Family World Travel: A Growing Trend?

Forget the weeklong family vacation; it seems parents and their children are hitting the road for months at a time, across borders and thousands of miles, in a new wave of family travel that seeks to educate through global experiences.

This morning I came across a story on Yahoo Travel about a 10-year-old girl who blogs about her worldly experiences, having visited more than 30 countries in her first decade on this planet. Tatum Oxenreider and her two brothers live a migratory life with their parents, who work remotely (you can say that again) for a nonprofit organization while chronicling their journeys on their website, “The Art of Simple Travel.” Tsh, Tatum’s mother and an author of books on travel and simplicity, believes that the world is the best teacher possible.

Thinking about the Oxenreiders reminded me of another family: the Kirkbys. Stars of “Big Crazy Family Adventure” on the Travel Channel, this family of four — with two young sons, ages 7 and 4 — documented their travels across 13,000 miles from British Columbia to the Himalayas without taking a single airplane. While there’s an expected amount of groaning from the kids, who tire of some more tedious parts of travel — such as hikes intended to acclimate them to an increase in altitude — for the most part, the family remains upbeat and embraces every chance they can to introduce their young ones to a new cultural experience (including the crunchy scorpions both boys ate with gusto in China).

Out of curiosity I searched online for families traveling the world — and there are plenty. Meet the Nomadic Family, a clan of five from Israel who offer insight and tips from their journeys wandering the world for three years, as well as the decision they made to stop traveling and how that transition back to home life has been. Other families are doing it without tracking the trek via a blog or website. Last year the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler wrote an editorial piece on the Maurers, a family of four (children, ages 15 and 12) traveling from Southeast Asia to Nepal to Europe on $150 a day. Over 10 months, some of the challenges and lessons they faced were strange and difficult. For example, the father and daughter — adopted from Korea — could not walk alone together in Thailand, as they would be often misconstrued as a couple. The parents also faced harsh criticism from home for having their children out of school for a year, despite unconventional home schooling along the way.

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And then there’s our own story of a couple who hit the open road (and skies and rivers…) with their three young sons to explore South and Central America. In the interview, the DeSas discuss challenges like traveling through airports while keeping hands free to hold on to the kids, or not being able to find foods they crave in a new place on a tight budget. However, the lack of chocolate chip cookies is more than made up for with family travel experiences like making their own chocolate from scratch in Ecuador.

I don’t yet have a family of my own, so I can’t speak to whether I would bring children on such a long trip, but I know I certainly would’ve enjoyed it as a child myself. Would you embark on a trip around the world with your family? Tell us in the comments.

— written by Brittany Chrusciel