When is the right time to start travelling with your child? Should you dive in during the first few months, or wait until they are a toddler?
Here, William Gray, editor of 101FamilyHolidays.co.uk & author of Travel With Kids, recommends starting early and below suggests his ten good reasons why it's never too early to start travelling with kids.
1. Babies are easy to transport in strollers, backpacks or papooses
2. Babies and toddlers can't dictate where you go or what you do (so make the most of it while it lasts)
<3.> In most countries locals will make a big fuss of your children which is a great morale boost for weary new parents
4. Babies often go free. The older children get, the more expensive they become, and travel is no exception
5. There are plenty of innovative travel products designed to make life easier for parents
6. Choose the right hotel or resort so you get some well-deserved pampering
7. Youngsters expand their social skills, can try interesting new flavours and learn to swim in warm water
8. Increasingly numbers of hotels and resorts offer daytime babycare and playgroup activities, giving you the opportunity for some well-earned R&R.
9. You will be able to create a lasting memory bank of great experiences for the entire family which will last through the generations - just look through your own family photo albums to see what I mean.
10. Even the youngest minds can be broadened through travel - my colleague, Catherine, has strong memories of picking olives with her grandfather and local farmers in Portugal - when she was just four years of age. It sparked her life-long passion for and career in travel.Travelling with a BabyGo on, admit it. You'd much rather not have one sitting near you on a flight. You board the plane, shuffle down the cramped aisle, coerce your hand luggage into the overhead locker, glance down and there it is - all cute and innocent on its mother's lap. You can't help but ask yourself how you'll cope with the potential ear-bashing for the duration of the 15-hour, non-stop flight.
It's hardly surprising that more parents shun holidays when their children are aged between one and four than at any other time. Not only do practicalities, like flying, become fraught with stress and logistical nightmares (for new parents, the journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step - it usually starts with trying to change a nappy in a cramped toilet before take-off), but you are constantly striving to reduce the impact of your little darlings on other, often unsympathetic, travellers. That, combined with the general fatigue that stalks new parents, does little to set the wheels of family travel in motion.
We've all been there: sleep deprived, irritable, barely capable of summoning the energy (or baby paraphernalia) for a trip to the shops, let alone a holiday. My wife and I have travelled with our twins from the first few months of their lives - and we can't recommend it highly enough. The rewards more than compensate for those 'no, I thought you had packed the nappies' moments.Travelling with a ToddlerWith toddlerdom come new challenges. In fact, many parents claim this to be the most demanding time to travel with children. If only toddlers had an on-off switch or some way of containing all that energy and frustration pent up in a body that won't always do what it's meant to - or, worse still, is prevented from doing so by ever-watchful parents.
With this age group, you have to be especially careful over your choice of accommodation. Toddlers have an alarming tendency to wander off when something interesting catches their eye. Health and safety is not exactly foremost in the minds of these mini-explorers and you need to be particularly wary of unfenced swimming pools and balconies with squeeze-through railings.
Toddlers also tend to shove a lot of unsavoury stuff into their mouths. Usually this is nothing more harmless than a bit of sand, although my son used to be fond of those large, irresistibly crunchy beetles that frequent Mediterranean climes.
If there's one thing that makes travel with toddlers easier it's their increasing ability to talk - even if it's just to tell you they are about to be sick or that they object to another child walking off with their bucket and spade.
by
William Gray
Editor of 101 Family Holidays
author of Travel With Kids
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