The Benefits of Travel for Teens


a teen's view of the white house . . .

What is the best age for kids to travel? It could be argued that travel is good for a person at any age. The benefits of travel, whether within the U.S. or abroad, are wide ranging. The opportunity to see the world beyond your comfortable circumference opens your eyes and your mind. It increases tolerance and fosters understanding. It doesn’t have to be a far away land, world trekking adventure that makes a difference in your life. Travel and education are invariably intertwined. Even a trip across town can be educational if coupled with the right mindset.

You go. You learn. You come back home with a little more understanding of how the world works, how it got to be the way it is, and you lose a bit of the fear of the unknown, because after traveling to a place, its not so unknown.


viewing the canyons of southern California

Traveling as a family, whether the children are toddlers or teens, enriches us all. The time spent together, of course, is important, but the shared experiences are what make traveling with your family something that binds you. You create memories that serve to connect you as a family. It’s not necessarily the big things – visiting the monuments and historic sites – that make the journey a series of lessons.

on the ferry to the statue of liberty, with Manhattan in the background.

Just the process of a trip, from the planning to the unpacking, is an educational experience. In the planning stages, it may well be the adults that make the decisions about the where and the when, but as a parent, you know you don’t make those choices without taking your children into consideration, whether you ask for their opinions or not. Their age level, abilities and interests determine so much of the logistics of travel. Will they be able to handle being in an airport for a 3 hour layover without having a meltdown? Can they carry their own luggage? Would an additional day or two in a particular city allow you to visit the sites you know they’d love?

calling home from a pay phone in Mexico

My friend Tom is an eighth grade history teacher. When we asked him at what age he thought that a child would benefit most from visiting historical sites, he quickly answered that the years between seventh and tenth grades are best for educational travel. His answer comes from knowing that the curriculum in those grades revolves around the history of western civilization in broad terms. In school, kids learn about the wars and the cultures of the ages that have determined life as we know it. They don’t always see it that way, but a good teacher can make all the difference. A good teacher makes it fun to learn, striving to make a connection between the student and the point in history being taught. I’m sure that in today’s world, full of buzzing and bells, screen time and constant stimulation, a student’s ability to grasp onto a piece of what brought us to this point in history is diminished by the noise. The way to get through the din is to create a connection and one of the best ways to do that is by experiencing history on a more organic, tactical level, through travel.

the Gettysburg Address at the Lincoln Memorial

Though history is well documented, augmented and argued, it’s tough to make it stick without an association to it. It all seems so long ago and far away. That’s where travel can have a huge impact. Take the bits of the history that trickle through the chaos of middle and high schools, mix it with a hands on experience with the place where history happened and you have a bona fide connection that translates to learning, whether they realize it or not.

And it’s not just in the case of history. There’s poetry to be absorbed in Edgar Allen Poe’s city of Baltimore. There’s science, meteorology, archeology to be see at Mount St Helens. You can "feel the flutter" of the butterfly enclosure at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. There are Mayan ruins on the high cliffs above the Caribbean beaches of the Yucatan in Mexico.

Immigrant's luggage at Ellis Island

The grade levels that my friend Tom suggested are often a point in between the first exposure a kid has to a particular event and the more detailed study that happens in the later grades. When my daughter was in the fourth grade, her class did an extended project on Ellis Island. The students were first taught about the countries that were the homes of immigrants arriving there and had to select a character from them. My daughter chose a girl from the French countryside. They next had to research clothing from the time period so that they could portray their characters and tell their stories as applied to entering the U.S. at Ellis Island. On presentation day, families were invited to the classrooms of the fourth graders, where each class was a different station in the process of entry. Students, dressed in costume, told tales of their journeys and what they may have brought from their home countries, of hardships endured and of hope for the future.

entry ledger at Ellis Island

Fast forward nearly four years and to our visit this past summer to Ellis Island. My husband, daughter and I arrived at Ellis Island by ferry from Liberty State Park in New Jersey. Upon entering the building, we took advantage of the free audio tour available. First exhibit: a considerable stack of luggage; trunks, satchels, crates and baskets served to illustrate methods of containment for immigrant’s precious items brought to this new world that we would see later on in the tour. We stood in the entry hall, heard voices and sounds as they were so many years ago. Medical exams and educational assessment, white tiled rooms that divided families and generations, stories of so many lives that passed through there. We saw graffiti on the walls left by people who waited there to be notified of their acceptance. The building and the grounds were overwhelming with sounds and promise. Towards the end of the tour, exhibits of propaganda posters and governmental advocacy highlighted the turning of the public against free immigration, some calling out to stop the onslaught, to essentially build a wall. It taught us all that the struggles of Americans and of those who wish to be Americans look and sound must as they do now, only different ports of entry and different countries of origin.

Liberty has her flame; my daughter her phone

My daughter moved on ahead of us in the tour, anxious for the next chapter. It was hard to keep up with her. When eighth grade began this fall, she was excited to tell me that they will be studying Ellis Island in her social studies class and that she stopped by the teacher’s desk on her way out of class that first day to tell him that she had been there. Yesterday she told me how much she likes her social studies class this year, which thrilled me since it’s been a subject she’s struggled with in the past.

It is expected when visiting historic sites that some education seeps in. One would hope that would happen.

But there’s more to travel that educates on a whole different level.

The exposure to people, places, food, methods of transport, cultural expectations, and societal differences whether two states removed from home or half way around the world has an impact on the way a kid views life from there on in. If it removes even one layer of fear travel is worthwhile.

Learning patience at the airport - both parties here needed the education.

There are lessons along the way that as adults we might glaze over. Reading maps and road signs, maneuvering through an airport, checking into a hotel, riding a subway, hailing a cab, skyscrapers and projects, backyards of chickens and goats and donkeys that roam freely, landscapes that surprise in their variation, there are so many nuances of living on this planet that are a little less intimidating when you’ve experienced them yourself. You might be surprised at the things that kids notice on a journey. You might also learn something yourself.

a little fun with distortion . . Liberty perched high above.

In my travel experiences with my family, we’ve found that the memories and experience gained far outweigh any concerns about the costs. We all look at the Statue of Liberty a bit differently now that we’ve been there and stood at her feet as she gazes out over the harbor. We laugh about the outburst of a fellow passenger on the small ferry we took from Manhattan to New Jersey. The three of us reminisce about the awesome handmade tacos we had at the tiny restaurant in the jungle when we visited an attraction nearby. When we see the Hollywood sign on the hills above Los Angeles, we remember that twisty narrow road we took to get up as close to it as you can drive and the haze that hung over the city in the heat that day. We’ve often seen a location in a movie or on TV that we visited in the canyons of California where directors use the unusually shaped boulders as backdrop for scenes that range from the Flintstones to Armageddon.

Is it Bedrock or an alien planet? This canyon has been both.

at Madame Tusseau's she got to meet Will Smith . . sort of

Hollywood behind her, the future is bright

The point is that travel changes you for the better. It educates, illuminates, and connects us to one another. It diminishes fears and increases confidence and understanding. With such focus in the coming months on giving, it could be an opportunity to give an experience rather than a thing. No you can’t hold an adventure in your hands and squirrel it away for safe keeping. You can end up possessing much more and having a deeper understanding and connection to the world around us and to your family.

Civil rights lesson at the Smithsonian

Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit were certainly part of MY history.

Earlier entertainment

That’s a gift too big to wrap. Travel is the only thing we can buy that makes us richer.

On Ellis Island

Just a few of the things teens can learn from travelling:

Exchanging money – the US dollar vs the world’s currencies.
Overcoming or adapting to language barriers by necessity; i.e. having to ask where the bathroom is or ordering food in a restaurant.
Differences and similarities in foods, dress styles, architecture, and transportation.
That the landscapes and terrain may be worlds apart in a different part of the country or the world but a smile is universal.

holding up the Washington Monument

My daughter has been invited to participate in a student ambassador program next summer that will include her in a group of teens from the area traveling to the United Kingdom. The group will visit England, Scotland, Wales, and both Northern Ireland and Ireland. They will participate in educational activities, confidence and team building exercises, some community service, a home stay with a local family, and even get a tour of Parliament in London by a member of Parliament. The program is run through People to People. Students who participate are responsible to raise the funds needed. Therefore she and I have been exploring fundraising initiatives, such as bake sales. Follow her progress at www.follownolasjourney.blogspot.com.