The joy of not getting what you want

Travel with family is rewarding because it's hard

Exploring caves in southern Utah

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On a recent road trip, my family and I stopped in St. George, Utah, for lunch. Just off a freeway exit in town there’s a Del Taco and an In-N-Out next to each other. We stop at this spot often during road trips because it’s fast and cheap, and on this particular day I suggested we go to In-N-Out. But my wife and three young kids — ages 6, 3 and 2 — had other ideas and outvoted me. We ended up at Del Taco. Sigh.

It’s a weird moment when your little kids start getting a vote, and can start taking things away from you. This incident was low stakes of course, but where exactly did my toddlers get the idea that they can have their own opinions? I guess I have a lifetime of this to look forward to.

Recently, I wrote about travel with family for the Institute for Family Studies. My thesis was that if possible, you should travel with your kids. We live in an individualistic world, and travel is one of the few opportunities we have to forge a real group identity. The piece was something of a companion to my last Nuclear Meltdown post in which I argued in favor of the “corporate family.” Corporate families traditionally engaged in a shared venture — a shop, a farm, etc. — but they’re uncommon today. In 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families, but by 2010 that number had fallen to just 10 percent. Opportunities for families to genuinely work together on something lasting more than an evening are rare.

Given this trend, and the fact that we can’t all run off and start multigenerational family farms, a pilgrimage-type journey strikes me as a way to at least get a little taste of what it’s like to work together toward a common goal as a family. As I argued in my IFS piece, travel creates a rapid-fire series of opportunities for kids to contribute to the family’s success in ways that are not made up or contrived — which is often the case with chores at home. Or at least, that has been my experience with travel.

But of course the caveat is that this kind of travel is not always easy. I began this post with that little story about In-N-Out because it sort of sums up what travel with kids is like. You want one thing, but end up doing something entirely different because the kids need a break, or they’re hungry, or they just have different interests. For instance, I’ve written in the past about going to Spain last fall and how we spent a significant amount of our trip at playgrounds. That was not necessarily on the top of my to-do list for an overseas trip.

This kind of thing happens constantly while traveling. A few years ago, I took my daughter to Portugal. We did nearly nothing that I would normally do on a trip. No art museums, no architectural walking tours, and no late night street food crawls. The highlights of our trip were a touristic boat ride, visiting a two-room puppet museum, and my daughter being grossed out that I ordered octopus at a restaurant.

Another case in point: Earlier this summer, our family went on a 3,000-mile road trip around much of the West. During this multi-week trip, all five of us mostly slept in the same hotel room. That is not my preferred way to sleep (or, not sleep, as was often the case).

If someone had described any of these trips to me before I had kids, I would have said they sound terrible. And this speaks to a larger theme in parenting discourse; there’s a debate right now about whether or not having kids is a bum deal. Many look at all the sacrifices that go into having kids and wonder what the point is. I personally felt this way for a long time, which is part of why I (regrettably) put off having kids until my mid 30s.

I think most parents do eventually discover that the sacrifices involved in having kids are worth it. That explains why — according to Pew survey data — most people say parenting is harder than they expected, but also that it is rewarding either all or most of the time.

What may be less obvious, though, is that traveling as a family is a similar experience, but on steroids. Going on journeys with my kids is both harder than I expected, and also rewarding much of the time. Part of that is because we’re working together as a family, per my IFS argument.

But also, part of the reason traveling with kids is amazing is because it requires constant little sacrifices, which leaven the experience in unexpected ways. They’re not major or high stakes sacrifices that disrupt life, but they are simple exercises in putting someone else first. And it turns out there is joy in not getting what you want¹.

In practice, this has meant that going to the Portuguese puppet museum, or the Spanish playgrounds, or running around the grounds of a roadside motel in Yakima, Washington, have been the best parts of my recent trips. When it comes to travel, I have been lucky beyond my wildest dreams to go on many trips over the years², and I have been as surprised as anyone to discover that the trips with kids have been the very best of all. And not only that, but the most difficult trips, the ones where we pushed ourselves and our kids the hardest, have been the most rewarding. I barely remember sitting on a beach earlier this summer, but I’ll never forget the anecdote I mentioned in my IFS piece about my daughter carrying my son’s backpack when he was too tired to go on.

Both here and in my IFS piece, I’ve mostly been talking about travel with kids. But I think this idea scales up to a bigger family group as well. Over the last year, every single trip my nuclear family has taken has included extend family as well. The obvious benefit of traveling with this larger group, aside from more potential fun, is that a greater number of people get to participate in the temporary corporate family.

But also, a bigger group means each individual gives up more.

Just this last weekend, for example, members of the extended Dalrymple family rented an Airbnb in Kanab, Utah, and spent the long weekend exploring a remote corner of the Southwest. The more family members that joined this trip, the more I had to scale back my initial vision for the weekend, which had included many hours of driving each day, an extra night on the road, every day in a new hotel, etc. I imagine that was true for everyone; the bigger the group, the more we compromised. And yet, somehow, it was better being together than getting exactly what any one person wanted. Everybody sacrificed a little bit and the experience was better, not worse.

Of course travel in any form is a tremendous privilege. That’s doubly true for taking kids on trips, which increases costs in many unexpected ways³. And of course not every trip needs to be a grueling pilgrimage to some remote location. Vacations are fun too! Kids are as happy in a hotel down the street as they are on the other side of the world!

But if travel is an option, I’ve found that doing it with family is an eye-opening experience. To go on a journey with loved ones isn’t wonderful in spite of the difficulty, it’s good because of it.

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1. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; that idea is central in many world religions and philosophical schools of thought, but it’s still surprising for someone immersed in a world that values self above all else.

2. I’ve managed to travel in two ways. First, I’ve found other people to subsidize trips. BYU paid me to spend two months making a documentary in England. BuzzFeed sent me to France. Etc. But the real way I’ve managed to afford travel is that two different family members have worked for airlines. This has meant years of free or almost-free flights. That’s not an opportunity that is available to everyone, though my wife’s first airline job was doing phone reservations from home, which requires no education or training and comes with full flight benefits. It’s sort of the perfect job for people who want to travel cheaply. But I also want to stress that you don’t need to fly across the world to enjoy the benefits of travel with family. Some of my most rewarding trips have been weekend road trips within a stone’s throw of our house.

3. For example, though we did our Spain trip very cheaply, we still had to buy things like booster seats for our kids so they could ride in cars. After many years of budget traveling as a couple, there was some sticker shock from all the kid-related extra expenses.