Benefits of our full-time travel lifestyle for our toddler
“How does she travel? Does she enjoy it?”
Sprout’s great to travel with. And yep, she seems to enjoy it.
I get asked these questions a lot when someone realises our family travels full-time. Most can’t imagine themselves living on the road with a toddler.
In truth, our kid travels well - by a combination of her easy-going personality and our intentional choices to make sure our lifestyle suits a young child.
And yes, she does seem to enjoy it.
It makes me reflect on what the benefits are for our kid, especially as there are definite downsides to being a travelling family too (perhaps an article for another time!).
I often wonder what Sprout will say about her early life, both when she’s old enough to first communicate that and then later, when she’s older still and can come and tell me about the impacts of her childhood and the stories from her perspective.
From where we stand now, a “normal life” is completely unappealing for both Jacob and I - and a large part of that is the benefits of our lifestyle for our family as a whole.
The benefits of being a travelling family come from two places:
What we get to leave behind while travelling
What we gain from travelling
What we get to leave behind
A house and garden to look after
Community expectations
All the ‘stuff’ that comes with a regular home, social life and keeping up with expectations
A “normal” work life, where one or both of us work out of the home at regular hours with far less family time than we have now
Weekend obligations and commitments that take up precious leisure time
What we gain from travelling
Increased quantity of family time
More time outside
New experiences
Meeting new people
More freedom and choice
Benefits for our 18 month old from our full-time travelling lifestyle
Most of the benefits I’ve listed below are not exclusive to our travelling lifestyle. You can focus on lots of outside time, rich experiences, social interactions and having lots of family time/quality time when living a “normal” life in a house.
Our current travelling lifestyle matches our family values. We can prioritise what we want to provide to enrich our toddler’s early childhood years.
Lots of outside time:
Living in a camper trailer comes with lots of time spent outside. There’s limited room inside and so we are outside everyday until it’s time for bed! With lots of time in the great outdoors, our toddler gets to:
Develop a stronger connection to nature
Learn about the environment
Building resilience, problem solve and engage in risky play
Run around and build fitness with plenty of space
Learn to “notice” - noticing beauty, hazards, sounds, smells and movement (and lots of tasting - toddlers are
Plenty of space and obstacles for building gross motor skills
Learning to walk, run and climb comes with extra challenge when you’re always camping and on the move. There’s no carpet or cushions to soften the fall - some nice lush grass is the best Sprout gets!
Walking on different surfaces and uneven ground
Climbing on, up and over logs, stairs, steps and rocks
Plenty of room for spinning, tumbling, throwing and other toddler ‘tricks’ - walking backwards is a current favourite
Rich opportunities to develop fine motor skills
Sprout has always loved working with her hands, ever since she realised they belonged to her. She likes picking up tiny pieces of fluff, pulling stickers, mastering a pinch pot, doing her colouring. Living outside provides ever-changing challenges to further develop her fine motor skills.
Collecting rocks, rubbish and sticks
Drawing with sticks
Playing with leaves
Building, stacking
Playing with dirt, sand and mud
Both parents around everyday
This one is a big win for all of us. There’s far less pressure on one person with the parenting load shared.
Sprout benefits from a highly-involved Dad, who’s been able to be around pretty much all the time for her first year and a half. I’m sure this will enrich their relationship for years to come.
More opportunity for quality time
Time together to build a close relationship with both her parents
Less parental burn out because the load is shared
Two active caregivers who know her needs, challenges, likes and strengths intimately
If we weren’t travelling, it’s likely Jacob would still be working full-time. We’re now at the point of looking for work on the road, so it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.
Meeting and knowing people who are different from us
It’s important to me that we teach Sprout intentionally about our world and its people. Whilst the playground offers many wonderful lessons, some things are too important to leave to chance.
A benefit of traveling is the wealth of opportunities to learn from, and about, other people. Wherever possible, we do this by paying people for their time, their knowledge and their skills.
Our child has the opportunity to:
Join us on guided tours across the country
Access libraries and book shops, each having their own selection of excellent authors and publishers to support
Attend different community events and festivals
Begin to learn about Australia’s history, often in the place where events happened and stories began
Getting out of her comfort zone (and witnessing it too!)
Travelling has been slowly building up my own resilience - and I can see the ways it challenges and strengthens my toddler too. We deal with last-minute changes to plans, crappy weather, long waits and discomfort regularly as full-time campers and travellers.
Our toddler stretches her comfort zone when:
Meeting new people
Figuring out and testing boundaries
Learning how to interact with other kids
Dealing with frustration, disappointment, anger and sadness
Learning new skills
Lots of conversations and rich language
This is a surprising benefit of travelling full-time - it’s so much easier to spend the day in conversation with our toddler. It’s harder to have rich, exciting conversations when you’re stuck within the same four walls every day.
Easier to chat about what’s around us when it changes frequently
Building a rich and varied world view
Lots of chatting to strangers and practicing social skills
Building vocabulary - because our surroundings change, we use new language and words to describe the world around us.
Developing a broad view of community
I’ve enjoying finding our new travelling community, especially connecting with other families.
I felt I’d lost touch with my community when I went on maternity leave, unexpectedly early and in the middle of COVID-19. It’s been a real pleasure to find those bright sparks of community in our chats with other travellers.
By participating in our transient, travelling community, Sprout is learning:
We care for others in our community
We show care by sharing knowledge, looking after communal areas, having conversations, offering help, including others, respectful behaviour, following rules and group norms
The individuals that make up communities can be very diverse, it’s what is shared that keeps a community working together
Unstructured time and freedom to play
Because Sprout is a toddler, unstructured play time is not unsupervised play time. It’s when her play is self-directed, rather than following instructions or doing an activity with a parent.
This is something we are working on - that I expect will become easier as Sprout gets older. We want to avoid constantly providing entertainment but that can be tricky with a toddler!
Sprout benefits from unstructured playtime as we travel during:
Long drives in the car alone in the backseat. The perfect time to be bored, to chat to herself and practise new words, to play imaginary games and to play without an adult scripting, supervising or supporting
Time playing in the dirt, mud and puddles
Making do with what’s there - finding sticks, stones, string, anything!
Time spent wandering through playgrounds, across the grass and through forests - free to choose a direction and follow her interests
Meeting other kids and families
This benefit of travelling is an interesting one - it would be easier to find a group of parents and kids to catch up with if we were not travelling. Travelling provides Sprout with different opportunities to play in new places, with new kids and watch her parents navigate new social situations daily.
When we meet other families, Sprout is:
Learning to play alongside others
Learning to share space and things
Watching her parents model social skills with other adults and children
Watching how other children interact when they play - including siblings, established friends and kids meeting each other for the first time
Learning safety and life skills organically
As we travel, there are so many learning opportunities for our toddler. It’s a worry trying to teach some of these skills “as we go”, knowing that there are risks and hazards in our changing environment that we wouldn’t have in a house.
Children learn best from doing things themselves, with an appropriate level of support and encouragement.
As we travel, we can teach Sprout about:
Listening for cars and finding a safe place to be when cars are moving
Safe interactions with adults
Respect for nature
Respect for animals
Taking care of our body
Happier parents
It’s hard work being a parent, no matter where you are, so you may as well be travelling! As travelling parents we:
Have more energy to give to our child
Model continual learning and growth
Show that our interests and experiences as adults matter too
Spend more time together as a family
You could do these things ‘at home’ too!
It’s not that our toddler wouldn’t have these experiences if we lived in a house and lived in one spot. We could choose to spend lots of time outdoors if we had a “normal” life too.
It’s that our current full-time travel lifestyle makes it’s easier to prioritise the things we love. Our priorities are different without a house, a garden and community expectations to attend to. We have more freedom about how and where we spend our time.
And, it’s not about one person’s lifestyle being better than another - it’s about being able to choose what works for your family. There are a multitude of ways to raise a happy, well-adjusted child - including full-time travelling and all the benefits listed above.
Feel free to share - both with the people who always have your back and for the ones who think you’re mad too!
Interested in knowing more about family travel? Check out the articles below.
