When to push your kids: taking them out of their comfort zone

There’s nothing like pulling your child out of their comfort zone and plunging them into an unfamiliar situation and seeing how they sink or swim.

Enabling your child to experience the world as it really is should almost be considered a parental duty, but in practice, it’s not always easy to achieve.

Travelling with kids ain’t easy, whichever way you cut it. With parents often confined to school holidays when prices sky rocket,  soaring airfares and hammering exchange rates, it has become harder for the average parent to give their child the travel experiences that many of us took for granted in our childhoods. Add to that Jonah’s autism, which makes it harder for him to cope with changes in place and routine, and even diet, and the whole experience can feel less like a holiday and more like an experiment in personal stress management.

I’m also a believer in testing boundaries,  whether my own or my children’s, exposing their plastic juvenile minds to ways of being and cultures that are unfamiliar to them in order that they start out open minded and question the things they take for granted. It’s just a shame that for us,  four airfares means a family holiday out of the UK is more of a pipe dream than a plausible reality

I was lucky. My divorced parents took me on a couple of holidays a year each as a child, and I visited America and Europe, and in my teens ventured east to  Singapore and Bali, as my Dad’s business grew. But it was my own travels before and during uni, to India, Asia and Australia that really opened my eyes up to just how different the world could be and how easy and affordable travel was, if you knew the right places to go.

Which is why, when I do take my kids abroad, it won’t be to France, hamstrung as we are by an unaffordable Euro, or America, to the saccharine artificiality of Disney, but it will be to the beaches of Goa or the islands of Thailand where you can experience another world while you play in the sand and swim in the sea, and where a plate of chips won’t cost an arm and a leg, and anyway, chips are of the menu, kids, so you’re just going to have to try curry or starve.

This is the one time when I think it’s right, fair and necessary to push your kids, especially when the usual fail safes are taken away and they learn to see the world in a whole new light. If only, if only it was easier to get away in the first place.

For now, Jonah has in his holiday memory bank our trip to Bognor where he fell in a pool, aged four and a half without armbands, and really did learn to swim. When push comes to shove, kids adapt to wherever they end up, so it’s important, if you can, to take them out of their comfort zone every now and again, and even better, show them there’s more to the world than can be viewed through a screen.