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On why we travel with kids, and the kind of people it quietly helps them become.

It didn’t start with Paris.

It started the way most things do: close to home, with modest ambitions and a car packed for a beach day. Day trips down to the coast. A long weekend in Savannah. Charleston in the spring. Atlanta. New Orleans. A flight to New York when our oldest was seven to see a Harry Potter orchestra performance at Radio City Music Hall. At the time, it felt like the most exciting thing we had ever done.

None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered.

Our oldest has been traveling since she was small enough to fall asleep in a carrier on a cobblestone street. Today, our children range from baby to teenager. Between them are years of beach days, road trips, museums, and cities that have quietly become part of their childhood. Looking back, we can already see they have been shaped by those experiences in ways we’re still discovering.

This was a choice. It remains one.

Something happens when a child realizes that the world is not arranged the way they thought it was.

Different food on the table. Different language in the street. A different way of marking a Sunday, greeting a stranger, or organizing a city. They begin to understand—often without realizing it—that there is more than one way to live a good life.

That realization doesn’t just teach them about another place. It teaches them that the world is worth understanding. Questions replace assumptions. Differences become invitations to learn instead of things to fear. Those lessons rarely happen all at once. They accumulate over years through small moments that are easy to overlook at the time and impossible to forget later.

It’s easy to assume that what is familiar is also universal. Travel interrupts that.

It reminds children that the world is larger than their own experience. That a city can be built differently. That a meal can look different. That people can worship, celebrate, and welcome one another in ways they’ve never encountered before.

In the process, humanity becomes a little more tangible.

Raising Curious Children

We watched it happen with our oldest.

We watched her become curious in a way that classroom learning alone never quite produced. We watched her ask questions she wouldn’t have known to ask if she hadn’t stood in front of something that demanded them.

Over years of beach trips, road trips, and eventually transatlantic flights, she became a person who is genuinely interested in the world—not as a backdrop for her own life, but as something worth understanding.

That is what we hope to give all of our children.

The trips got bigger over time. New York became Paris. Paris became London. London became the beginning of a longer list we’re still writing.

But the philosophy behind them hasn’t changed since we were packing a cooler for a day at the beach with a seven-year-old who wanted to know everything about everything.

We go because the world is worth understanding, and we bring our children because we want them to know that early—before the world has a chance to feel small.

We started with beach days and a car full of kids. In many ways, we’re still doing exactly that—just with more miles behind us and a longer list ahead.

If we’re fortunate, our children will grow up believing two things: that the world is bigger than themselves, and that it is filled with things worth noticing.

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