They Said Travel With Kids Would Never Be Relaxing. They Lied.

For one mom, becoming a parent turned traveling into a much better—and surprisingly, more relaxing—endeavor than it was before.

Fact checked by Karen Cilli

Those who know me know I’m a traveler. But I started getting the warnings as soon as I got pregnant: “Oh boy, good luck traveling now.” “Well, you had a good globetrotting run!” “Travel with kids is a trip, not a vacation.”

I heard it from the actual humans in my life as well as from popular culture and plenty of parenting memes: travel with kids would be possible, but it would be an incredibly difficult path at best and a total disaster at worst. In no way would it be relaxing.

Eight years and two kids later, as my 7-year-old and I lounge poolside, watching waves crash against the cliffs of Baja Sur and enjoying our daily milk-and-margaritas happy hour (yes, we invented this) at the tranquil Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal after a day rambling through the beautiful coastal desert, I find myself thinking about all those warnings and laughing. They were wrong. Here I am, traveling solo internationally with a smallish child, and it's the most relaxed I've been in years.

As it turns out, my kids have turned traveling into a much better—and, shockingly, often easier—endeavor than it was before I had them.

I didn’t grow up traveling, but as soon as I was a legal adult (albeit still a teen) with three jobs and some savings, I dove straight in (ie. bought a plane ticket to Bombay) and was hooked. For my first decade of travels, however, moderation was not my strong suit. I didn’t have much money, but what I did have was seemingly boundless energy, no real need for sleep—ah, youth—and as much free time as I could afford to take between jobs or grad school semesters. I hopped a train from Budapest to Belgrade at a moment's notice; I hitchhiked in northern Scotland and walked the 15 miles between towns like it was 15 city blocks. I squatted to pee through a literal hole in the floor of a racing train en route down the western coast of India. I woke up early and went to bed late, if at all.

In hindsight, I realize that travel, for my young-adult self, was both a healing and a trauma response: My dad had just died in his 40s, having never left the United States. I was determined to see the world for him, but also for me—because there was a subconscious part of me that assumed I, too, would only have a couple decades left.

I visited four continents and learned how to impress people in a dozen languages. I ate termites and alligator and haggis and maggots. I was usually an anxious mess. But I powered through it—in fact, younger me based much of my identity on Powering Through It, "it" being work or or sickness or miserable weather or traffic. (I am, after all, a native New Yorker and an eldest daughter: I am tough! And I'm walkin' here!) But with travel, as with most of those things, powering through can only get you so far before you burn out—plus, powering through is antithetical to a concept that many happily associate with travel: vacation.

When my oldest son, Silas, was small and I was a single parent, those first years of "vacation" with a kid definitely took their own detours onto that difficult path to building memories. I’ll never forget running on adrenaline through Marrakech and scavenging unprecedented amounts of medical French from the depths of my brain in order to purchase the antibiotics a local doctor kept in his car (?!) when Silas came down with bronchitis and sinusitis shortly after we landed in Morocco. But he got well quickly—fast enough for us to have many days left to enjoy together, rambling through souks and gorging on olives. And the stress of those first few days only made the rest of the trip feel luxurious by comparison.

Because the thing is, traveling with my kid did something remarkable: It released me from the pressure, however self-created, to do and see "it all." No way was I waking up early anymore to get a good spot in line at the Louvre to see the underwhelming La Joconde before brunch, bookstore, marché aux puces, and then back to the hotel to get dressed for the cheapest happy hour; instead, I was sleeping in as late as my baby would possibly allow, wandering vaguely towards a croissant, sitting in a park for 1-4 hours counting squirrels, and calling it a (very successful) day.

There were no more all-nighters, no more sleeping in train stations to save time or money, no more 10-hour drives there and back in one day because I had to see the Taj Majal. Instead, there was nap time. There were strolls. There was ice cream. Instead of scrimping and staying in loud, roach-ridden hostels so I could afford to go clubbing every night, I started saving my money to stay in nice places, where Silas and I could both sleep well. Maybe with a pool.

I got married when Silas was four, and his younger brother Sunny was born when he was six. We spent much of my maternity leave traveling as a family, and having two kids (one of them just weeks old) only deepened those slow-travel tendencies. There was no speeding around trying to catch all the sights. There were no jam-packed days; in fact, there were days with nothing scheduled at all. Yes, there were stressors—searching for formula in Central America during a shortage was no easy feat—but there was also so much peace. There were early nights in bed, listening to the monkeys shuffle above our thatched roof in the Belizean jungle. There were hikes through ancient, empty Mayan temples. There was the reliable nature of nap time—of either returning to our hut midday or knowing that we could just keep walking and Sunny would conk out on my chest in his carrier.

Perhaps the greatest gift of my maternity leave travel was just how much everyone at the family-run jungle lodge where we stayed loved baby Sunny. Mothers and grandmothers alike vied to dote on him, pass him around, sing to him, make him giggle, and in doing so give me and my partner free hands to eat our meals. Coming from the U.S. and its abysmal support for postpartum parents and even rampant cultural disdain for kids, period, traveling internationally with a newborn was not only relaxing; it felt easier than staying home.

"Traveling with my kid did something remarkable: It released me from the pressure, however self-created, to do and see "it all.""

And that has held up for bigger-kid travel, too: This most recent trip saw Silas and I not only enjoying those daily milk-and-margaritas hours, but also spending time together in ways we never would at home, what with home's ever-present scramble of pickup-dropoff-work-school-homework-sports-dishes-laundry-what-have-you. In Baja Sur, we moved slowly and mindfully, counting cacti as we drove through the desert between Pedregal and Todos Santos. We watched a local weaver work his loom and peered around the famously haunted Hotel California looking for ghosts. We ate an early, leisurely dinner nestled into the cliffs, watching the sunset and getting just the right amount of sea spray. I got the massage of a lifetime while Silas practiced his Spanish (and his piñata-whacking) at the Tortuguitas Kids Club—and later, I laughed telling him about how my pre-kid self swore I'd never, ever, be a kids-club parent traveler. I was wrong, and I'm glad.

The thing is, you don't have to be one kind of traveler. I was no better or worse back when I never took the easy route, when I saved every penny, when I never missed a "must-see" and spun myself into a hungover, jet-lagged tizzy. And hey, maybe I'll be some version of that traveler again some day. But these days, I feel for that younger self. She didn't know when to stop. She missed her dad. She combatted loneliness the best way she knew how: go, go, go. It wasn't a mistake, but it couldn't be forever either.

Becoming a parent did a number on my personhood in general, and how I travel is no exception. We all have vastly different experiences but for me, parenthood gave me more clarity and less anxiety. It made my life simultaneously more boring and more full. It shrunk my world and aspirations down to the here and now: feed, sleep, repeat.

Traveling with my kids has done the same. Now, I no longer feel the pressures that my twentysomething self felt (slash created entirely for myself in my head) to do it all, see it all. Instead, I’m content to read my kid a book in this hammock overlooking the Pacific, knowing that the Mexican mountains will still be there for us to explore more deeply tomorrow, and next year, and the year after.

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