Making These Family Vacations a Meaningful Experience for the Children

Adding the depth of meaning to the trips we take together as a family, making memories more meaningful and lasting, a whole lot, longer, translated…

My family and I, we love traveling, we’d always schedule several trips on the island, from the north to the south, east, to west, we’d made an agreement, to visit EVERY single county and city in Taiwan.

And, perhaps it’s, my job, as an editor-in-chief, that every time, I’d traveled, I’d, made sure every single detail was, set up, just right. From before when I’d traveled with my girlfriend, we have set the motives of the trips, and naturally, we were, always, able to, rush through everything we’d planned for ourselves on the trips. As my children were born, we’d become this, foursome from the original twosome, and, naturally, we’d, often, needed, to halt the plans, because the kids are in, a bad mood, or something sudden that’s, come up. And, being a planning FREAK, it took me, a very long time, to finally, persuade myself, to just, follow the flow of things, and slowly, I’d, reduced the stresses on the trips, to leave this time of doing nothing, so we can, all have our needed breathers.

Now the itinerary simplified, but the spirits of our journeys, we can’t let that slide. I believed, that these family trips are, a hard-to-come by chance for learning, even as the children heard the lectures from the school teacher already, it can’t beat have the real-time experiences. Because we’d, longed for the seas and mountains in the eastern parts, we’d decided, to head to the back mountains; in order to soak our children up in the eastern side of the island’s atmosphere, after we’d started off in Kaohsiung, we’d, tuned in to the Good Friend’s 96.3 dial on the radio. With the company of the mountains and the oceans, with the natives singing their songs, the navigator, and our young, getting really into the music, singing along, “Alian—sing together, hear those, different symphonies!”, this was, the theme related to the locals I’d added to the trip.

illustration from the papers online…ROADTRIP, YAY US!!!

Family trips shouldn’t just be focused on the surfaces of fun, the two of us would, select the places to visit carefully, especially for those who’d, worked hard for public services, we’d hoped, to lead our young, to see them in action, the first stop was the Southern Loops hospital site. But how do we, get our kids, to experience the lacking in medical treatment? This wasn’t, naturally, easy, I’d had the children imagine, that as we drove out of the Southern Loops, and, we wanted to go to the restrooms, but, we’d needed to drive for thirty kilometers on, to the local tribes to go, how would they feel? They’d, remained, silent, and started, feeling how long this, fifty minute ride was…………with this experience in their minds, they could better understand, the pressing feeling that someone with a serious illness, being rushed by ambulance, for over a hundred kilometers, to get to a fully equipped hospital.

Another point of our trip to Taidong was to visit the House of Books for the Children, Papa Chen, who’s passionate, took along the kids in Jiben, to build the house themselves, other than tailoring to the children’s homework, he’d also, started cultivating the youths locally, other than setting up and developing a construction worker’s course, he’d also, built a “Dark children black coffee” café, which was an internship place for the kids to get the hands-on experiences they’d needed for work in the future. This afterschool help program is quite difficult, to explain to children seven and three, their young minds may only recall the lunch we had in Jiben, running around, in and out, of a café that didn’t, hush them up, playing hide-and-seek in the garden, seeing the fish in the small pond, and they’d, drawn a picture at the hot springs, playing, and had two huge cups of black coffee, and how before we left, their parents handed a scheduled donation slip to the receptionist.

Since, their lives started connecting with Taidong, they will start showing care and concerns, for the progresses of the hospital being build, and would want to know how “children’s book house” was doing. And, all of that, is enough, and there are, still a lot for them to learn. Making the checkmarks in the memories of having fun, creating that connectedness with the local, adding to the kids’ life experiences, this, is how our family treats the trips we take our kids on.

So, these parents made these trips they took with their young children more meaningful, by taking the children to the sites where social services are needed, and getting them involved, in the local workings of things, and hopefully, kids who are, raised like this, can gain that empathy that a lot of the people in the world has, lacked, and will show care and concern for everybody around them when they’re, old enough.