Family travel content has, for several decades, been organised around theme-park-based templates that produce predictable but often unsatisfying results. Several alternative approaches produce more durable family memories without requiring the structured-attraction infrastructure.

The five approaches

The five approaches are: extended-family group travel that brings together cousins across generations; long-weekend trips to a single small town that allow children to settle into a place rather than rushing through it; family-camping trips at the kind of state and federal parks whose infrastructure makes them accessible to non-experienced campers; structured cultural trips that use specific historical sites or museums as anchors; and family-volunteer trips that engage children in service work appropriate to their ages.

What they share

What the alternative approaches share is the kind of unstructured time that allows families to interact with each other rather than to consume entertainment together. The unstructured time is the substance of which family memories are made.

What they require

What they require is the parental willingness to plan less aggressively than the theme-park templates encourage. The willingness is harder than it sounds; the dominant family-travel culture has trained parents to fill time, not to leave it open.

The honest read

The honest read is that the alternative approaches produce trips that some children will find less immediately exciting than theme-park trips. The trips also produce, on the longer arc, the kind of family memories the theme-park trips do not. Both of these are true. Both should figure into how families decide what to do.