From California (where lots of HI tourists are from) it is possible to find $500 tickets. Lots of people have a timeshare kicking around the family or other connections to cheap lodging- and this lodging often has cooking facilities. It doesn’t cost a lot to lounge on beaches. With some luck, Hawaii can be a pretty affordable vacation.
I actually usually see lots of deals for $350ish round trip out of LAX, but I’m on a million travel special mailing lists. The killer about Hawaii (from California, at least) isn’t so much the air or hotel, but the food. Food is goddamned crazy expensive in Hawaii.
Which is a non-factor for the infants being talked about in this thread, especially if they’re breastfeeding.
My reason for taking vacations with my son when he was very small, was quite simply that I wanted to go on vacation.
We didn’t go with any thoughts of his getting anything out of it. Just that we needed a break. I could be tired, stressed and dealing with an infant at home. Or I could be doing it away from home, staying in a hotel or resort with someone else cleaning the room every day.
I think it’s more a matter that babies are aware of the people around them than the scenery. Babies are people-focused from the start because that’s where the food, warmth, protection, and clean diapers come from. They know who their primary caretaker(s) are (usually mommy and daddy, but nannies, older siblings, and so forth also count if they’re around a lot). Being left for days with someone they don’t know, who doesn’t know them well, can be distressing for all concerned. Being cared for by a stranger in a familiar place isn’t that wonderful for them, because it’s the people they are oriented towards, not the place.
It will vary, of course, because babies aren’t identical, but some infants may find being cared for by people other than their parents more disturbing than a change in scenery. If they’re spending quite a bit of time in a carrier they’re familiar with, well, the scenery from their viewpoint isn’t changing that much, is it?
Do infants “get anything out of it”? Probably not in the sense adults or older children do. However, they might get parents who are more relaxed and less stressed which can result in a baby less stressed and fussy.
I suspect that, although I don’t have children either, I have a much higher tolerance for them than you do. If the parents are minding the children adequately I see no reason not to take children of any age traveling. Of course, we’ve all encountered children allowed to run riot in public but I blame the parents, not the children, especially the younger kids.
It’s already been touched on, but whether or not you can take a service animal in the main cabin of an airplane depends on several factors. Seeing eye dogs are a shoo-in, they’re allowed, the rest maybe or maybe not depending on a patchwork of rules, regulations, and corporate policies.
Yes (unless the kid has some medical problem, but you did specify a normal child). In fact, overuse of hand sanitizers may be detrimental. Apparently overly sanitized surroundings are associated with a higher risk of allergies. You obviously don’t want to roll babies in raw sewage but healthy kids can tolerate some dirt. Our culture insists on every one bathing daily, for example, but really, skipping a day or two won’t hurt a healthy human being as far as health is concerned even if said person is feeling sticky and uncomfortable or just less than preferred cleanliness.
Baby butts need a lot of cleaning, but if you’re properly changing diapers that happens when you swamp the dirty for clean. The rest of the kid, eh, not so much.
Not everyone views Hawai’i as “all that way”, probably. Sure, it’s a long plane ride, but so would a trip from LA to New York or from the east coast to Europe or wherever be lengthy.
The vacation is really for the benefit of the the adults (and possibly older siblings). Once the adults decide on taking such a trip, then the question becomes is it better to bring the kid or leave the baby in someone else’s care. If you keep in mind that, despite the stress and disrupted sleep, a lot of people are THRILLED to have a new baby in their lives, bringing baby along starts to make more sense. If mom and dad would feel better bringing baby despite the burdens an infant imposes (which, although consuming time and energy, really are manageable) than leaving baby behind, well, you have baby tourists in Hawai’i.
As long as the children are adequately cared for, whether at home with a caretaker or along with the parents on a trip, who cares? You’re always demanding people with offspring take responsibility and care for them properly - if they can do that while towing the kid along on vacation what’s the issue? May not be the decision you would make, but as long as no harm is done, again, who cares?
I’ve stayed at hotels and resorts that informed guests of daycare and sitting services as well. This is sort of the best of both worlds, because parents can have their children with them most of the vacation (most families don’t really like multi-day separations when the children are young) but if they do want to get away for an adults-only dinner or activity for a couple hours they can do so by leaving their offspring in proper care and supervision while they do it. Perhaps, as someone childless, you are simply not aware of these sorts of services.
I think the OP just has a POV on children that is fundamentally different from people who choose to have children. She asked in her OP “what kind of vacation is mom getting?” Well, the kind of vacation people have when they have children. It might be a little more inconvenient than traveling only with adults, but that doesn’t make the experience worthless. I like Hawai’i, and I like my children…I personally don’t see a reason to give up one so I could have the other.
Yeah, babies and children can be a little bit of trouble, can add some difficulty to life. But to quote a favorite TV show of mine when the parents were agonizing over daycare, “that is not our burden, that is our gift.”
Another issue is that you don’t know what your kid will enjoy / tolerate.
My older son loved being in the backpack, so we took him everywhere with us. He went into caves, camping, long trails, etc. He learned to walk in Stockholm during a trip. As long as we were moving, he was happy.
You don’t know what you will be able to do, until you try it. Some kids do great camping, others don’t. Some kids love the spicy salsa in El Salvador, others hate it. Until you take the trip, you don’t know. As long as you are flexible with adjusting your trek, you are fine.
Eh. People are just different. We wouldn’t have dreamed of taking our Little One to Hawaii at 6 months. But we did take her to Yosemite around that time and had a blast (although if I had to do it over again, I would have changed a couple of the logistics). My parents thought we were absolutely crazy, but they wanted us to take her to Mexico with them at around the same time, so… whatever.
Well, I don’t have kids; might have chosen to do so if the right circumstances had presented themselves. That’s life. Haven’t been to Hawaii, either. But I’m pretty sure that, if I get to go, I won’t let the presence of babies ruin the trip for me.
Years ago, some friends went down to Mexico while their baby was pretty young. They’re old Mexico hands & were staying at a resort-type destination, not in the boonies. I think the kid was on formula, which they supplemented with mineral water & the occasional tortilla; she thrived & they all enjoyed themselves. Most of the other vacationers were couples taking their first “time off” after having babies–who’d been left in the USA because of the danger(!) Apparently the other couples really missed their kids & lavished lots of attention on The Youngest Tourist.
Yes, I suppose. I’m having trouble picturing someplace like that as de rigueur tho… :eek:
The first two of us were a year and a month apart but during the time we were babies my parents couldn’t afford any vacations anyway. The next two were born when I was 10 & 11 - when my parents went away for the weekend, they left them with me, for a longer period of time we all went to one grandparent or the other. I don’t know if they took the last two on vacation with them ever - I escaped the day I turned 18. Oh no, wait - I remember we went camping at least once after the last one was out of diapers.
And the touristy things, damn! We spent over $600 on the two of us for a luau, a horseback ride and a snorkeling trip. I suppose the babies get in free tho.
In your case, you got to do those things without baby in tow, right?
Tolerance has nothing to do with it. Except for at the airport, I don’t recall meeting any kids that were any sort of issue except the baby at the luau and his/her mom kept taking him/her out. It was more a matter of “damn, here you are in this tropical paradise and you bring a baby that cannot take any care of itself at all??” It looks like from what has been said here tho, that is the best time to take a young child - which is supported by the fact that I don’t remember seeing any toddlers at all. Lots of kids from about 7 or so and up, but younger than that it was all bitty babies.
Seeing eye dogs are under the same rules as service dogs because that is what they are. What was being talked about upthread was flying with a cat, a regular housepet.
That’s kind of it - to me, Hawai’i isn’t a place I’d think of as a tourist destination for young children - it’s freaking expensive, there aren’t any theme parks (well, not on Maui anyway) and really, the things they can do are things that can be done someplace much cheaper. Jaysus, even the gas was 70 cents a gallon more than at home, and our gas costs almost the most in all of mainland US.
I think of Hawai’i as a place you get married or take your honeymoon, or as in my case, something that’s on your bucket list that you finally get to do. It didn’t really startle me to see kids there, but the bitty babies were a surprise.
I didn’t say anyone cared, I merely asked why. As for caring for them properly, it appears that Hawai’i gets a better class of tourist than Southern California does.
Nope! It probably wasn’t available where we stayed, but there were high end hotels right down the road who could have had this sort of thing.
Well, in my defense, what I noticed were mothers that didn’t seem to be having much of a vacation. However, since the folks here say that it isn’t that much of an issue to travel with a new baby, it’s quite likely there were lots of mothers with new babies having a great time, but I didn’t notice them in the swarm of other people having a great time.
But yeah, I don’t get the whole baby thing, which is why I asked. When I go on vacation, or come home, I want as few responsibilities and as little noise as possible. When I travel I almost always take at least one dog, but I very rarely take the young untrained ones because of all the extra work - and they don’t cry, or need to be fed and changed frequently!
No, mostly we did things with the kids. The adults took turns snorkeling while someone else watched their kids, and we went out to dinner without the kids once or twice, but mostly we did things all together.
I’m in my 50s, and I always went on vacation with my parents when I was growing up. My father always had two weeks a year, and we would almost always spend it during the summer at Six Flags over Texas (at least every other year) followed by my grandmother’s house in Arkansas. Occasionaly we took a little extra vacation when school was out for Easter to go see my grandmother, especially if we ended up with rare alternate plans for the summer.
As for taking babies and small children places on vacation, I can tell you they get pampered by all the locals in a place like Thailand. Case in point was a married couple we know. Now living in Denver, they married here in Thailand back in the 1980s. (Not a case of a Thai wife; both are white Americans working in country.) In the 1990s, the husband, an engineer, signed on for an extended job in Indonesia, where their son was born. Before returning to the US in 1999, they revisited Thailand, along with he wife’s sister. The wife, her sister and the son came to mainland SE Asia ahead of the husband, as he had some finishing up to do in Indonesia. So the mother, sister and small boy (about 2 years old at this point) traveled up the Malay Peninsula, starting in Singapore, up through Malaysia and on into Thailand. My wife and I met up with them here in Bangkok, and a few days later the father arrived too. The boy was your stereotypical blue-eyed blond, and we could not go to any restaurant without the waitresses immediately taking charge of the kid and playing with him. He was like a drug to the locals, and they made the parents’ job very easy. They’ve since returned to Thailand with their son for another visit, along with their new daughter who I’m thinking was about 7 at the time.
In fact, before the father showed up in Bangkok, the mother, sister and small boy trio visited our Upper North, where the couple had been married. The mother told me that the three of them stopped off at what turned out to be, shall we say, an establishment of questionable repute, heh. The bargirls all went gaga over the boy, sweeping him off into the back dressing room. The mother was no newbie, in fact she could speak Thai very well and knew her way around, but she said after a short period, just when she was thinking maybe she’d better go back there to get him, the girl who took him away brought him back, positively reeking of cheap perfume from the girls all hugging him like a little doll. She said it took her half an hour to scrub off the smell back at the hotel. 
And she said when they were leaving, one of the girls escorted them outside, waved goodbye and said to the boy: “Bye-bye! Come back and buy me out when you get older!” (Meaning come back to pay the bar the fee for taking her off for, um, extracurricular activities.) Unfortunately, the boy, when I next saw him here at age 9 or so, had no recollection of any of these beautiful Thai women – bargirls, waitresses, regular bus passengers, you name it – all fawning over him, unable to keep their hands off him. Poor kid will never know what he missed.
Intelligent parents don’t take small children on trips for the benefit of the children. They just go on vacation and take their small (babies) along. Small (Pre-mobile) babies actually travel pretty well (once you get over the ear thing during take off and landing a plane). They usually travel as free as you can “lap child” you kid until they are three on a plane and not pay for a seat, they don’t add to hotel room costs or food costs. You can have sex in the room with them and they are oblivious. For parents with a first baby, they may realize that Hawaii with a six month old may be the last vacation they get for a while that isn’t kid centered.
People do take more vacations than they did when I was a kid - but people do, not families do. Independently, you start that as early as high school, continue it in college, do it as young single adults, as married childfree people, and when you have kids, vacations have become an important part of your life. Kids change them - but you don’t need to give them up.
As for memories - my kids started traveling when my youngest was two. No, they don’t remember the Disney World trip at two, their parents do (and the reason we went was because psuedo-cousin of mine was piloting the shuttle and got us tickets at the Cape for the private viewing rooms - the shuttle mission was delayed, but we were there - might as well take pictures of the kids with Mickey). However, each trip my kids have taken has built on the previous trips - they get through security better than most tourists at the airport. They can research, make plans, book reservations on the internet. And now (they are currently both tweens) they actually have a better appreciation for a larger world than they would without the travel.
We had our tweens in Hawaii this March. It was an awesome place to vacation with kids. Expensive, yes, for us - but it isn’t that expensive if you get a deal and are flying from California. And one of the things I’ve learned about life and vacations is that some people have a lot of money. My kids were PLENTY old enough to snorkel, whale watch, surf - and as toddlers just sitting on the beach playing in the surf (with lifejackets on - one of the bothersome things about beach vacations was packing lifejackets when they were little) was heaven for them.
I saw two things at the beach in Hawaii that made me tear up. One was a young (twelvish) girl who was learning to snorkle with her mother. She was deaf. The other was a younger girl - around six - learning about the surf with her parents - she was blind. Watching those kids learn about the world first hand from their parents reminded me why I’ve dragged my kids all over the world to learn about it first hand.
We took our son to Hawaii when he was 2. We might have left him with my parents, but they came with us on the trip. He mostly did fine, although he did throw a fit at the Polynesian Cultural Center. He calmed down and enjoyed the flaming-torch-juggling immensely, but doesn’t remember anything about it now (he’s 9). In fact, one of my favorite memories is when three Japanese women insisted that I take their picture with him on Waikiki Beach because he was so “kawaii”. I’m pretty sure they thought we were locals, because we have a vaguely Hawaiian look. So there’s a picture of my kid in some Japanese photo album now. I also remember that my dad took a nap in the afternoon while we wanted to go to the beach, so we left my son sleeping with him. When we came back, he was gnawing on the corner of a piece of gum. Asked Dad what it was all about and he said, “He wouldn’t stop crying, wanted mom, so I gave him a little sugar. Calmed him right down.” (In my dad’s hillbilly-American culture this is known as the ‘sugar tit’.)
Amen to this. When we took our son to India, he probably got a personal tour of nearly every small restaurant (kitchen included) we went to, plus was so stuffed full of sweets when we got him back we thought he’d start spinning like a top. Also, even though he was fully capable of walking, I think he was carried and bounced around on the knee of every adult we visited.
By the time we got home, we had to do some reverse-conditioning because suddenly he had to follow our rules again, which were considerably stricter than those where we had been visiting.
I swear, it was no holds barred over there - I still remember trying to prevent him from whacking a glass case over and over with something. Whatever it was he was hitting it with was about the same consistency of a paper towel roll (can’t recall exactly what it was, though) and he was 18 months so couldn’t hit it terribly hard, but I still didn’t want him to get used to whacking anything made of glass - or anything at all in someone else’s house. When I saw him, I immediately pulled him away, said “No!” and explained briefly why and tried to take the object away. But my husband’s grandmother’s response was, “Oh, let him. Let him. He’s just a boy being a boy,” then she gave it back to him! Unfortunately, that was the response to virtually anything he did, unless it was exceptionally dangerous.
A couple of points:
When I was young, my parents always took me and my sister on all the vacations they went on. They were family vacations, after all, and family meant you took the whole family. The travelling unit was the family, not the mother or the father or the couple.
More recently, my wife and I did actually take our five-month old to Maui last year. But it was more than a simple vacation. It was a wedding in her family. Accompanying us were her parents and grandmother, her sister, several uncles and aunts, and lots of cousins, all with their own children. The point of the trip was to attend the wedding, for us to see all these relatives, and for the relatives to see (and in some cases, babysit) our baby. It’s not important what the baby himself got out of it, as long as he wasn’t actually harmed.