Parenting
Perspectives on Parenting©
by Nancy Lambert Davenport
Nancy Davenport's Column:
For Richardson News 03-19-00
Copyright Nancy Lambert Davenport 2000
"Traveling with kids a wild trip"
I ran into a friend at the grocery store yesterday. She was glassy-eyed still
from having accompanied a batch of college freshmen to South Padre for spring
break. She intimated that when she signed up for parenting, if she had known
that South Padre and OU weekend were part of the job description, she would
have passed.
Maybe she has repressed her vacations of years past from her memory.
We have just returned from spending a week with friends whose children are ages
six and nine. In this case, I was the one who had forgotten what it is like
traveling with young children. It's not the long, back-breaking days sitting in
the car or the stress of checking in and out of hotels or even living out of a
suitcase that wipes parents out. No. That which wears the hardest is the
children bickering and whining.
I watched as the week wore on. The children's parents started off with all the
right techniques-positive statements, encouraging words, compliments for good
behavior. They had budgeted money for treats and souvenirs knowing that is part
of a vacation. I was impressed. It wasn't turning out to be like any vacation
we ever had when our children were young. Our kids always spent most of their
time "separated" (cannot sit close enough to touch anyone except a
parent) or "on silence" (can say nothing to anyone for any reason for
a designated period of time). Such happy memories.
It was the same when I was a child. We had numerous cross country car trips
with no air-conditioning, mind you. One of the three of us children always had
to sit in the front seat between my parents. The two in back had an unseen line
drawn down the middle of the seat which was never crossed. My mother reserved
detective stories as her reading fare for cross-country travel. When we
children became restless she would resort to reading her detective story to us,
yelling out the words on the pages over the noise of the car's open windows.
After reading some of those same books later, I realized how much juicy stuff
she trimmed from the pages as she read.
Yet not too far into last week's vacation, things changed. The children became
more proficient at whining. The level of bickering picked up and finally became
an art form. I noticed they had a style of bickering reserved for their father
alone and a completely different one for their mother's presence. They tried
nimbly to work their parents around into bickering with each other but never
succeeded. After a few days I noticed circles on the parents eyes. This family
was normal after all.
I doubt that many of us though would trade the memories of our travels with our
kids for anything. Our trip last week was a train trip to southern Florida. The
growing confidence of the six year old barreling her way through the noisy
doors from car to car on the train was worth putting up with the whines of
boredom in the van portion of the trip. The awestruck wonder both kids showed
while riding an airboat and seeing an alligator or an iguana in his native
habitat in the Everglades was well worth tolerating a few word and body
scuffles.
No one said it would be easy traveling with children. My friend at the grocery
store is at the end of her era of children-oriented vacations. She is now at
the "maintaining" and "praying" stage of vacations. That
is, maintaining some semblance of control and praying constantly because the
kids are always somewhere else with someone else. When all is said and done and
given a choice, I guess I'd take the bickering stage back anytime.
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