You have more time to travel with your kids than the internet says

A pitch landed in my inbox this week engineered to make me panic, and I’ll hand it to them, it almost worked.

It’s built on a survey of 2,000 parents. Sixty-six percent say a single year with their child passes like at least two. Ninety-one percent say time only speeds up as kids get older. And the closer lands like a countdown clock. Parents get about 17 years before their kids leave the nest, and the “golden age” for family travel supposedly slams shut around 13. Forty-four percent of us are already past it. Tick tock.

The survey was commissioned by Club Wyndham. A vacation club. Because of course it was.

I won’t pretend the feeling underneath the numbers is fake. Time does go sideways once you have kids. But worrying that your children are growing up too fast is about the least useful thing you can do with an afternoon. They’re going to grow up. That’s the whole assignment. Whether you spend those years present or spend them anxious about how few are left, the calendar does not care. And if the panic is pulling you out of the good moments you still have, congratulations, you’ve found a way to lose the time twice.

Then there’s the money. Have you left your house recently? Breathing on a public sidewalk runs about $20. A real grocery stock-up costs roughly one car payment. Gas is holding at five bucks a gallon. If a family vacation isn’t in the cards right now, you’re not a bad parent. You’re a person who has looked at a receipt. You are in enormous company.

Nobody selling vacations wants to say this part out loud, but traveling with kids is not a vacation. It’s your same exact job in an unfamiliar location, minus everything that makes the job survivable at home. Sure, it’s a gift to watch a three-year-old meet the ocean, or hand a kid real Italian gelato. But I once dragged my five-year-old to a very expensive Cirque du Soleil show in Montreal, and when I asked what her favorite part of the day was, she said the paddle boats. The $25, 15-minute paddle boats parked outside. Top dollar does not buy more delight. It buys a lighter wallet and a kid who wanted the paddle boats.

My daughter is 14 now. She can’t recall half of what we did on one big trip to Seattle. What she remembers with cinematic clarity is the moment I completely lost it at her brother, now 20, over an attitude I can now diagnose, from a safe distance, as basic vacation fatigue. That’s the souvenir.

So here’s where I surprise myself. The last few trips we’ve taken as a family have been some of my favorite moments, and I don’t mean favorite vacation moments. I mean favorite, full stop. There’s something about the forced closeness, about handling the mishaps as a team and getting to know each other as whole people, that doesn’t happen when everyone scatters after a 20-minute dinner. We build in time to do our own thing. But leave enough unplanned space and something real tends to fall into it.

On a recent long weekend in Miami, which happened to land in the rare overlap of my son’s college break and my daughter’s high school break, we ditched the beach for lunch and an art walk in Wynwood. We climbed out of the Uber into a wall of burning rubber and chemicals, a plume of black smoke rising off to the right, a tour bus on fire miles away. The sky was also going black with a thunderstorm, and it broke before we reached the restaurant. So we ran, laughing at the stacked absurdity of it all, and the only thought in my head was, thank God I’m not dragging a toddler through this.

So yes, travel with your little ones if you can swing it. Enjoy the parts that are enjoyable. Let the rest go. You have more time than a vacation club would like you to believe. And in this economy, your kids will be tagging along on your trips well past 17, whether you planned it that way or not.