Why Travel Can Be Good for Your Family
Let’s face it—modern society did not invent the family road trip. Humans have been traveling for millennia, and for many reasons: sustenance, survival, soul-searching, security. This blog looks at what has motivated people to travel over time and whether it may be a good choice for you and your family.
So many of us yearn to be on the road, soaking in adventure and experiencing other cultures and faraway places. Whether escaping the rat race, emerging from a pandemic, or cashing in on a sabbatical to pursue the dream of family travel, more and more families are moving around.
You could say we evolved for long-distance travel—to hunt and gather, secure resources and water, avoid predators, and quench a thirst for exploration. After all, our forebears were really good at foraging and traveling; they did it for hundreds of thousands of years.
What stokes modern-day travelers to get up and go?
Why Humans Travel
Wanderlust
We often talk about a love of travel as wanderlust. The word is derived from the German wandern (to wander) and lust (to desire). In the fullest sense, wanderlust is an overwhelming desire to explore the world and deepen your connection to people and history while walking toward the unknown.
Psychologists have even posited the existence of a “wanderlust gene” in some people—correlated with extroversion, exploration, curiosity, and a migratory lifestyle. Certain people just love change more than others and want to wander and try something new.
For Adventure
Classical explorers were some of the earliest adventure travelers. From the 1400s through the 1600s, they navigated oceans, mapped the skies, bagged mountains, and established new routes. We do not glorify their trade; we know theirs was not just saffron and gold.
Today, many travelers heed the call to adventure to find their physical or social limits. They do it for mystery, for challenge, and for meaning and transformation.
As Pilgrimage
The practice or path of awakening is evident across cultures and time periods. Many religions have a pilgrimage—a journey to a physical holy site or a metaphorical or spiritual period of contemplation, transformation, and ascension to the sacred.
In the Middle Ages, the Santiago de Compostela was a popular pilgrimage ending at the site believed to be the burial ground of Saint James. Today, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a European Cultural Route. Pilgrims and other travelers follow the paths on foot, by bike, in silence, or with a friend.
Some feel these modern treks bring them closer to history, to themselves, to their physical limits—and ultimately closer to their spiritual ideal.
For Purpose
Just as early travelers were seekers, when we trace their historic routes around the world, we become modern seekers on our own journeys—looking for change, love, truth, or enlightenment.
To Pursue Simplicity
The ideal of simple living is a motivator for some travelers. There’s great liberation in carrying on your back everything you need to survive. It wakes up your senses and brings your intention back to the basics—unencumbered by material possessions and focused instead on daily nourishment, shelter, water, and clothing. Living simply is practical too. It’s usually easier and cheaper to occupy a 285-square-foot motor home than to pay down a thirty-year mortgage and maintain a 2,000-square-foot house.
To Reconnect as a Family
Some of us feel so crazy busy that there’s rarely a night we can sit down together for dinner—let alone connect with and enjoy our quickly growing kids. Maybe you’re concerned that technology and social media are disrupting family life. Travel can bring families together and dial down the noise. For many, it feels like a great reset from an overbooked and overscheduled life.
To Understand Family History
Some people travel to connect with and imagine the experiences of their ancestors.
Annika and her family traveled to China to fall in love with their adopted daughter’s homeland and to meet the caregivers at the orphanage where Lucy spent the first three years of life. Our friends John and Eydie traveled to West Africa to show their son, Brook, the village in Benin where John had spent two years in the Peace Corps.
Because We Can: Digital Nomadism
A new technological and social reality has opened many doors for the professionally adventurous. Infrastructure for digital nomadism is steadily growing, and this presents more opportunities to pursue the travel dream. We have new marketplaces, new ways of transacting, and new models of community that support mobile lifestyles. Industry experts predict that by 2035 there will be one billion digital nomads working remotely around the globe.
Whatever the reasons or context, traveling as a family sets us into motion together on a winding and textured road that may be at once restorative, cathartic, familial, purely pleasurable, or outside of our comfort zone. It is here, in these momentous, magical, unfamiliar spaces, that we become more deeply connected to history, to fellow travelers, and to ourselves.
The Upsides of Travel
We’ve heard many stories from fellow travelers about how extended travel helped people’s sense of well-being. Travel offers many benefits. In our experience, it can:
Help Us Navigate Stress
While traveling, we remove many of the stress triggers of home and work. We have more time for exercise and activity, reading and listening to music, taking long walks, connecting with family and friends, being in nature, experiencing the change in seasons more deeply, and feeling free. We dare you to notice a rising tide, watch a moonrise, or photograph a sunset with your kids and not feel more relaxed! Now, do that for months in a row and imagine the effect.
As a bonus for the planners among us, the organizational process itself—putting together itineraries, researching destinations, and solving logistical problems—can be enormously fun and satisfying. The anticipation is an exhilarating prelude to the great adventure.
Boost Creativity
Engaging in new rituals and experiencing new places can stimulate creativity and prompt fresh ideas. One of the fundamental truths of travel is that it offers many new experiences, thus promoting “cognitive flexibility”—the brain’s ability to jump from one set of ideas, activities, or learning approaches to another. Traveling is rich with novel experiences; at every turn, every day, down every trail, there are unexpected sparks and nonstop innovation. We learn to think outside the box because we are outside of our box.
Make Us More Tolerant
Travel exposes our own biases and prejudices. It offers us new perspectives, bringing us face-to-face with fresh ideas and different cultures. Travel expands our cultural awareness and sensitivity, building tolerance, appreciation, and respect.
Feed Our Curiosity
You can’t exactly make someone curious overnight. But give a child 365 consecutive days of new experiences and educational adventures while traveling, and curiosity will surely bloom.
The urge to travel as a family might feel familiar—like something that’s always been with us. We might not be following migrating animals or escaping the dry season anymore, but the pull to move, explore, and connect is still there. It shows up in our need for quality time, novelty, and stories worth telling.
So if you’re on the fence about hitting the road, know you’re not just booking a trip. You’re likely stepping into something bigger—something generations before you understood well. And who knows? That one journey might become one of the stories your family tells for years to come.
