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Have kids, will travel: 8 tips for family trips

Kids should learn how to travel, and parents should learn how to support kids to make travel fun and adventurous. I polled a number of friends and family who have traveled with their kids, asking them for their favorite travel tips. Here are eight favorites relating specifically to airplane and road trips, but I am sure these same lessons apply to most every form of transportation.

2. Travel industry professionals are your friend

Andy Nelson / The Christian Science Monitor, File
Unfazed by the beginning of an overnight train trip, 10-week-old Kiran waits as he waits for his mother and brother to finish the ticketing process at the Amtrak counter at Union Station in Washington, DC.

"Be friendly to flight attendants, on my flight from NYC to LA there was no changing table in any of the bathrooms!!! Luckily one of the flight attendants let me use his seat to change Oliver and even offered to hold him while I went to the restroom or if I just needed a break." – Gina, mother of Oliver, 8 months

Flight attendants, shuttle bus operators, hotel concierges, airline desk attendants, the list goes on…love kids. It’s the parents that annoy them. Think about it. When you see a kid who is misbehaving on a flight and you notice that the parent could care less, who makes you more frustrated? Conversely, if you see a parent struggling to keep it together, aren’t you more likely to help?

Treat travel professionals nicely, thank them often, offer them the pristine magazine of which you read only three pages since your kid refused to nap, stay out of their way when they need to get work done, and do what you can to help them like you. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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