A recent series of commercials for Airbnb suggest that staying in a house while you’re on vacation with your family has a lot of advantages. It can give you more room or allow you to live on the less touristy side of town. It can allow people to go to sleep at different times and ensure that you’re only around the people you actually want to be around. When you have kids, once you look at hotel prices, it can be tempting to rent a home for a few days instead.
Don’t fall for it. Consider the all-inclusive resort.
I used to frown on the all- (or partially-) inclusive resort. Such tourist traps. Wouldn’t I rather take my children somewhere more authentic? Who wants to just sit around on a beach when we could be exploring interesting cities or national parks? Can’t I save some money and make our own meals? These are great questions, when your kids are older.
When your kids are young — say, under the age of 8 — there are two kinds of vacations that actually feel like vacations. There are vacations without children — and you don’t need my advice about those. And there are vacations with kids where someone else is doing the cooking and cleaning.
I learned this lesson the first time when my children were 6, 4, and 18 months. Before that summer, we had rented houses for vacations. They were big places with lakes or pools nearby. It seemed like an easy option. No planes. We could bring as much stuff as we needed and stop on the drive as often as necessary. Sometimes friends came, too. What could go wrong?
The first step upon arrival was going to the supermarket to purchase hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries, paper products and sometimes even cleaning supplies. Then come home, unpack everything and start on dinner. Or buy all those groceries and then order pizza because we were exhausted by the shopping excursion. But with kids at a certain age, the cleanup is unavoidable. I knew my son could be a great pitcher after watching the arc of Cheerios he could launch from his high chair. There was a great cartoon someone sent me at the time of a mother in a vacation home. The caption was something about doing dishes with a different view.
Then I heard about Canoe Island Lodge on Lake George in New York state. It was a lot of money for us to spend, but breakfast and dinner each day were included. The beach was only a few steps from the rooms and someone came through to vacuum and straighten up each morning. Each morning, the kids could choose from eggs, cereal or pancakes. And if the eggs were too runny or the toast was too dark or the food otherwise didn’t turn out the way a toddler expected, the waiters would bring something else. Yes, there was waste, but there was also the option to try new things without suffering any consequences. And the kids would get to fill out a form at breakfast choosing which option they wanted that evening. Hot dogs and fries were always there as a backup.
That week, I realized that the most hated words in the English language (at least by me and a few other mothers I’ve surveyed) are “What’s for dinner?” I never heard them that week, and it was heavenly. Indeed, I could stay on the beach until 5:30 without ever wondering what was in the refrigerator that would make everyone happy.
And that was perhaps the most wonderful part of the experience. Getting to sit and talk and play with your kids — without distractions of work or housework, without thinking about the next thing — was an extraordinary experience. And I fear this is becoming rarer these days. The need to multitask even without the presence of screens is constant. I didn’t relax on a beach reading a book as I would do in later years, but I got buried in sand and had water poured over my head with no interruption. I played on inflatable dinosaurs in the water and participated in rules-free shuffleboard. I had extensive toddler dinner conversations without chasing after food under the table. I played ping pong and checkers until it was dark out. A few years ago, Jennifer Senior wrote a book about modern parenthood called “All Joy and No Fun.” That week, I got to have both.
Even as the kids got older, we have gone back there some summers. It’s fun to watch them in the same places at different ages. We take more field trips — bike rides and amusement parks. And I get some peace and quiet, too. But I still get a little thrill as the day winds down and no one asks me what’s for dinner.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.