We’re starting to have family discussions about our next vacation. Our oldest, a 14 year old boy, is not cooperating. He wants to stay home and play his guitar. We’d like to reach some concensus so that everyone is happy, or at least OK, with the choice. Any ideas on where we can go, what we can do when we get there?
The younger kids, Ms. Plan B, and I are relatively easy to please. We can do an all inclusive family place, like Club Med, we can go to a new city, just about anything.
One idea that just came up, but about which we know nothing, is to stay at the Hard Rock hotel at Disney.
We did that for Christmas when my brother was 18 (not the Hard Rock, but a rock-n-roll themed hotel on Disney property). He was miserable, miserable to be around and made the whole trip miserable. It was CHRISTMAS and we were at DISNEY WORLD and he still managed to have a bad time and bring us down with him!!
I wish you could just leave the bugger home
Hopefully though your son is still young enough to talk a big game but not actually follow through with it, and be able to find some child-like happiness in wherever you choose to go.
He is 14, so you need to do something that he can be interested in, otherwise known as something where he doesn’t have to be around you all day. Trust me on this one, you will all enjoy the vacation a lot more if you aren’t listening to him gripe. Take him someplace where there are lots of girls in tiny swimsuits. Take him someplace where there is a stellar arcade and a fantastic pizza parlor. Take him somewhere he can take guitar lessons while everyone else goes swimming in the hotel pool or something. Take him on a cruise so he can do lots of things without you over his shoulder but can meet back up before you dock.
Let him choose. If the rest of the gang is so easy to please, then just tell him: “we are going on vacations together whether you want to or not. You cannot stay home. We will go anywhere you choose (within what’s possible, of course). Let me know in (set deadline here) or I will choose a place if you haven’t.”
Let him bring a friend. It will up the expense, of course, but it’s the best way to help a kid in that age-range have a good time. It will help the rest of you, too, because when the boys are suffering from chronic testosterone poisoning, they can go off by themselves and leave you all in peace.
YES!! As the mother of a 16 year old boy, I agree wholeheartedly. And go somewhere where they have an option to get away from “the family” and “do their own thing”.
Get him a beat-up acoustic guitar that he can take on the vacation. The constant soundtrack may get annoying, but it’s better than constant complaining. (My teenage brother-in-law sounds exactly like the boy you’re describing.)
Even better than the acoustic: get him an electric guitar with headphones. Then he can play without driving you nuts, even if everyone else is talking, reading, watching TV, or whatever.
Bringing a friend works great.
Make sure he has stuff to keep him occupied on the airplanes: handheld games like Nintendo DS or PSP, an MP3 player, a portable DVD player (we bought one for $39.95 at Radio Shack last year), magazines, books… Whatever works. If he’s bored stiff, you’ll be miserable.
Find a place that has both group activities and stuff he can solo (the guitar lessons were a neat idea). Plan a day where he can do whatever he wants while you guys do something else…or even go with him if he wants to.
Remember that everyone’s tastes are different. I’d be miserable at Disney World for Christmas, and I would have been at age 14, too. I’ve always hated big crowds, and I’ve always liked snow at Christmastime. He may just not be into what you expect a 14-year-old to be into.
My 14-year-old son griped about our Thanksgiving trip to Mexico for weeks, but when we went, he had a good time. We just didn’t make him go shopping, and let him spend all the time he wanted at the pool or playing videogames in the room. He ended up enjoying the fishing, and really getting into the variety of foods.
My experience as the father of 4 now grown-up children is that they are all different, and what works well for one may not work at all for others. So I agree with the suggestion that you need to get your son’s involvement, both in choosing the destination, and in choosing some (though not all!) of the activities there.
A friend of mine is a professional guitarist, and he has a fantabulous creation - a flat piece of wood, as wide as a guitar neck, with strings like a guitar, tunable and all, and no body or sounding case. Instead, it has a stethescope rubber-banded to the back of the wood. So on an airplane, in his hotel room, at the mall, wherever, he can play his “guitar” and he’s the only one who can hear it. It’s smaller than an electric with headphones, even quieter to everyone else, doesn’t have to be turned off for any part of the flight, and needs no batteries.
It’d be a pretty easy build for a 14 year old with a few tools and hardware.
When my brother was that age and stopped wanting to go on vacation, mom usually let him bring a friend when reasonable. I ALWAYS wanted to go on vacation!!! I never did understand why he would want to stay home - our parents are very un-lame as parents go. Pretty much all of our vacations included either an ocean or a nice lake, so watersports and BBQ/eating out were always a given. I’m upset my parents don’t really take me anymore now that I’m in college and my friends and I can’t afford to go anywhere on our own. Especially because they always go to the Caribbean now.
Or, see if you can pawn him off on the parents of a friend for a week and have him stay with them.
Seriously, I feel his pain. My parents forced me to go with them to Williamsburg for Christmas one year when I was on break from college. :rolleyes: All I wanted to do was sleep in and get a chance to see friends that I only got to see on break, and instead I was forced to endure the commercial abomination that is Colonial Williamsburg. It’s a waste of money if the kid just doesn’t want to go.
I use this answer in just about every parenting thread, because it works better than anything else…Duct TapeI’ve yet to encounter a parenting problem that could not be resolved with generous application.
Since the Hard Rock Hotel is at Universal and not at Disney, yeah, you have some research to do. Universal is a better choice for most teenagers than Disney (Disney doesn’t have a lot of thrill rides) - but a week in Orlando would let you do a little of both.
I agree with letting him be involved, letting him bring a friend (if that is a reasonable suggestion from cost and trust issues), letting him bring a guitar.
Picture this:
Grandma lives is a tidy, Precious Moments decorated house with lace and doily covered furniture. She has a 13" color TV. She goes to church regularly and eats funny ethnic food in am old folks community. She knits and crochets.
Our parents would threaten to send us there, to visit. :eek:
I agree with everyone who said to let him bring a friend.
I have been through this with 2 boys and a girl.
To a 14-year-old, everyone is stupid. Everything you say, every place you visit and every idea you come up with - all stupid. He will gripe, complain and mope all the way there and back. If he is secretly having fun, he will never admit it. It goes against the code.
But the friend changes everything. Suddenly the stupidest place becomes fun, because now he has one cool person to hang with. They can mock the stupidness of others together and have a great time.
Make sure he has a working watch, an appointed time to meet back, and give him some freedom to enjoy himself. Nothing more humiliating to a teen than being seen with parents.
If the ‘bring a friend’ idea is not an option, let him choose some destinations. Make sure he has working headphones to soothe his angst. If you’re driving, make sure he has enough space that he doesn’t have to make physical contact with younger siblings.
Make sure to take plenty of group pictures. You will all get a kick out of it later. He will most likely have the eye-rolling look of disgust and disgruntlement in every picture. When he looks back at these pictures 5 years from now, he will realize he was the stupid one.
I’ve seen the “bring a friend” idea backfire once, at least for part of the trip. My inlaws planned a family trip to Italy for the parents, adult children, and their own children if they had any. I had two teenage nieces going along, and one just would not go without a friend, so her parents paid for her friend to go as well. Since an unrelated girl was going with them, they got a suite in the hotel. At one point, the hotel management went up to their room because the niece and her friend were seen by passers-by mooning the people outside, off their room’s balcony.
Another night, the niece who so desperately needed a friend along - to be able to bear getting away from wintry Chicago to a trip to a balmy, palm-tree-lined beach of the Italian Riviera - had a meltdown in a restaurant, screaming at her parents about how they didn’t know what it was like being away from their friends and in this awful place, and blah blah blah while her friend sat next to her, trying simultaneously to sink into the floor while feeling like chopped liver. (At that point, I would have voted for trading the friend for my niece.)
