When Are Children Old Enough to Travel Abroad?

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.09.07 | 4:35 PM ET

I’m a new father, and as I suspected, my wanderlust didn’t subside with the birth of my daughter. So I pored over Beth J. Harpaz’s recent AP story exploring whether children can be too young to travel abroad—Harpaz put the question to a number of well-traveled women and mothers, including Pauline Frommer and Maureen Wheeler. The general consensus: Children under 3 or 4 don’t get much out of it, although at some deep level it might instill in them a sense of adventure and curiosity. Wheeler, who co-founded Lonely Planet, told Harpaz, “I started traveling with my children when they were babies and that’s just stupid. It was exhausting.” But she added, “I honestly think that it gave them an attitude for life, because they learned to be very flexible.”

From the parents’ standpoint, traveling with children can have at least one surprising benefit.

Elisa Bernick, author of “The Family Sabbatical Handbook: The Budget Guide to Living Abroad with Your Family,” told Harpaz that moving to Mexico with her 2-year-old and 7-year-old made getting to know people easier: “One of the primary benefits was that they were the best little diplomats. Kids were our passports into that world.”

I suspect settling into a place, rather than hopping trains and catching lots of planes, helped make the experience so positive.

My one complaint about Harpaz’s story: She didn’t talk to any traveling dads. So I e-mailed travel writers/fathers Tony Perrottet and Larry Habegger to get their take on traveling with kids.

Perrottet, author of “Pagan Holiday” and a World Hum contributor, told me he thinks the AP story “reflects our strange need to find hard and fast rules on how to deal with kids. I don’t think there are any. Except that it really helps all involved to have a pool in your hotel at the end of the day.”

He added:

Parentood in general involves long stretches of agony punctuated by moments of euphoria, so I don’t know why traveling with kids should be any different! But I don’t think it’s ever too early to take kids traveling. We took Henry to the Great Barrier Reef when he was 9 months old and it was great…he was in St Lucia at 3 months, Spain at 12 months…you could say he “got nothing out of it,” but I think it affected his general outlook on life—he’s pretty adaptable, even for a New York kid. Of course, we didn’t take the trips for him—we took them for us, and wanted him along! Sam has traveled a bit less, but has still been to sand islands in tropical Australia, explored the BVIs, toured up and down the West etc., at the age of two.

In general, I guess European cities are less appealing places to take kids, because they hinge on museums and sitting still in restaurants, etc., and a lot of adults can’t quite manage the attention span involved—running wild in the natural corners of the Caribbean, etc. are more relaxing vacations, if that’s what you’re after—but I was just in Venice, and I saw kids having a ball on the ferries, exploring the map room of the Doge’s Palace and so on. It all depends on the kid, depends on the time, depends on the parents.

Habegger of Travelers’ Tales agrees that there isn’t a right or wrong answer.

He wrote:

Any age is fine for taking kids overseas. Ideally, though, they’d be at least 3 years old so they don’t have to be carried everywhere. But I’ve traveled with kids when they were 6 months old and a year and a half, and once you’re off your flight you can get into your rhythms pretty quickly. Dealing with diapers is a nuisance, but you get used to it. When they’re out of diapers they’re a lot easier and that gives you a lot more flexibility. Naturally your travels have to take into account your kids’ interests, but that’s true when you’re home, too. So your travels adapt depending on the kids’ ages. I’ve been all over Ireland, Switzerland, Paris, and parts of Australia with my two daughters at various ages and found the only difficulties were the long flight (on a bad routing) to Australia.

My girls are now 7 and almost 10. Things change as they get older and have different interests. Possibly the most important change is pretty soon my daughter may not want to go away because she won’t want to leave her friends. Now I can just say, we’re going, and we go. When she’s a teenager I expect it may not be so easy to do that.

In any case, traveling with my children has been great, and we’ve been abroad almost every year since my youngest was 6 months old.

That’s encouraging. I like the idea of simply changing the way my wife and I travel, at least in the early years. Instead of hitting several cities on an overseas trip and moving around often, we’ll spend a week or two in one place, renting an apartment, or even house-swapping, trying to balance exploring our surroundings with settling into a daily routine for the benefit of our daughter.

Photo by Silfverduk via Flickr, (Creative Commons).