Every July we go to Agadir. 3 children. Surfboards they can barely carry. A deliberate choice to do something physical, slightly scary, and completely outside of normal life.
Travel in this family is not about relaxation. It is about exposure. Teaching 3 humans that the world is bigger than their postcode, that discomfort is survivable, and that the willingness to try things that might not work is one of the most important skills you can develop.
That word survivable is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so it is worth slowing down on. Children are not taught that discomfort passes. They are usually taught that discomfort means stop. A cold sea is the cleanest possible lesson in the other thing, because it is genuinely unpleasant for about 90 seconds and then it simply is not, and nobody has to explain that to them. The body does the explaining.
And once a person has had that experience a few times, in a context where nothing bad happens, they have something to draw on. Not a belief about resilience. A memory of being cold and then being fine.
The second thing that happens is the falling off. A surfboard is an unusually honest teacher. You fall, repeatedly, in front of people, and there is no version in which you do not. There is no way to look competent while learning, which means the usual strategy of only attempting things you are already good at is unavailable for the week.
Most adults have organised their lives to avoid exactly that. It is worth noticing how rarely you do anything in front of other people that you are visibly bad at.
The surf trip is the annual reset. Salt water, physical exhaustion, terrible wi-fi, and the particular joy of watching your children do something they did not think they could do. That moment, the wave they catch, the fall they survive, the pride on their face, is worth every logistical nightmare of travelling with 3 kids and 4 surfboards.
The terrible wi-fi is not incidental, by the way. It is probably the most effective part of the whole arrangement and it was not chosen. A week in which nobody can reach you easily does something that a week of deciding not to look at your phone does not, because the deciding is itself the work and you have to keep doing it. Bad signal takes the decision away.
What tends to go wrong with a family holiday is that it is designed as relaxation and relaxation is not available to the person who is in charge. If the week is only lovely when everybody behaves, you have booked a fortnight of risk. If the week is built around doing 1 physical thing badly together, the behaviour sorts itself out, because tired people are easier.
The other thing I would say is that the activity being slightly frightening is not a flaw in the plan. Something with a small amount of genuine jeopardy produces a particular kind of attention that a pool does not. You are present for it, all of you, at the same time, which is a thing that almost never happens at home.
And it does not have to be Morocco or a surfboard. The shape is what matters. Something physical. Something nobody in the family is already good at. Somewhere the signal is poor. Enough days for the first 2 to be difficult, because the first 2 days are always difficult and a long weekend ends exactly when it is starting to work.
A cold lake and a rented tent does it. So does a long walk nobody is ready for. A hill will do. The point is not the location. The point is that you arrive home with something you did rather than somewhere you went.
What I notice afterwards is not the children being braver, exactly. It is that the register in the house changes for a few weeks. Things that would have been a crisis in June are not a crisis in August, and somebody who has been dropped off a wave 30 times has a different relationship with being told no.
It wears off. That is fine. That is why it is annual.
More like this
The houseboat interiors that cost almost nothing.
The river is my front garden: cold water swimming and the nervous system
On why a day away is not a day off
If you want to talk about any of this, I am at anna@annalouoflondon.com, or on WhatsApp.
If a trip is not on the cards and you still need to come off the ceiling, Rest and restore is the session for it. 60 minutes, one to one and private, online or in person at The Hare and the Moon in Twickenham on a Tuesday between 10am and 1.30pm. Book a Tuesday.