|
|
|
"Helping families, children and adolescents
grow well."
"Are We Having Fun Yet?"
From "The Heart of Parenting" column
by Emory Luce Baldwin, LGMFT
Published in the Takoma Voice, August 2006
|
You haven't even arrived at your vacation destination yet, and you're already fantasizing
about leaving the kids at home with 14 pizzas and 84 videos. This is not a good sign.
|
Family vacations can be a time to renew ourselves and renew our family connections. Taking a break from day to day routines, going to see new sights, and enjoying new activities together are a terrific recipe for family fun.
But, as we all know, family vacations can also be a recipe for stress and unhappiness. Changing sleeping, eating, and activity routines can throw everyone off kilter. Being all together as a family for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is a lot more together time than most of us are used to! Big changes in routine, even when done in the pursuit of fun, can put a lot of pressure on grownups and children alike.
It's tough when we start out on a family vacation with such high expectations for fun and excitement. You have been looking forward to this vacation for months, but you've barely made it out the door and you're already tired. You've just spent hours and hours getting ready by making the reservations, doing the laundry and getting everyone packed, finding the maps, closing up the house, arranging for getting plants
watered and pets cared for, loading the cooler, getting on the road or to the airport, and...
"Mom, I'm hungry (bored, hot, cold, etc., etc.)!"
"She's sitting too close, Dad! Make her stop bothering me!"
"I don't want to go to the museum! I want to go to the water park!
Why do we have to do all these stupid things you want to do, and we never get to do the fun things I want to do?"
You haven't even arrived at your vacation destination yet, and you're already fantasizing about leaving the kids at home with 14 pizzas and 84 videos. This is not a good sign.
Let's face it: most family vacations are designed and managed solely by the parents. No matter how hard you try, the best vacation plans in the world can be quickly spoiled by kids acting like brats. Nevertheless, I still think that family vacations are a terrific opportunity for building family closeness and connections, if we want to approach family fun as a joint project.
To begin with, parents aren't solely responsible for whether or not their kids are having fun. Fun is the preferred byproduct, but not the goal, of the vacation experience. Parents who try to guarantee their kid's fun quickly become prey to blackmail-and they often sacrifice their own enjoyment for their children's pleasure. Every self-respecting, pampered kid will want to find out just how far their parent is willing to go to ensure their "fun." "Can I have another ice-cream cone? Another ride on the roller coaster? A trip to the water park instead of the museum? Can't we go to Disney World instead of visiting Grandma's?"
A family vacation that is approached as a joint project will ideally include the kids in the planning stages. This means simply giving the kids some limited choices within the parameters that the parents are willing to set. "Mom and I are planning to go to the beach for our vacation this summer-which do you think would be most fun, a beach with a board walk or a beach without a board walk?"
Another way to make a family vacation a joint project is to ask everyone in the family a very important question: "What is the one thing that you want to do the most while we are on our vacation?" It's a simple question, but the answers are very important.
If-while we are in West Virginia for a week-Mom really wants to go antiquing for a day, and Suzy really wants to learn to water ski, and all Mariah cares about is cooking hotdogs over an outdoor fire while telling ghost stories in the dark-then those can be planned on as the three most important activities of the vacation. Taking those three wishes into account at the beginning of the vacation allows everyone in the family to have a voice about what they want to do the most. It also gives everyone's wish an equal amount of respect in terms of setting the priorities for the vacation. That alone can make a big difference in how much each member of the family is going to enjoy themselves.
Giving every member of the family a part in the planning also gives everyone a stake in the success of the vacation-for each other, as well as for themselves. It also increases the probability that your family vacation will be the kind of fun experience that everyone will want to remember!
Emory Luce Baldwin, LGMFT, is both an experienced parent educator with the Parent
Encouragement Program (PEP) and a Family Therapist working with families with
children and adolescents in Takoma Park and Kensington.
For information about PEP classes and programs,
contact PEP at 301-929-8824 or visit www.ParentEncouragement.org.
To contact Emory, call 301-588-1451 or e-mail emory@emorylucebaldwin.com
|
