Folium: Perhaps It’s Time to Rethink Exploring the World With Our Children via GoingAnyway
Folium: Perhaps It’s Time to Rethink Exploring the World With Our Children via Goinganyway
Folium: Perhaps It’s Time to Rethink Exploring the World With Our Children via GoingAnyway
They’re the parents of three surviving quadruplets – enthusiastic 9 year olds, including one with cerebral palsy who rides in an off-road wheelchair or in Dad’s sling and requires feeding of blenderized food through a tube. In tow, a moptop four year old, and a nursing six month old. This might sound like a list of “what you hope not to sit next to on an airplane”, but one Australian family is showing that this is the perfect combination for home school on the move, language and culture education, and a family trip around the world. That sounds like the perfect time to explore the world, doesn’t it? Why not? Perhaps it’s time to rethink exploring the world with our children.
Kids Travel Food Rules
One practical question I have as a mother with little children is – how do you pack food for your family when you’re traveling by airplane to Asia then traveling across to various countries? This enterprising, adventurous family shows how travel with a fun family of children can be done while you still maintain your sense of humor. Her sensible but hilarious “mom’s rules for food” answered all my questions.
Kids…. Travel…. Food…. Rules displays how to build in cultural sensitivity, practical sanitation, and enjoyment of cross-cultural experiences while living on a budget with kids who want recognizable foods at regular intervals, hopefully without heads. Well sometimes the food does have heads, and wings, which is part of the exotic experience of traveling in Asia.
The author encourages us to “be adventurous – try stuff” but admits after three weeks it’s okay to go order pizza. The experiences she shares with us as she discovers that Mums everywhere pack snacks for their children on bus rides helps us see how similar cultures are that are seemingly disparate.
“So, is it common sense that children shouldn’t eat beetles? Or is it commonsense that they should, because they are cheap, high in protein, and possibly tasty. Is it, then, common sense that they should be well fried? Maybe, in Cambodian parenting circles, they discuss the extreme common sense of packing beetles on a long bus trip (like Australian mums take sultanas to a long appointment) as they conveniently take so long to eat.”
Perhaps that is one simple lesson to take away from traveling and exposing our children to the cultures of the world, is that beneath the various exteriors, to use the author’s phrase “we are all same-same, but different”. That’s not bad, for a life view.
Kellisue Montague-Kolz
LEAF Contributor
(Ed.) How have you introduced strange new food to your children while traveling (nationally or internationally?) Let us know in the comments below!
Resources:
The LEAF Project
www.leaflanguages.org
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