Most of my family is in California. One sister lives in England, so she had to travel a lot with her young family. She once said, “A holiday with kids is not a holiday. It's just more work in a different place.” 😁
truth!! And often its actually harder to do the same things in a different place because it's not home, where at least you have a semblance of familiarity and control.
I am currently on vacation with my two children and my parents and am really feeling this: “I feel like I have to hold it all together for everyone else, and that can be hard and sometimes impossible.”
For me, the struggle is not worth the vacation, but everyone else in my family loves this vacation (possibly because I’m running myself ragged handling everything) and I don’t want to ruin it for them. (This is our fifth time taking the same vacation). Now that my children are elementary age, I’m trying to figure out how to transition our vacations to where the struggle and the enjoyment are more evenly shared.
Yep. It's real. We feel like we need to low-key suffer so that the rest of the family enjoys their vacation, and I'm not sure I'm into that anymore. I also agree that sometimes it's just not worth it, or only marginally worth it!
I definitely relate. My partner often says while we are traveling, “There’s no vacation with kids, just a change of scenery.”
More seriously though, we’ve shifted to slow travel and that helps. We did a month in Hawaii two years ago and three weeks on the east coast last year. We manage it by doing home exchanges. The Hawaiian family contacted us!
With a family of five someone seems to get sick any time we travel, so staying there longer helps. It does mean we are both trying to get some work in while traveling, which has its own challenges, but overall it’s worth it.
My partner actually gets a six week sabbatical in 2025 so we are early dreaming about where to go. :)
Wow how exciting 6 weeks! and yes to the change of scenery haha. I think long stretches of time is maybe the way to go for us too, although frankly I find that hard also but not as hard as a short few days somewhere and rushing around trying to see all the things.
I just finished Low Demand Parenting by Amanda Diekman. It wasn’t necessarily new information, but it was affirming. We’ve been low demand parenting for ages without a name for it - letting go of everything that didn’t absolutely matter and holding to a few non negotiable demands.
As for struggle…I can struggle if I know the outcome will be net positive. For example, we go to the same beach vacation place every year. Why? Because I know it will be a good experience, and there are no unknowns (there was the first time, but now I reap the benefits of having tried something new once). With five kids, half of which are neurodivergent, and I’m starting to think that I may be as well, I need that known “this will be good” to make the struggle worth it. New places don’t offer that. Hope that makes sense?
We also go to the same lake house every year and it works really well for my kids. We are very lucky to have family who also join us on this trip and who love to spend time with the kids so us parents can have a break.
(Also, about low demand parenting - I kept reading it thinking, “this sounds an awful lot like unschooling” so I dug through the book looking for the word and finally found it towards the end! They do unschooling, because naturally school brings with it the most demands of all.)
Oh and yes, they unschool! I loved Amanda’s book too, even though I’m not sure that what we do is low demand.. I think in principle lowering demands is a positive thing, and we do a lot of it, but I feel like there are times when lowering demands spills into licence, and that’s perhaps why I wouldn’t call us that! Just my experience though, of course.
I interpret lowering demands as letting go of what doesn’t really matter so you have energy to do the things that matter more. For example, instead of everyone in our family bringing dishes to the kitchen throughout the day, one person collects everything at the end of the day and one person loads the dishwasher so the maximum amount of dishes fits. So it lowers my demands to nag kids to remember to collect their dishes, and the end result is the same - dishes get done. Then I can spend that energy on a higher priority item, like making sure things like personal hygiene (teeth, showers etc) are taken care of.
Yeah I don’t have an issue with lowering demands - just with some of the ways it is being interpreted, (and then packaged and sold.) I worry about some of the ways parents might put it into practice, that start to look a lot like martyr motherhood and the sort of darker side of radical unschooling. There’s a whole convo to be had around this!!
Ooooo, I get what you’re saying. That dark side of radical unschooling is definitely dark, and I’ve had to find a balance because it can definitely lead to martyr motherhood! 💯 and it’s not good.
We just got back from a few days away (to somewhere colder and snowier than home) and I relate to this so much. The struggle to get there, the two days of adjustment and despair before one kid could have any fun and the toll that can take on the rest of us. Most of the time when we go away it feels just slightly more worth it to go than to stay home. I really appreciate your perspective on struggle and ease.
Yes the margin is so slim!! It was worth it, but only just 😂 I’m so glad it’s not just us, thank you for sharing this Anna. Sometimes it really does feel like we might be doing something wrong, and then I remind myself we probably aren’t but people just don’t talk about it.
Most of my family is in California. One sister lives in England, so she had to travel a lot with her young family. She once said, “A holiday with kids is not a holiday. It's just more work in a different place.” 😁
truth!! And often its actually harder to do the same things in a different place because it's not home, where at least you have a semblance of familiarity and control.
I am currently on vacation with my two children and my parents and am really feeling this: “I feel like I have to hold it all together for everyone else, and that can be hard and sometimes impossible.”
For me, the struggle is not worth the vacation, but everyone else in my family loves this vacation (possibly because I’m running myself ragged handling everything) and I don’t want to ruin it for them. (This is our fifth time taking the same vacation). Now that my children are elementary age, I’m trying to figure out how to transition our vacations to where the struggle and the enjoyment are more evenly shared.
Yep. It's real. We feel like we need to low-key suffer so that the rest of the family enjoys their vacation, and I'm not sure I'm into that anymore. I also agree that sometimes it's just not worth it, or only marginally worth it!
I definitely relate. My partner often says while we are traveling, “There’s no vacation with kids, just a change of scenery.”
More seriously though, we’ve shifted to slow travel and that helps. We did a month in Hawaii two years ago and three weeks on the east coast last year. We manage it by doing home exchanges. The Hawaiian family contacted us!
With a family of five someone seems to get sick any time we travel, so staying there longer helps. It does mean we are both trying to get some work in while traveling, which has its own challenges, but overall it’s worth it.
My partner actually gets a six week sabbatical in 2025 so we are early dreaming about where to go. :)
Great links on neurodivergence too!
Wow how exciting 6 weeks! and yes to the change of scenery haha. I think long stretches of time is maybe the way to go for us too, although frankly I find that hard also but not as hard as a short few days somewhere and rushing around trying to see all the things.
I just finished Low Demand Parenting by Amanda Diekman. It wasn’t necessarily new information, but it was affirming. We’ve been low demand parenting for ages without a name for it - letting go of everything that didn’t absolutely matter and holding to a few non negotiable demands.
As for struggle…I can struggle if I know the outcome will be net positive. For example, we go to the same beach vacation place every year. Why? Because I know it will be a good experience, and there are no unknowns (there was the first time, but now I reap the benefits of having tried something new once). With five kids, half of which are neurodivergent, and I’m starting to think that I may be as well, I need that known “this will be good” to make the struggle worth it. New places don’t offer that. Hope that makes sense?
We also go to the same lake house every year and it works really well for my kids. We are very lucky to have family who also join us on this trip and who love to spend time with the kids so us parents can have a break.
Yes totally! There’s something to be said about going with what we know works. We obv haven’t learned that lesson yet!!
(Also, about low demand parenting - I kept reading it thinking, “this sounds an awful lot like unschooling” so I dug through the book looking for the word and finally found it towards the end! They do unschooling, because naturally school brings with it the most demands of all.)
Oh and yes, they unschool! I loved Amanda’s book too, even though I’m not sure that what we do is low demand.. I think in principle lowering demands is a positive thing, and we do a lot of it, but I feel like there are times when lowering demands spills into licence, and that’s perhaps why I wouldn’t call us that! Just my experience though, of course.
I interpret lowering demands as letting go of what doesn’t really matter so you have energy to do the things that matter more. For example, instead of everyone in our family bringing dishes to the kitchen throughout the day, one person collects everything at the end of the day and one person loads the dishwasher so the maximum amount of dishes fits. So it lowers my demands to nag kids to remember to collect their dishes, and the end result is the same - dishes get done. Then I can spend that energy on a higher priority item, like making sure things like personal hygiene (teeth, showers etc) are taken care of.
Yeah I don’t have an issue with lowering demands - just with some of the ways it is being interpreted, (and then packaged and sold.) I worry about some of the ways parents might put it into practice, that start to look a lot like martyr motherhood and the sort of darker side of radical unschooling. There’s a whole convo to be had around this!!
Ooooo, I get what you’re saying. That dark side of radical unschooling is definitely dark, and I’ve had to find a balance because it can definitely lead to martyr motherhood! 💯 and it’s not good.
We just got back from a few days away (to somewhere colder and snowier than home) and I relate to this so much. The struggle to get there, the two days of adjustment and despair before one kid could have any fun and the toll that can take on the rest of us. Most of the time when we go away it feels just slightly more worth it to go than to stay home. I really appreciate your perspective on struggle and ease.
Yes the margin is so slim!! It was worth it, but only just 😂 I’m so glad it’s not just us, thank you for sharing this Anna. Sometimes it really does feel like we might be doing something wrong, and then I remind myself we probably aren’t but people just don’t talk about it.
Well there are at least two of us 😆 - I shared your newsletter with my husband as proof that we are not the only ones who have these struggles!
ha! i should prob share this comment section with my husband too, great idea!