I still remember the exact moment it hit me. We were sitting cross-legged on a bamboo mat in a small family home in rural Thailand, sharing a meal we couldn’t name with people whose language we didn’t speak. My daughter, Isla — seven years old at the time and previously the child who would cry if her pasta had “bits” in it — reached forward, scooped something unfamiliar onto her spoon, and ate it without hesitation. She looked up at me and grinned.
Something shifted in me that afternoon. Not just pride (though there was plenty of that), but a quiet, creeping realisation: travel was doing something to my child that I never could have done at home. And, if I’m being honest, it was doing something to me as a parent, too.
I’ve been travelling with my children — Isla, now eleven, and her younger brother Finn, who’s eight — for the better part of six years. What started as a slightly terrifying experiment (who takes a five-year-old to Southeast Asia?!) has become the single most transformative force in how I raise my kids. Not the parenting books. Not the school curriculum. Not the well-meaning advice from relatives. Travel.
Here’s how it changed everything.
It Taught Me to Let Go of Control
Before I became a travelling mum, I was — there’s no gentle way to say this — a control freak. Routines were sacred. Bedtimes were non-negotiable. Snacks were organised. I had a system for everything, and I believed, deeply, that this structure was what good parenting looked like.
Then we missed a connecting flight in Istanbul. The kids were tired, we were stranded, and not a single thing on my carefully typed itinerary was happening. And you know what? We found a little restaurant near the airport, ate flatbread and cheese at 10pm, and Finn fell asleep across two chairs while Isla and I played Uno. It became one of our favourite memories from that entire trip.
Travel has a way of dismantling the illusion that you are in charge. Trains get delayed. It rains on beach days. The “unmissable” restaurant is closed. And your children watch how you respond to all of this. I’ve learned — slowly, sometimes painfully — to model flexibility and calm instead of frustration and rigidity. I’ve learned that not everything needs to be managed, and that some of the best moments come from plans falling apart entirely.
At home now, I hold things more loosely. I’ve eased up on the perfectly synchronised routine. I’ve learned to say “let’s figure it out” instead of spiralling when things don’t go to plan. My kids have learned the same.
It Rewired My Ideas About “Educational”
For a long time, I thought education happened at school. Desks, books, teachers, homework. Travel felt like the fun bit — the reward after the learning.
I was completely wrong.
When Finn stood in the Colosseum in Rome and asked, “Mum, did real gladiators die here?”— and we spent the next hour talking about ancient Rome in a way no textbook ever made feel real — I understood what living history actually means. When Isla helped me count change in a Moroccan souk and worked out currency conversion on the fly, she learned maths through genuine necessity. When both children navigated the Tokyo Metro using pictograms and logic alone, they developed problem-solving skills I couldn’t have taught in a classroom.
Travel is relentlessly, joyfully educational — and not in the way you plan for. The education sneaks in sideways: through a conversation with a fisherman, a museum visited on a whim, a question asked at dinner about why people here eat differently to us. I’ve stopped justifying travel as “educational” to sceptical relatives, because I no longer feel I need to. I’ve seen the evidence in my children’s curiosity, their questions, their capacity to connect dots across different cultures and experiences.
At home, this has made me a more creative parent when it comes to learning. We cook food from countries we’ve visited. We find documentaries about places on our list. We let curiosity lead, rather than waiting for it to be scheduled.
It Made Me Confront My Own Biases
This one is harder to admit.
Travel has held up a mirror to the assumptions I didn’t even know I was carrying — and they weren’t always flattering. I realised I had quietly, unconsciously absorbed certain ideas about how families “should” look, how children “should” be raised, what a good home “should” provide. And a lot of those ideas were very narrowly Western, very middle-class, very specific to the bubble I grew up in.
In Japan, I watched children as young as six navigating public transport independently, trusted completely by their parents and society. In Portugal, I saw children out until midnight at village festivals, absorbed into community life rather than packed off to bed. In rural Uganda, I met a mother who described her philosophy of raising children to belong to the whole community, not just to their parents.
None of these ways were wrong. They were just different. And in being different, they challenged me.
I came home asking myself questions I’d never thought to ask: Why do I do things the way I do? Is it because it’s genuinely best for my children, or because it’s what was done to me? Which of my parenting “non-negotiables” are actually essential, and which are just habit?
I’m not suggesting I’ve thrown out all my values — but I’ve interrogated them. I parent with more intention now. When I make a choice, I want it to be a choice, not an unexamined default.
It Changed How I Talk to My Children
Before we started travelling seriously, my conversations with Isla and Finn were largely logistical. How was school? Did you eat your lunch? Have you done your reading? The functional business of daily life filled up most of our airtime.
Travel creates conversation in a way that ordinary life rarely does. When you’re somewhere unfamiliar, questions become unavoidable: Why do people here live like this? What do you think it feels like to grow up somewhere without much rain? Do you think we could live in a place like this?
Some of the deepest conversations I’ve had with my children have happened in transit — on overnight trains, in airport lounges, walking through unfamiliar streets with nowhere to be. Without screens, without the familiar pull of routine, we talk. About big things. About what matters to us, what surprises us, what makes us uncomfortable.
I’ve carried this home. I ask my children bigger questions now. I’m less afraid of conversations that don’t have tidy endings. I’ve learned to sit in the uncertainty of a question alongside them rather than rushing to provide an answer. Travel taught me that “I don’t know — what do you think?” is one of the best things a parent can say.
It Built My Children’s Confidence in Ways I Couldn’t Have Manufactured
There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from navigating the world — real, unfamiliar, slightly unpredictable world — and discovering you can handle it.
I’ve watched Isla go from a child who was frightened to order her own food at restaurants to a girl who will attempt to communicate with shopkeepers in their language, however imperfectly, because she’s learned that trying matters more than succeeding. I’ve watched Finn go from a child who needed me within eyesight at all times to a boy who will wander confidently into a new situation and introduce himself.
These aren’t things I engineered. They happened because travel put them in situations where the only options were try or don’t — and they chose, over and over again, to try. Every small success built on the last.
At home, I’ve become much more willing to let them do hard things. To let them fail at something and pick themselves back up. To resist the urge to smooth every path. Travel showed me what they’re capable of when I step back, and I can’t un-see it.
It Taught Us All About Gratitude — The Real Kind
I’ll be honest: before our first big trip, I tried to “teach” my children gratitude the way many parents do — prompting thank-yous, pointing out how lucky we are, explaining that some children don’t have what they have. It felt hollow, even to me. A performance of a feeling rather than the feeling itself.
Real gratitude — the embodied, heartfelt kind — came later, and it came from experience, not instruction.
After two weeks in a remote part of Cambodia, my children came home and Isla walked into her bedroom and said, quietly, “I forgot I had all this stuff.” Not accusingly, not dramatically. Just noticing. Finn started eating foods he’d previously refused because he’d learned, viscerally, that food is not something to waste. These weren’t lessons I taught. They were lessons travel taught, because travel puts you in the presence of different realities and trusts you to draw your own conclusions.
We talk about gratitude differently now. Less abstractly. “Remember that family in Portugal who had one room for six people?” lands differently than any lecture I could give.
It Showed Me Who My Children Really Are
Here is perhaps the most unexpected gift: travel has shown me my children outside of the context I created for them.
At home, children fit into the shape of their daily lives — their school, their friendships, their routines. You see them through that lens. But travel strips all of that away. New environment, new stimuli, new challenges — and suddenly you see your child responding to the world with no familiar scaffolding to lean on.
I learned that Isla is braver than I thought and more sensitive than I’d noticed. I learned that Finn has an extraordinary ability to connect with strangers, a kind of fearless warmth I’d never seen so clearly at home. I learned things about both of them that I might have taken years to discover otherwise.
And in turn, they’ve seen me. They’ve seen me get it wrong and admit it. They’ve seen me ask for help when I’m lost. They’ve seen me try to speak a language I don’t speak, get laughed at gently, and laugh back. Travel has made me more human in my children’s eyes — less the infallible authority figure, more a fellow adventurer figuring things out alongside them.
What It All Comes Down To
I am not the parent I would have been if we’d stayed home. I am less rigid, more curious, more willing to be uncomfortable, more trusting of my children’s capabilities, more aware of the size and variety of the world and the smallness of any single way of living in it.
Travel didn’t make me a perfect parent — nothing could do that. But it made me a more intentional one. A more humble one. One who holds parenting philosophies a little more lightly and holds her children’s hands a little more tightly, at least while we’re crossing unfamiliar streets together.
If you’re on the fence about whether to travel with your kids — whether they’re old enough, whether it’s worth the expense and the logistics and the chaos — I’d gently say this: the trip will be imperfect. Something will go wrong. Somebody will cry (probably you, at least once). And it will be one of the best things you ever do, not just for them, but for who you become as their parent along the way.
Jennifer writes about family travel, slow adventures, and raising curious kids at MumsTravel. Follow along for honest stories from the road.
