I have some friends from Hawaii. They haul their babies along so the grandparents can see them. Of course going to Hawaii is different when you go there every year or two and stay with family.
My mother, who was a registered nurse, had a low opinion of hauling babies around until their immune system was more developed. Of course, when she started parenting, a lot of vaccines hadn’t been invented yet.
This assumes someone lives near enough to grandparents/aunts/whatever that there is someone ot dump the kids on. My parents were a continent away from their parents, we did not go to the local school so they did not know their neighbours well enough to ask them to take on this burden. OTOH, they did not do much more than road trips when I was young - airline tickets were freakin expensive back then. However, we did fly back to England for a visit when I was 6 months and my brother was 2yo., but that was to see family rather than a beach vacation.
If you are going to take the kids, a beach vacation sounds more kid-friendly than some. When I was in Italy, the lady in line in front of us for the Uffuzi had a baby in a backpack carrier. The child was very well behaved, and she mentioned the father was back in the hotel room with the napping 3yo. Seems a shame to pay to come all that way and then not take full advantage of every moment, but she did not seem to regret anything and said she was enjoying herself.
Sometimes the point of view espoused by the poster makes it difficult to entirely separate the two. I understand that insults are inappropriate. But if someone says, “I cannot fathom why people like sex, it seems totally repugnant to me”, it would be very, very hard to respond completely without saying something along the lines of “well, you need to realize that your perceptions are not representative of how many people feel. Your feelings are so outside the norm that it is no wonder you are having trouble understanding this topic.”
Likewise, if someone doesn’t understand why parents want to bring their infants on vacation, part of the answer is going to be “Apparently you just don’t get it because you are not the kind of person who understands that kind of familial bonding.”
Sure, the answer is “about the poster.” But sometimes, that’s where the answer is to be found.
I bring my kids when I travel because I love them and I like to be with them and it’s fun to spend time with them somewhere other than my own house. It’s as simple as that.
Also, my parents always brought us on vacation with them. I have a picture of us sitting by a pool in Florida, and we were ages 7, 5, 3, and 6 months. It was considered family bonding time, and we always had a blast.
I’m pretty sure that this varied by family. My sister and I accompanied my parents on several trips that we don’t really remember and, while I have great memories of our trip to California in '58, I am pretty sure that my then-18-month-old brother does not remember it and my then 3 1/2 year old brother has only vague memories. My folks loved to travel, figured that they could afford to do it if they camped, and my sibs and I all saw 47 of the states, (with enough return trips for my younger brothers to view and remember the same locales), before I was 15.
While “not bringing children” certainly affected the plans of a lot of people, we certainly met all kinds of families with kids while on the road.
One thing that would have negatively affected traveling with kids in the old days was that many restaurants and quite a few hotels would not permit them. (Camping got around that barrier, as well.) Between the higher cost of lodging and the difficulty in finding lodging if one had kids, there were barriers to bringing kids on longer trips. We certainly knew a few families who parked their kids with sitters while the parents traveled, by they were a tiny minority in our experience. Plotted on a graph, I would expect to see a skewed bell curve with a thin leader of families who traveled together, (narrowing over time and distance), with a larger bulge of people who simply never traveled, followed by a rather short tail of parents who traveled without their kids.
Certainly, there are people who just preferred to make trips an adult-only experience, but I would guess that the expense and the hassle of finding places to sleep and eat was a bigger barrier than the perceived hassle of having the kids along.
**Q:**How was your vacation?
**A:**Have you ever spent three weeks in a station wagon with those you thought you loved? 
Good point. About two years ago we went on an extended-family trip to Disney World. The youngest member of the crew was my niece, who was about 1 1/2. Now, of course she won’t remember the trip - she probably doesn’t really remember it now. But her two older brothers will remember it, and her parents will remember it, and the rest of us will remember having the trip with her.
And Disney World is very likely to still be there when she’s older. We might even… gulp… take another extended-family trip there someday. But don’t hold me to that
The opposite of “family vacation” is not “leave mom at home with the baby.” Sheesh!
Ha ha! Well, I’m not sure how much fun it was for my parents, but us kids always had a good time!
I took my son on a family beach vacation when he was 9 months old. My older two children were 9 and 11. Sure, I had all the baby-care responsibilities that I had at home, but I was at the beach, with my family! It was fun times + child care, rather than home/routine + child care. And, I feel compelled to point out, rather than being a burden, taking care of my baby’s needs was for me, and my husband, a joyful task. You want your child to be clean, fed and happy. It’s not drudgery.
And while in some cases a vacation might be an opportunity for adults to “get away” from the children and have alone-time, many parents consider getting away with the children part of the fun of a vacation. We love them and want to be around them. Wherever we are.
We take our 9-month-old on trips as appropriate. We didn’t take her to the baseball game we saw last month, but we DO take her to the beach. Even at 6 months or less, she was able to sit on a beach towel in her little hat and play with her toys while we enjoyed the beach.
As long as the infant/baby isn’t being harmed by the experience, or being disruptive to the experiences of others, who cares? Yeah, she’s more work than going without her would be, but she’s a lot of fun as well (case in point, watching an eight-month-old trying to figure out the concept of “sand” is downright hilarious once you get it through her head that the stuff is not for eating.)
My parents drove every summer - two kids packed in the back of whatever the family car was at that point and we visited most mainland US state by the time I was 13. I’m pretty sure by the time my little brother was 3 they were already sick of “HE’S ON MY SIDE”
She mentioned a nursing mother. Leaving a baby while breast feeding for a day or two with a pump is one thing - a weeks vacation would probably mean the end of breastfeeding.
Come to think of it that’s an excellent weaning strategy 
I’m not a parent either, but this always boggles my mind when I’m on vacation, particularly in places like Vegas. It’s like, eleventybillion degrees outside, there are people smoking everywhere, drunk people are screaming and groping each other in the streets, and you have what appears to be a two month old with you? I suppose certain things can’t be avoided, but it’s odd.
I also get weirded out at Disneyland, of all places. Don’t get me wrong: of course Disneyland is for kids and all, but why would two adults bring their less than 6 month old baby with them? It’s not like junior knows what’s going on and now you guys have to take turns going on rides, because it’s not like the infant can go on most of the rides without getting terrified. And it’s not that I hate kids or anything- one of the best things about going to Disney as an adult is seeing all the little ones freaking out with pure glee because OMG IT’S FREAKING BUZZ LIGHTYEAR!!! 
This one could just be timing. The last trip I took to Disney World involved my whole family and was planned close to a year in advance in order to find a time when everyone could go. So, you could not know you’re pregnant, or you could be going with your extended family with kids in an age range. Your choices then become taking the baby with you or missing out on a trip with everyone you care about.
Oh definitely. I understand that there are some random circumstances like that, but you’d be amazed how many people are strolling around Dland with a tiny baby–even late late at night, right before closing. There are SO MANY that I’m sure some have to be just taking their babies to Disneyland heh.
It depends a whole lot on the disposition of the child. My oldest child we could (and did) take everywhere. She would sleep or sit calmly and watch the passing scene. My second we could not take anywhere. She was physically incapable of sitting still and being quiet while awake and did not sleep for more than a few hours at a time for what seemed like forever. To have taken her on an airplane would have been cruel not only to her but to everyone on the plane!
Or not. I see wee little babies at local amusement parks all the time too, in the sort of places that are not a long-planned ahead destination, and the parents have to take turns on rides there as well. I think for a lot of people taking turns on rides is just better than not going at all, no matter how much or little time and money the day costs.
IME, most established amusement parks will let parents with a child or children who cannot go on a certain ride trade off - one parent goes on the ride (with any children large enough) while the second waits with the child(ren) who cannot go on. When the first parent gets off, the second gets on immediately. So your time spent on each ride isn’t significantly increased.
Time period when I was growing up? Late 50’s/early 60’s. We grew up in the Seattle area, but not in one social class. When I and the next one were born, we were very poor, moving up at bit until we were about 8, then my father finally graduated law school and we moved to what was probably lower middle class. Then more like middle middle class when the next two were born. So I don’t think social class was an influence, but time frame and/or area of the country may have been.
I’d say that it was different for me because my parents weren’t all that into kids (they weren’t, especially my father) but not taking children on all vacations seemed to be the norm for our friends as well.
Bitty babies are not, as I have seen it claimed, thrown off by changes in routine? Shoot, the time change and the long flight threw me off…
(Cats don’t travel with cargo when someone is flying with them.)
No, more the germ thing that so many moms worry about, plus the inherent dangers of travel, plus it seems to me there would be more danger to a baby on a boat or in a crowd than to an adult, or even an older child?
I’m not going to go there. You cannot know how I feel about my pets and so cannot know if its the same thing or not.
Again, not going there. I do not leave my pets in a kennel.
Could be, and I did say that I only noticed these babies and moms because they looked unhappy/stressed/noisy. Or jogging, which to me isn’t a fun thing to begin with…
It just seemed odd to me to spend that kind of money on a vacation but have to spend so much of it catering to someone who isn’t going to remember or enjoy the experience themselves.
Yes, this. My question isn’t about taking children on vacation - shoot, I live in one of the child vacation hot spots! It was about taking bitty babies, who require a lot of care and who won’t notice or remember any of it.
Where did you get that idea from anything I’ve said?
Because I agreed with another poster?
Yes, this too.
You are saying that taking a bitty baby on an expensive tropical vacation makes for better memories than if you had waited until the child was older?
The soccer player??
