It’s one thing for a hotel to go out and declare itself as “family-friendly” and stock the rooms with all sorts of kid-oriented goodies and treats. It’s another thing for a hotel that doesn’t make a big deal about family travelers to boast the kinds of amenities that make us who vacation with kids feel […]
Unless you’re raising V.I.C.I. from “Small Wonder“, temper tantrums likely are a fact of your current life as a parent. And since kids generally aren’t discriminating about where and when they have these meltdowns, I’m guessing you probably have had to deal with a spaz-out or two on a family vacation. We’ve got a soon-to-be […]
Nothing embodies my perspective on education quite like the line from Springsteen’s “No Surrender” (off Born in the U.S.A., of course): “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, then we ever learned in school.” I certainly held this philosophy in journalism school; even then, I knew my parents were paying to hook me up […]
It always has seemed so irrational; the way ordinary, fun-loving people embark an aircraft and suddenly hate families how Tonya Harding hated (hates?) Nancy Kerrigan. They stare. They snivel. They seethe. Sometimes, they even sneer. We encounter these terrible humans just about every time we fly the so-called “friendly” skies, and every time we meet […]
It took explorer Sir Edmund Hillary two years of trying before he became the first climber to summit Mount Everest in 1953. Judging from our family’s recent visit to the Exploratorium in its new digs in San Francisco, it could take us just as long to explore all there is to see at our home […]
I’m the first person to admit the way most airlines treat families these days is atrocious. I’d also be among the first parents to start chanting obscenities at said airlines for denying us basic necessities such as changing tables in the lavatories of commercial flights. Heck, some people have called me a “tiger father” for […]
As someone who writes about family travel for a living, I understand and appreciate how difficult it is to cover the subject in a way that appeals to an audience comprising diverse perspectives. That’s why I love Keith Bellows’ new book so much. The book, titled, “100 Places That Can Change Your Child’s Life: From […]
This weekend kicks off what is arguably one of my favorite weeks of the year: National Park Week, an 8-day stretch during which admission to all 401 of the parks in our national system is totally free. For family travelers, this means now is a great time to get out and explore some of our […]
The more I read about the aftermath of Monday’s horrific bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, I admit it: The more I feel part of me longing for a bubble. A bubble for my friends, my parents, for Powerwoman, and our girls. A bubble to protect us from the haters, the misunderstood, […]
By now you probably have read about the incident on a United Airlines flight last month in which a pilot misconstrued a father’s request to shut off an inappropriate movie as a security threat. Details of how things played out are ugly: Inappropriate scene came on, family objected, family asked politely that the movie be […]