Why Family Trips Shape Kids More Than You Think

Hey, this is Wayne. And before we jump into today's podcast, I wanna let you know that we're brought to you by our friends over at Creating a Masterpiece.

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look at maybe homeschooling your kids or giving your kids more art offerings in their schooling next year. Again, that's creatingamasterpiece.com forward slash celebrate. We're so thankful they're friends and partners with us here and that they're bringing this

podcast to you today. So now let's turn to Dr. Cathy Cook. When kids feel valued, everything changes. their security identity, belonging, it changes, you know, their purpose, their competence. It's just huge.

So Dr. Kathy, there's something that kind of happens in the middle of a trip that parents rarely planned for and I'm guessing that you probably haven't experienced this but this happens almost every trip that I've taken with our kids and Sometimes it happens when I don't know if we might be on an airport And we might be flying together that there's a flight delayed and everyone's tired and all the snacks are gone and Dr.

Kathy the snacks are really important for trips And when they're gone, it's like the I don't know we're like somebody's not gonna make it to the end and to home or something. It kind of happens when our kids taste something

that they can't really name with the language and they don't really speak and decide all kind of this expectation happens. It might be kind of in the stillness

that descends on a long hike when our phones have no signal and this has happened to us and there's nothing to do but walk and talk

and notice the world. Something shifts in those moments and that something is really hard to name And it's even impossible to manufacture when we're at home.

It's something that a growing body of research is really working to put a name to and to put language to for what parents have maybe already felt intuitively when they're taking trips with their kids,

especially during the summer. And that's this idea that travel is not simply a reward for a year of hard work or even a backdrop for family photos

or even a break from ordinary life. It's actually when approached with some intention, it's a developmental experience that developed something in kids that structured environments,

like what we do kind of every day at home, rarely can replicate. Dr. Patricia Brito, she's an education psychologist. She kind of says it very plainly.

She says that new environments activate attention and memory and language and observation and executive functioning. And she says it does this in ways that are difficult for us to reproduce inside of a classroom.

She highlights that this is really important for kids and why field trips are so great in school. But those kids who travel during the summer months, they begin to know that the world is really a lot bigger and more nuanced and more even interconnected than their immediate surroundings. And the moments that they do this are rarely the moments that we would maybe highlight with different attractions. You know, it's natural to take kids to a theme park or a famous landmark or a resort pool.

It's not those things that she highlights as being the places where these benefits of executive functioning and memory and language are really being built. She says that's actually built in the in between moments. the ones where nobody's kind of like booked into something. She highlights the research points to how we're seeing increasing levels of overstimulation, anxiety, emotional disconnection in kids that are

raised in highly digital environments. And she notes that traveling, particularly things that are slower and more immersive in their traveling, that that interrupts the cycle of those over-stimulation things that technology can do. And it actually then pulls kids into places where they are building those languages and active attention things.

So the road trip is really powerful for kids in these moments. She highlights that it puts kids back in contact with human interaction and nature with spontaneity with the kind of grounded sensory experience that a screen, no no matter how vivid can not produce and provide.

And she notes that that is something powerful for those families that have a lot of screens, but even for families that have regular routines in the home, these travel experiences do something

for kids that are dynamic. And you've taught kind of for a long time that kids really feel most loved or maybe even like secure

when we just spend time with them. You have this phrase that you like to say that I really love, and it's this idea of listening longer. And doing that is really powerful.

But I think listening longer when we take trips, at least I've observed it with my kids. When we take a, we call them stand ventures. You know, we throw everyone into the van

after church on Sunday, and we just go on a road trip. There's no technology. Sometimes we listen to a book on audio, or we'll listen to adventures in Odyssey.

But the kids are just literally looking out the window and then we get to the place we're going and then there's nothing planned. We're just there.

It's kind of a random trip, but we love it. But it does something to kids.