Excerpts from a personal essay on traveling with children, written for Food52

What I Learned While Traveling Europe with Small Children

Excerpt 1

Jet Lag

Most parents worry about jet lag when traveling with kids, but I find going east pretty easy–as long as you’re happy to have late night hang outs with your kids. Luckily, our first stop was in Spain, where no one batted an eye to see our small children dining out with us at 10pm. From there we went to southern Italy where nights wound down a little earlier, and eventually to Scotland where all the children we knew were hitting the hay at 7. 

It was pure luck that our itinerary combined with cultural norms made the transition gradual. That said, jet lag reminds me that there are benefits to being a Type B parent. I didn’t have any fixed expectation as to how and when my kids should be sleeping or waking. We exposed them to daylight a little earlier each day, they napped in the stroller when they needed to, and we encouraged bedtime when they seemed tired enough to sleep. 

If it all sounds a little too easy, flying home was a whole different story, featuring playtime at 4am. You win some, you lose some!

Excerpt 2

While it required flexibility, I found traveling with kids to be rewarding and expansive. It’s incredible to see the world through their eyes, and to help stretch their awareness of the diversity of lifestyles, experiences, cultures, and cuisines in the world. By traveling in Europe we were only scratching the surface, yet it was a rich surface to scratch. Though it will take a couple years before these experiences start to imprint on my youngest, my four year old returned knowing that in some places people eat dinner at 10PM and kids stay up and play after dark, and in other places his friends go to bed when the sun is still up. He expanded his normally restrictive diet and is comfortable traveling by car, bus, train, tram, boat, and funicular. Most importantly he knows that there’s no one right way to do things. Everyone everywhere does things a little differently, and that’s pretty cool.