Items May Have Shifted: How to Travel With Your Baby or Toddler

By NJS Kaye

Do you know why babies really cry on planes? Or what lands the most traveling tots in the emergency room?

It is possible to travel with babies, toddlers, even twins, without losing your mind or your moxie. You just need information and a handful of items, and one of them is duct tape.

Combining tested guerilla tactics with scholarly research, Items May Have Shifted: How to Travel With Your Baby or Toddler offers guidance on everything from altitude sickness to zoological hazards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NJS Kaye
• Release date: Jun 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995166615

NJS Kaye

NJS Kaye is a smart ass. And she’s okay with that. A former professor and journalist, she has been writing professionally for 25 years. Her groundbreaking research on such diverse topics as the porn business, globalization in the media, and insurance policies in antebellum slavery is probably being taught to some poor college student somewhere. She has worked with movie stars, Ivy League brainiacs, and the United Nations. Now she avoids stepping on Lego and has a slight addiction to her power tools and creating elaborate birthday cakes. She has lived in Philadelphia, Paris, Oxford, Toronto, and Vancouver, but calls Edmonton, Canada home with her husband and 5 year-old twin boys. When she’s not writing, she runs a medical consulting company and serves on the board of an independent cinema. She also publishes romance as Nikky Kaye (but keep it quiet please; remember she has to protect her reputation as a smart ass).

Book preview

1

TRAVEL WITH A BABY, TODDLER, OR TWINS? ARE YOU INSANE?

In 1997 J.W . Reinhardt filed US Patent 5,697,580 and optimistically offered his airplane child safety device to the United States Department of Transportation. Confident that his system would revolutionize air travel for families, he waived all future royalties. Mr. Reinhardt’s solution, which was to stow infants in a new and improved overhead compartment, complete with harnesses and ventilation holes, did not fly.

There is a better way to travel with babies. My twin boys enjoyed their 21st flight the day before their 1st birthday, and did not spend any time in the overhead compartment. They did, however, enjoy time in the bins on the security belt.

We all know that babies and small children travel; we’ve seen them squalling in airplanes, strapped to backpacks on mountain trails, and testing the patience of servers at roadside restaurants. Perhaps you’re one of those people who mentally curse the crying baby on your flight, or can’t understand why that parent won’t stop their toddler from throwing spoons on the floor. If this feels familiar, then I’m willing to guess you don’t have kids or maybe it’s been a long time since your child was little.

But if you are a parent, especially a new parent or expecting to become one soon, this book is for you. Studies show that after becoming a parent, you tend to use your heart, not your head, when making family decisions, such as vacations.¹ This is not a big surprise.

But one of the tragic mistakes that new parents make, especially parents of multiples, is to shelve all their travel plans for the next ten years because they believe it’s too hard to travel with a baby. I’ll let you in on a little secret: there are babies in Belgium. There are toddlers in Tahiti. There are even triplets in Tripoli. But that’s different, you say. They live there, and they don’t have to get there.

There are constraints to traveling with kids, obviously. And the younger the child, the more people avoid it. In one study, only 15% of survey respondents thought that 0-3 years was the best age to travel with children (compared to 74% for 10-12 year olds). Despite that, 70% of people plan to travel with their children in the next two years.² Objectively, it can be more work to care for babies and younger children away from home. If they do go, parents tend to go on a shorter trip, limit their activities and improvise less than they did before having kids.³

So why do we do it?

A family vacation is possibly one of our strangest oxymorons, and we have a peculiar obsession with the idea.⁴ American families give up things like purchasing a new TV or computer (54%), going to the movies (47%), and eating out (43%) in order to afford a vacation.⁵

The established model of a family vacation focuses on having fun, the importance of adventure and new experiences, and the desire to reaffirm and strengthen relationships with family and friends. The motivation behind family travel is usually a desire for togetherness, family bonding, and social interactions.⁶ Okay, fair enough. That all sounds good.

But researchers believe that family vacations are different from any other type of holiday because

parents are not mindless vacationers but rather mindful educators, motivated to use family vacation in order to create long-term memories of a functioning family as a model for their children⁷

Whoa! No pressure, right? We take children on trips to improve their self-esteem, socialization, security, attachment, and knowledge of people and places beyond their immediate universe.⁸ Sounds noble, doesn't it? However, studies show that the current cultural standard of putting your children first has been firmly linked to the moral worth of parents.⁹

In other words, we travel with our children because we are controlling narcissists. Ouch.

Obviously a baby who is being taken across the country or world is pretty unaware of how much fun they’re having, but parents insist that surviving these trips is a signifier of good parenting. So taking your baby on a 12-hour flight is proof that you are a good parent. If that weren’t enough pressure, there is additional demand for a happy holiday.¹⁰ All this idealization of family leisure time actually creates more stress for parents, especially among mothers.

So now we are controlling narcissistic martyrs. No offense intended. I have felt this stress myself, and still do on every trip.

My goal with this book is to help you not just survive, but thrive on your next (or maybe even your first) family vacation. I learned through trial and error with my own twin boys, herein known as Mayhem and Destruction. Trips with them are definitely family time but sometimes I sure don’t feel like a good parent.

Researchers agree that this need for family time is a desire to shut out the pressures of everyday life, or sometimes it’s just the guilt of parents who feel they don’t spend enough time with their children, usually fathers more than mothers.¹¹ The role of dads on vacation are often as entertainers of children, and facilitators of moms’ interests, allowing them to seek more down time than they may get at home.¹² In other words, Dad will take the baby to watch basketball at the hotel bar while Mom goes to the spa (been there, got the massage). Other than that, mums generally do the same work as at home, only in an unfamiliar place.

Either way, the tiny traveler rarely calls the shots. The only real way that young children have any say is by asserting their basic needs for rest, sustenance, toileting and temperature control, all of which parents of young kids repeatedly deny for themselves on these trips (martyr, remember?). As children grow older, they are involved more in vacation decision-making, and by adolescence they try to avoid their parents altogether while on family trips. You’ll be lucky to get their faces out of their phones long enough to look up at the Taj Mahal and say Cool.

How is this book different from other travel with baby guides? Simply put, I believe in:

The MacGyver approach to solving problems (you would be surprised what you can do with a shoelace, duct tape, pipe cleaners, and a sock)

Doing the maximum with the minimum supplies

Backing myself up with scholarly research

I am not a celebrity, nor do I travel for business. But my twin boys were lucky enough to be on approximately 50 flights before their 5th birthday, and then there are a couple dozen road trips and train trips to add to that. So I’ve been that stressed tourist whipping a double stroller and two babies into a taxi in Manhattan during rush hour, and I’ve been the target of projectile vomit on an airplane. I have found unique solutions to the challenges of traveling with not only one baby or toddler, but double trouble.

My experience alone, however, should not be taken as authoritative. And since you can take the professor out of the college, but not the college out of the professor, I did research. Unfortunately, I discovered that there is little being published on children’s travel.¹³ To add insult to injury, the problem with all this family travel research is that it does not actually consider children’s experiences at all.¹⁴

There are a lot of reasons why children as active participants are not considered in tourism research. First, research that involves children requires special training, expertise, and ethics approvals—basically, a lot of pain in the ass roadblocks. Secondly, most researchers in travel and tourism are unfamiliar with models and theories that conceptualize children’s behavior.

What has mostly informed scholars to date is the assumption that tourists are free agents, and are seeking both escape from daily routines and also exposure to new cultures and environments. Clearly babies who are on family vacations are not free agents, so they are largely ignored in this paradigm of the studied tourist. I can concur; babies are rarely free anything!

While vacations are never free, you can pare them down. I have a minimalist approach, which means not buying or bringing a ton of stuff. You will figure out what works for you. Know yourself, know your child, and know your limits. Because traveling with a small child means reaching beyond those limits. But remember, you will be a good parent at the end!

SOUVENIRS

It’s okay to be want to be a good parent at the expense of your own comfort.

You are in charge, not your child. Think benevolent dictatorship, both in travel and in parenting.

Research into children’s travel is limited by babies’ abilities to respond to questionnaires. Go figure.

2

CHOOSING A DESTINATION

If you are nervous about traveling with your young child, then baby steps are the most appropriate way to start. After all, you are reading this book, not A Toddler’s Guide to Himalayan Trekking. Baby steps may mean a road trip to somewhere a few hours away, or it may mean a short flight or train ride. Remember that it’s preparation, not practice that makes the difference between a horrible and a happy family vacation. Unfortunately that prep comes at a cost. Pre-trip planning generally produces more stress than the actual travel itself, especially if you are traveling with children. ¹ It’s worse if you’re a mother. In fact, 74% of American women find family vacation planning stressful, compared to 67% of men. ²

As of May 2015, American households with children reported taking an average of 3.53 domestic trips in the previous year, almost two times the number of trips taken without children.³ In the United States, the most popular summer destination is Florida (by a wide margin at 26% of travelers), followed by California (15%), New York and Nevada (14%),