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Christine Rousseau learned the hard way that pharmacies in Paris do not always sell diapers. She had run out while on vacation, and her 2-year-old son desperately needed to be put down for a nap. So in the rain, wearing heels, the clock ticking toward a messy and imminent deadline, she hopped on an electric rental scooter that she did not know how to ride. Every place she tried seemed to have fancy face creams but no diapers. She didn’t know the French word to ask for them. This situation was not très chic—but then, family trips don’t tend to be.
Some would argue that the point of a vacation is to subtract, not add, stress. But like many parents of young kids, Rousseau is committed to traveling with her family—not only for her and her husband’s sake, but also for the sake of her children, now 7 and 3. She loves seeing them learn, and traveling provides abundant opportunity. In Paris, when the streets seemed empty of toddlers, she got to explain that many young kids there attend crèches, or state-subsidized day care. In London, her son inquired why the streets were so much cleaner than the streets back home in Brooklyn, and that prompted a lesson about civics and city funding. Breaking her kids out of their bubble, she told me, “helps them be more aware that their normal may not be everybody’s normal.”
Rousseau, like most parents of young children today, is a Millennial: part of a generation known for its love of travel and its tendency to spend a lot on it. This cohort came of age as flights were becoming more accessible and homeownership less so. In place of stability, many Millennials came to prize adventure; travel became not just a simple luxury but an alternative source of meaning and identity. One 2024 Vox Media poll found that 76 percent of the Zoomers and Millennials surveyed agreed that travel says “a lot about who they are”; 88 percent said it had spurred their personal growth. “For previous generations, travel was a status symbol,” Jennie Germann Molz, a College of the Holy Cross sociologist, told me. “For the Millennial generation it’s more about self-improvement or self-actualization.”
As more and more Millennials have started families, many of them are determined to pass down those globe-trotting values—to share the joy of journeying but also to shape their kids into adaptable, savvy people. Sometimes they’re spending money they don’t have; frequently, they’re sacrificing tranquility they may already be short on. In the era of intensive parenting, vacation has turned into something that many parents need a vacation from.
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For generations, parents have aspired to show their children more of the world—and, in the process, to bring their family closer, Susan Rugh, a Brigham Young University historian and the author of Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, told me. Of course, traveling as a unit has always been somewhat chaotic. When she was a kid, her parents took her and her six siblings on road trips—and back then, highway rest stops were rare. They had to carry all the food they were going to need for the whole excursion. But the inconvenience was kind of the point: Your family was a team, encountering obstacles on a shared adventure. “Even if there’s a lot of stress,” she told me, “it’s a memory of being together”—being stressed together, that is.
[Read: The new family vacation]
Today’s young parents, though, might be taking that tradition to a new level. One 2018 AAA poll found that 44 percent of American Millennials surveyed were planning a family trip—more than Gen Xers, who, on average, have older children and more resources. The pandemic slowed that jet-setting, but not for long. A 2022 Family Travel Association survey found that 85 percent of parents said they were very likely to travel with their children in the next 12 months—a reflection of people coming out of isolation and wanting to live life to the fullest, Heike Schänzel, a tourism professor at the Auckland University of Technology, told me. The rise of remote work, she said, has also led to more casual travel even when kids are on board. And the FTA poll found that 76 percent of respondents wanted to travel internationally with their children. Parents aren’t just piling their kids into the car and driving a few hours to Grandma’s house. They’re paying thousands of dollars to rock screaming babies on a nine-hour flight; transporting a 25-pound stroller across an ocean; trekking children to an exciting restaurant with unfamiliar food just to find that the children still want dinosaur chicken nuggets.
That trouble, for many parents, feels worth the reward. Even vacation is no longer spared from what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her 2003 book Unequal Childhoods, calls “concerted cultivation”: caregivers’ attempts to shape their child’s development and set them up for future success. Such efforts are at the core of intensive parenting, which rose in popularity among the American middle class in the mid-to-late 20th century; inequality was growing, manufacturing jobs were disappearing, and parents started worrying that their children might never reach financial stability—not without their careful and constant hand. Now a similar uncertainty drives many parents to take their kids abroad, Germann Molz, the Holy Cross sociologist, told me. For her book The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling, she interviewed people who homeschool their children on the go, the idea being that those children can learn more from travel than they would from a textbook. Theirs is a dramatic version of a common perspective: “Who knows what the labor market’s gonna look like?” Molz said, describing their thinking. “Who knows where we’ll be with the environment?” She told me these parents hope that, if the kids are well traveled, “they’ll be able to deal with change. They’ll be able to communicate with people from very different backgrounds from themselves. They’ll have this ability to move and travel with ease.”
The modern family vacation, then, is ever more ambitious and goal oriented—something Duncan Greenfield-Turk, the CEO of a boutique travel agency, told me he sees a lot of lately. Recently, a couple of his Millennial clients took their two kids, who were 9 and 11, to southern Africa for a trip focused on “humanitarian awareness”; the goal was for the children to understand how the lodges in which they were staying were part of the local economy. Another family took their kids to Okinawa, Japan, to get their children thinking about the impact of American influence and imperialism. For a lot of parents, he said, the “intention is very much trying to instill this sense of connection with the rest of the world.”
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Traveling really can be good for kids. Children benefit from lots of diverse stimuli: new sights, sounds, ways to play. Being introduced to different cultures and customs can foster empathy and emotional intelligence. When things go wrong—the flight gets delayed, the Airbnb code won’t work—children can learn flexibility, competence, and patience. And studies suggest that vacations tend to strengthen relationships among family members and contribute to a sense of family cohesion. If the kids are old enough, Daniel Weisberg, a child psychologist in the United Kingdom, told me, they also tend to make long-lasting memories on family trips. One sweet, mundane moment can serve for decades as a “psychological anchor of positivity”: a token of past happiness and connection that one can think back to in tougher times.
Family vacations can make lovely memories for adults too, even if those trips involve more dirty diapers than daiquiris by the beach. Rousseau told me that some of her most treasured travel moments involved activities that she never would have chosen had she not had kids—but that, in exploring a new environment through their eyes and seeing how thrilled they were, she ended up having the time of her life. She has also, with her kids in tow, had to improvise often—to practice letting go of control and focusing on what matters. On some trips, she has left the books and toys behind, instead telling her children stories about the people in the free airline magazine. When her son was little, she once put a potato-chip bag inside his shoe; for 30 minutes, the crinkling sound of the wrapper kept him joyfully occupied.
[Read: On failing the family vacation]
However creative parents get, though, few of these experiences abroad come cheaply. Intensive parenting is easier for ultra-wealthy caregivers to accomplish, but it might in some ways be especially enticing to less-affluent parents—the ones who worry about their children’s financial futures, who want so badly to give them an extra boost but who don’t have the funds or the flexible work schedules for travel. Lots of Americans, with or without kids, are going on vacations they absolutely cannot afford: In March, Bankrate, a consumer financial-services company, surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults and found that 29 percent of all respondents said they were planning to take on debt to travel this summer. Compared with other generations, Millennial participants were most interested in travel, most likely to say they couldn’t afford it, and most likely to say they were willing to take on debt for vacation—which no doubt becomes even more expensive the more children they bring along.
Giving kids the world doesn’t actually require showing them the world, though. Simply being exposed to another culture a week out of every year won’t transform a child into someone sensitive, conscientious, and accepting—nor will visiting foreign museums and restaurants make them a sophisticated cultural consumer. A parent might put everything into flying their 4-year-old to a new city only to find that the kid wants to stay at the hotel and watch their iPad. When I spoke with Greenfield-Turk, he told me that one of his clients was on a trip to France and Portugal. The whole point had been to introduce the kids to different foods and traditions—but they were struggling with the richness of the foods and the amount of activity. They kept getting sick. Children are children, wherever you take them.
There’s nothing wrong with vacations that are hard but rewarding—except that parenthood tends to be hard but rewarding 24/7. At some point, caregivers need actual relaxation. Even Rousseau, when I asked her if she craves a child-free, drink-on-the-beach-type trip, told me without hesitation: “Every single day, yes.” For leisure travel to be described so often as a source of purpose, a path to cultural awareness, a mind-opening exercise—that’s both perfectly legitimate and a testament to the reach of productivity culture. Nothing, it seems, is safe from the pressure to self-optimize, from the creep of guilt for being an imperfect parent and human being.
[Read: The logic of the ‘9 to 5’ is creeping into the rest of the day]
What kids tend to love most about traveling, anyway, can be found without going far at all. Parents can just keep an eye out for what Weisberg called “micro-adventures”: taking the bus to a free museum, driving two hours to a relative’s home, playing in the woods. Kids need novelty, yes—but when you’re new to existence, everything is new to you. Once, Rousseau’s family had a pileup of snafus trying to get from Amsterdam to Paris; they spent a whole day in the airport just to learn that their flight had been canceled. But as Rousseau and her husband were despairing, they realized that their toddler was having the time of his life: going up and down the escalator, watching the planes take off, marveling at how cool it is that people get to fly in the sky. You have it right, she felt like telling him. I am grumpy. I have forgotten the beauty of the world.
Rousseau had told me this story to illustrate the importance of family travel—how it takes everyone out of their separate routines and petty frustrations and plops them in the present moment together. She also ended up making the opposite point, though: that the long-awaited destination turned out not to be needed at all. Her kid was filled with wonder right where he happened to be.
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