Hinesh Chauhan breaks down how he gets his kids involved in trip planning: they pick destinations on maps, choose between hotels or camping, and handle specific jobs on the road like managing music or prepping gear. He gradually gives them more responsibility and scales back if they lose interest.
Now, be it travel or any other activity or experience, my job or my mission with my kids has been to incrementally expose them to challenges, to information, to thoughts and see how they handle them. The more they grasp onto it, the more I'll give them, the more their eyes just gloss over like my daughters and tunes out. Then I kind of dial it back or just shut up. They also like to block plaques and other things to read while we're on trips because I just need to soak up everything and I love knowledge, so I feel there's a theme there. I digress. Coming back to to trip planning as as they've gotten older, what I've done is, hey, first let's guys look at the map, pick different things, give me a list of things that was part one, part two is now great, you pick those things. Now tell me how do we get there and give me a couple of options because tomorrow we're leaving and we're coming from here or we'll be coming from there. So they get to do a little map and compass. Not really, it's more Google maps. And then lastly, which has been the best because as you know, planning a trip as a single parent is quite a bit of work. And now they actually look at what are the destinations or locations we're going to. They give me hotel options or camping options and they tell me which way to go and how to get there. And one kid is in shotgun next to me who is the co driver responsible for music and passing me snacks and the one in the back is responsible for passing up the snacks and getting beach gear ready because we also have the beach bag ready to go in case we're like, hey, it's a nice day, there's the ocean, let's go jump in. Nice bag, towels, sunscreen, a couple plastic bags, bathing suits and flip flops and we're good to go.
