blogs at Rage Against the Minivan) on Facebook as she and her four kids, all under ten at the time, embarked on a trip to Machu Picchu. It went something like this: “Here we go! Off to take the kids to whine at one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”
Vacations with children—and birthdays, holidays, and school breaks, along with that rare beast, “free time”—are supposed to be fun. But we know too well that while the fun is anything but guaranteed, one thing is certain: there will be a lot of work involved. For vacations, there will be the planning, the packing, the management of small children in unfamiliar and unchildproofed spaces, and the debates with older children about whether to put down the phone, turn off the video, or even set aside the book to look out the window. There will be times—usually weeks, if you’re in the United States—when your children are on vacation and you are not, and those will be both complicated and expensive. Birthdays and holidays will include family pressures and children jacked up on sugar, late bedtimes, and high expectations, at their worst when you expect them to be at their best. Is everybody happy yet?
What Goes Wrong
That word, “expectations,” is at the root of what makes special occasions with children so likely to be special in all the wrong ways. It seems to us, as parents, that there is a lot riding on these red-letter days. Many of our own memories of childhood center around the times when the camera came out and the grown-ups took off work and the cousins visited. We know these are the times our children will remember, too, and we want them to be good memories.
Vacations are under similar pressure. Vacations are worth the hassle: they’re good for adult health and productivity, and have benefits for children and families. Children who travel can be more adaptable, curious, and aware of the world around them, and families told researchers they felt closer and more connected while on vacation. (The latter finding is from a Disney-funded survey, so it should be taken with some salt; they probably didn’t ask if families also felt more stressed at the sight of each additional mouse-eared price tag.) Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, rejuvenating, a time to reconnect.
But we Americans pack our relaxation into a really small space. About a quarter of us have no paid time off at all, and the rest of us get an average of thirteen days a year for vacation and a bonus eight paid holidays. That’s not a lot of hours for all of our family togetherness needs, and many of us either don’t take all we’re offered or spend significant chunks of that time shielding our laptop from the spray and sunshine at the water park.
Once the vacation begins, we get weighed down by that whole “supposed to” problem. There’s this sense that this is our moment—that “quality time” for which we have traded in so much of our “quantity time.” Few of us spend many afternoons or weekend days hanging out with our children, especially once they’re elementary aged or older. Our leisure today tends to be both organized and age segregated, and even parents who are with their children during those hours, or parents who are at home most of the time, spend much of that time driving children to child-centered activities, practices, and lessons rather than on frivolous family fun. So when vacation time arrives, there we are, with our all-caps plan to relax, rejuvenate, and reconnect, burning precious resources in the form of vacation days and money and risking our very livelihoods with our absence from our desks in order to spend this time with these, our beloved offspring, who do not seem to appreciate it.
From here, “what goes wrong” on a family vacation is age and circumstance dependent, but there are so many possibilities. Children get sick on planes and then pass their germs through every member of the family on holiday. Rental cars lose their air-conditioning or their windows get stuck open. Work crises greet us in the hotel lobby, teenagers are bored and show it, the campsite or water park you’d counted on is closed for repairs. Even the memories gathered on the vacation might not be the ones you were counting on. Jessica Sanders, a Utah mother of three who writes The Happiest Blog on Earth, says that she and her husband saved for a year to take their children on a trip to Disneyland. “We spent two days at the resort, a few days at the beach, and time exploring Los Angeles museums and sights. We did so many incredible things most kids don’t ever get to experience,” she says. When they got home, her father-in-law asked their four-year-old what she liked best about the trip. “She said, ‘Grandpa! We got to go to McDonald’s three times!’”
How Can We Put the Fun Back in Family Time?
I included birthdays, holidays, vacations, and general free and leisure time in the same chapter because they have two big things in common: first, we feel a lot of pressure to get them “right,” and second, the only way to really feel happy under mandatory-fun conditions is to get to work on changing that mind-set. There are, of course, plenty of ways to make all of those things better and easier, and I’ll offer as many as I can in the final section of the chapter. But before any of the tricks and tips for family vacations and toddler birthdays can help, we have to pull the valve on the pressure. Yes, vacations, holidays, birthdays, and leisure are “supposed” to leave us with beloved family memories. That’s because they do, pretty much regardless. Even (possibly especially) when things are very much not going according to plan.
CHANGE YOUR NARRATIVE
One of the secrets of “quality time” in the form of vacations and special occasions is that, although it feels rare, you actually get a solid quantity of it. Enough to create traditions, enough that it will quickly feel as though you have “always” done this or that. Between a child’s birth and his eighteenth birthday, you get 940 Saturdays, as pediatrician Harley Rotbart counted up in his book No Regrets Parenting. You get eighteen Christmases, eighteen summers, and some set number of family vacations, which stretch out before you when your children are babies and catch up to you quickly after all. That may sound like me reminding you that your time is limited, but those are decently large numbers. They’re finite, yes, and we humans don’t like that much, but there’s lots of room in there for error, if you want to call it that. Plenty of time for missed connections and rainy beach vacations. More importantly, plenty of time for doing nothing much.
When it comes to letting up on some of the pressure we feel around vacations and holidays, one of the first things to do is to embrace the idea of truly unscheduled time. As in, no plans. You wake up in the morning with a completely open slate, and then you do something you want to do, and then you do something someone else wants to do, and you fit in some meals and any necessary personal hygiene in there, and before you know it, you’re ready to go to bed. No playdates, no lessons, not even a dinner reservation. Just a day or more doing whatever comes up.
The problem is, many of us, especially Americans, tend to be afraid to do nothing. It’s not our way. A survey by Hilton International found that more than half of travelers with children say they pack so much into their vacation that they need “a vacation from their vacation” when they return. “There’s this general sense right now that our children’s time, and the times when we’re with them, should be spent productively,” says Lisa Damour, who writes a column on adolescence for the New York Times and is the author of Untangled. “That’s the baseline. We’re working toward this faraway goal that our kids come out okay, and we don’t know what that looks like, exactly, but we know that watching YouTube videos with them does not feel connected to that
goal but driving them to ballet class does.”
Instead, says Damour, we need to rely on our gut feeling that all of the time we spend with our children, whether it’s watching mindless television, reading aloud, or just being in the same space together, occasionally leaning over to share a headline on our phones, adds up to something. “I have this fantasy that someone will do an actual research study that shows that just hanging out with your kids doing nothing leads to them coming out okay. I think we’d all feel so much better.”
If, when you’re planning a vacation or for the time you can share with your kids over their school breaks, you make “just hanging out doing nothing” one of your goals, you’ve set a lovely low bar that you’re bound to clear. You can make similar shifts in all your special occasion intentions: we will have eight fifth graders here, and they will celebrate my son’s birthday. Will they hit a piñata with a stick? Maybe. Or maybe the piñata will prove recalcitrant, and eventually, his older brother will take it up the stairs and throw it down at them. That’s still a birthday celebration (and arguably more memorable than the classic piñata version). After a long year of school and all of the activities that go along with it, Naomi Hattaway, the founder of an international social network based in Virginia, took a break this summer with two of her children (eleven and fourteen; she also has a twenty-two-year-old) and “didn’t sign up for one activity. Not one.” Instead, they traveled and, even when home, “slept until ungodly hours and stayed up past midnight nearly every night. We ate a lot of ice cream, logged more dog walk miles than we have ever collectively in our past, and explored our neighborhood coffee shops like never before.”
Scheduling unscheduled time can really change the way we interact with our kids. So many of our arguments with children, especially when they’re young, come from transitions. Every parent has wondered how it can possibly be so hard to get them to pack themselves up to go to the swimming pool with friends when they love the pool and their friends, and wanted nothing more than to go an hour ago when you made the arrangements.
I don’t have an answer for that, but I think it centers around the words “have to.” We have to go. We have to be on time. We have to get in the car now. Suddenly, what was supposed to be fun has become part of the constant give-and-take that is parenting. As Julie Falatko, a children’s book author from Maine who spends vacations camping out with her husband and three children in their RV, puts it: sometimes travel just feels like “a new and different venue for my husband and me to discipline the children.”
More genuinely free time, whether it’s at home or away, might help to reduce that sense of always being the disciplinarian on duty. If you don’t need to be anywhere, there’s no need to drag the kids to the car. It also gives you all an opportunity to make decisions together and not in a “here, you pick one thing to do on our vacation” kind of way. Instead, with a wide-open schedule, everyone gets to throw things out there. “We ditched the meal planning and decided at the last minute what to eat and where,” says Hattaway. “We took advantage of five-dollar movies at the theater on Tuesdays.” Less “have to” meant more time to play and a more relaxed attitude for everyone.
This business of being together, in your own house, in a vacation house, or at a family member’s home, without having some set plan is something that takes practice, especially if your screen-time rules don’t offer an easy out for the “bored” child, or if you’re the parent of siblings who are likely to use the time to engage in some rivalry. Do it enough, though, and particularly when your children reach an age where they can entertain themselves and even feed themselves or take themselves outside for a while, you’ll begin to crave it. The “do nothing day” will become one vacation ideal. Many families (us included) build it into vacation plans, choosing hotels or vacation rentals that allow for unstructured time and sudden changes of plan.
Joseph Hinson, who built my website, is a father of three in Virginia. He and his wife designed their summer vacation around the idea of unscheduled time. They drove a pop-up camper around the East Coast for a month, scheduling little beyond camping spots. “We saw bears, walked under waterfalls, went tubing, biking, and connected with our world in a way that was incredible,” he says. “It’s hard to get back to the normalcy of life after that experience.” Now they’re resisting scheduled weekends and afternoons, and trying to bring some of that feeling of freedom and family connection back into their ordinary life. They spend time with friends, but they also reserve “family fun days” every week. “So far they’ve ranged from seeing beautiful sites within an hour of our house on weekends to doing breakfast for dinner in front of our projector outside. We want to feel like we’re in control of our life, instead of it just happening to us.”
Unstructured time can also mean that you’ve made plans, but you’re happy to change them. Ruth Rau, a mother and toymaker in Winchester, Virginia, says that after years of vacationing with her two boys, she has learned to take a more laid-back approach. “We spend more time in fewer places,” she says. “We don’t try to cram everything in, and we don’t make many plans we can’t change.” On their way to the zoo while staying with family friends one summer, she says, they saw a sign for a model train show. “All of the kids wanted to see the trains. So we ditched the zoo and spent a lovely leisurely morning walking around a shaded model train exhibit, talking to locals, then found the most wonderful little coffee shop and had a picnic on the lawn.” A year later, she says, her kids (now four and five) still talk about the day with the trains. “And I still remember the feeling that exploring life with my kids is pretty sweet.”
As you ease into a comfort with doing less, consider the real goal of your time, whether it’s a vacation, summer break, or a holiday. “Seeing the Grand Canyon” or “celebrating Thanksgiving” is only part of it. “What we’ve come to understand is that vacations with kids are all about getting out of the house,” said Falatko. “You try to do something memorable, and we’re all together, so they have to figure out how to play together even more than they usually do.” In my research on siblings, one thing that came up again and again is that all the bickering matters less in families where siblings also share memories of good times. Family vacations and holidays are often where those memories are formed. Soak up the good. “What it’s about for me,” said Falatko, “is the enforced togetherness, which makes us all remember what we like about each other in the first place.”
Once you’ve adjusted your expectations when it comes to vacations and special occasions, there are still practical things you can do to increase your happiness when the pressure feels like it’s on. These big events might represent future memories and past traditions, but they’re also, on a simpler level, experiences to be built with your family, your to-do list, and your wallet. Most of us get better at vacations, family holidays, and birthdays with practice, and other people’s advice can help.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Families on the Move
When a vacation or a family holiday involves packing up and heading out, it’s the rare parent whose excitement isn’t tinged, or entirely overwhelmed, with a sense of stress. There’s so much to remember, so much to plan, so much to pack. How can we get it all together and keep it that way over the course of four flights, a rental car, and two different hotels in two states?
EXPECT MORE FROM YOUR KIDS
When my children were three, five, and seven, my husband, my mother, and I took them to China on a trip to adopt their youngest sister. As if that trip alone weren’t challenge enough, three days after our arrival in Beijing, the Chinese government quarantined us as part of their efforts to combat the spread of the H1N1 flu virus (you might remember it as swine flu). They hospitalized my husband and moved my mother, the three children, and me to a quarantine facility—a former luxury hotel, moldy and full of holes in the walls after being shut down for years, now staffed by government employees, only one of whom spoke English. Daily temperatures ho
vered in the nineties. The hotel was un-air-conditioned and the entertainment options limited to a single badminton net and a long-unused fountain full of koi fish, some belly-up. Chinese food was served buffet-style three times daily and did not include the typical kid’s menu options (although we were once served hot dogs, wrapped in Chinese buns, for breakfast).
This was obviously not your ideal vacation scenario, but in looking back, the thing I see most clearly is that everything I panicked about regularly before traveling with my kids really isn’t a big deal. The absence of snacks wasn’t a crisis, nor was the unfamiliar food (and watching your children eat what’s in front of them for a week because there isn’t anything else will forever change your approach to feeding them). Extremely limited TV and video games weren’t, either (this experience predated tablets by a year or so). They were hot and bored, but who hasn’t been hot and bored? It was a surreal week (and in many ways a frightening one), but it wasn’t a catastrophe in the ways I would have expected it to be if you’d asked me to prepare for it. It was, once we were really convinced they weren’t going to remove the children and that they were going to let us go eventually, not that bad.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 25