Family vacations are fun, but they’re more than just breaks from the daily stressors of life. Each vacation you take with your kids is an opportunity to develop their sense of responsibility.
For example, teaching kids to pack their own luggage helps them develop a sense of responsibility for their belongings. It also trains them to prioritize their needs when they leave the house. Whether they’re packing a suitcase, a backpack, or a lunch bag, they need to know how to prioritize what they bring.
You can tell your children over and over why they can’t take ten suitcases on vacation, but they’ll never understand until they have to pack and carry their own luggage. Once your child understands that packing five suitcases means carrying five suitcases, they’ll see the need to be selective.
Real-life experience teaches quickly
Kids learn best through direct experience rather than being told intellectual concepts. Because of this, you might have to let your child pack five suitcases and attempt to carry them all to the car at once before they understand.
If this applies to your family, let your kid pack as many bags as they want and then simulate how they’ll need to carry them through the airport. Tell your child if they can carry all of their bags at one time to the car, they can take them on vacation. Let them know they can’t take more than one trip because they only get one trip in the airport.
Naturally, your child won’t be able to carry a bunch of bags. However, they need to experience the impossibility for themselves.
Prioritizing is a lifelong skill
Teaching kids to prioritize is a skill that will last them a lifetime. It’s best to start teaching them about priorities when they’re young. There’s no better way to instill this skill than when packing for a vacation.
Learning to prioritize has several important benefits:
- Kids will learn how now prioritizing impacts others. If they pack too much, other people will have to carry their luggage. If others don’t want to help, their bags will be left behind, and the other person will be upset.
- Kids will learn to make do with what they have. While kids think they can’t sleep on any pillow other than their own, they’ll learn to adjust to making do with what they have and what they are provided.
- Kids will learn how to plan ahead. If they can’t fit their favorite blanket in their suitcase for a trip to grandma’s house, it’s an opportunity to think creatively. Can they mail the blanket? Can they ask grandma to keep a second blanket at her house?
Traveling can help kids develop manners
Manners are required to function in society. There’s no better way to teach your kids manners than to put them in an unfamiliar situation where being polite is not just the norm, but a requirement to get by.
People naturally tend to be polite in unfamiliar situations and when interacting with strangers. We get too comfortable with our own lives and somehow, manners sometimes fall to the wayside.
Traveling is an opportunity to teach your kids how to make requests from adults
Being on vacation is a great opportunity to teach your kids how to respect people they’ve just met by saying please, thank-you, and asking polite questions. For example, say you visit Disney World and your child has never been to an amusement park before. There are so many opportunities to teach them how to interact with people when they want something from that person.
For instance, they might want to buy a lemonade, a piece of candy, or play a carnival game. Each situation requires approaching an adult and making a request. That request is followed by an exchange of tickets, tokens, or money.
In addition to learning respect for other people, they’ll also learn that nothing will be freely given to them, and everything requires an exchange. These are important aspects of responsibility to learn. They might not learn these values in school if there’s nobody around to model these simple interactions. Even when they go to pick up their hot lunch, there’s no guarantee the adults serving lunch will engage the kids they serve.
Every situation is an opportunity to teach kids to be responsible
Whether you’re getting a family pet, going on vacation, or hosting a party at home, every situation is an opportunity to teach your kids to be responsible.
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