Wondering How to Connect With a Child While You Travel? Here is one way…

We know this scenario only too well: Some of the adults are traveling and the children are staying at home with family or friends. Both parties want to stay connected throughout the trip, but don’t want to use social media to share the details with the whole world, nor do they want to use a tool that costs additional cellular data or money. Sound familiar? Yes, for us too.

A few years ago we took a round-trip cruise to islands in the Eastern Caribbean that left out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Our granddaughter was young and wanted to “follow us” throughout the trip. We asked her to solve the problem of wanting to follow us on our cruise and provided 4 options – photos posted on Facebook, texting photos when we had data access, emailing photos back home, and using a free mapping tool to track our progress over time. We reviewed each one of the options and she chose the Google My Map! She loved maps and would collect them whenever she could, so her choice of tool was not a surprise.

Once we had selected a tool for our communication, we researched the stops on the journey and plotted them on the Google My Map. With that done, we agreed to share a few photos with her after leaving each port. She followed along while we were on the cruise and checked on the progress of our trip, asking questions about what she was seeing and predicting what we would see in the next stop on our itinerary.

Here is an Eastern Caribbean Cruise example of what we co-created. Another example came from a similar scenario as we celebrated our 30th anniversary in Europe. Once again we co-created the Google My Map and researched the major attractions from the itinerary. Here is the example from the Anniversary trip.

We will explore other ways to invite family and friends to travel with us in future blog posts. For children, the opportunity to solve the question of how to connect across the state, country, and/or globe empowers them to have an active role in the experience. They might even pose questions to be answered collaboratively along the way. Not only will the child(ren) gain new perspectives from your collaborative efforts, but also strengthen their communication, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness – all traits that we hope to develop in our children.

Do you have suggestions for virtual ways to travel with those back home? We’d love to hear about them!

Happy walking!