I took a bus home with my toddler one day when waiting for the planned ride was going to take a longer time than I was originally expecting. I didn't think much of it, but for him the bus ride was WAY more interesting than the zoo we had just visited!
Tbh if you've never done either, I can absolutely see why getting on and riding a machine 1000x your size is a bigger deal than seeing various animals from a distance.
For their 3rd Birthday the daughter of a friend just wanted to ride the bus. So all our friends and their kids got on the right bus at the right time and place so we were all on the bus by the time the Birthday girl got on.
We had a riot of a time going around our little town, and the bus driver and other passengers all sang Happy Birthday and “the wheels on the bus”
When I was a kid in suburban Australia my parents would organize a semi-annual ‘bus-train-ferry’ trip. It was a school holiday tradition where - in hindsight - we’d do the sort of daily commute that thousands of working adults would do every morning…except for a kid the magic of a bus to a train station, a train into the city, and then a ferry across the river was just great fun. A day ticket for a family back in the 1980s? Probably next to nothing, but a priceless memory.
I took a train to work for a few years, and a ferry to work for about a year later. Even if it's regular it's still magical.
A couple of times I took the bus to the ferry, walked to the light rail, took that to the airport, flew, then picked up a rental car and drove in to work. Maybe the airport train too. Pretty much all the modes but a bike.
When I was growing up, it was a Christmas tradition for my family to take the local train system (SEPTA) from Delaware to Philly to visit the exhibits at the old Gallery mall. It was a rough, dirty, and crowded ride, and it felt like forever as it stopped at every station. My grandparents would take my mother when she was growing up.
Decades later it still left a positive impact on me.
I went to the transport office and got a map of all the local tram routes - we hung it on the wall, and my child and I rode every tram from one end to the other.
Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.
Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Great that you posted this. I told my story of riding metro with my son, but only after this one un-stuck my brain to think of other locations in my city we could ride to, for almost nothing.
Funnily, when I was in Helsinki, I did ride couple of trams to the terminus. But in my brain, this was stored in another department, "urban research going to the fringe". Not "going out with the kid".
For my middle child's 1st Birthday we realized we could give him everything he ever wanted for about $8. He opened a few boxes of bandaids, tissue boxes, and a roll of toilet paper. Played for hours.
When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
For our Disney(land) trip, we stayed at a motel ~ 1.5 miles from the park (Canadian walking distance) and the thing my kids LOVED was we walked by a 7-11 every day and I would buy them a slurpee on the morning walk to the gates. Probably $20 for the week (and likely not much worse for you than a typical vacation breakfast).
The "make your own waffle" station at the included breakfast was also a huge hit. The park and rides were satisfactory.
I've taken my older daughter to Disney (World) twice now (at ages 7 and 9). Her absolute favorite part: riding the Skyliner to EPCOT. On our second trip we went an hour out of our way to go ride it because we weren't at a served hotel that time.
When pressed for a favorite activity within the park, it was "that time we ran all the way from Japan to Soarin', dodging people".
Even as an adult I enjoy time when some other person I am spending time with is fully engaged and fully present, I’d call it quality time, but it’s just so rare…
Same - I hold onto friends for dear life who are capable of keeping their phone in their pocket. There is a time and a place for devices of course, but it's such a terrible feeling to be fully engaged in conversation with someone and all of a sudden they pull out their phone to get a bump of that endless scroll.
When we were kids, at some point we lived in a house whose garden was on top of a hill. So we would sometimes just look for whatever cardboard box is available and roll down the hill inside it.
I stopped offering stuff to my kids for birthdays a long time ago, they got enough from uncles and aunts. I prefer offering "events" like going some place special. Memories are more important than plastic stuff.
I once made a cardboard box (from an oven) into a real-life duplicator as a mad scientist at a talent show using a couple of twins as part of the show. Had some people blown away. lol.
A few months ago, we took our year-and-a-half-old daughter to Belgium and Spain for two weeks. Her favorite part of the whole trip was seeing horses, sheep, and geese (all of which, believe it or not, we have here at home in Canada).
When I was about seven, my sister and I were taken on a special trip to see the Giant Pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The pandas were fine, but we were fascinated by the chipmunks running around everywhere.
Given your username, I will mention the fascination of visitors with the squirrels in Washington. I know that they used to interest me when we visited my grandmother in Arlington. We had some in northern Ohio, but a) there was less tree cover, and b) a far smaller proportion of the trees were oaks.
As a grown ass man, I make a point of visiting zoos in foreign cities if I'm in a city that has one. My lady is never as enthusiastic, but then quickly forgets about her lack of enthusiasm with the first glance of a meerkat
My gf and I went to Ronda in Spain a few years ago and stopped at the amazing bridge over the gorge. Looked around for a few minutes and then spotted a mother cat leading her litter of kittens through a field down below. We watched them, entranced, for ages. It's always the way with us.
> My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.
Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.
Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.
So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.
I have travel entire Vietnam with people with kids. After seeing all the pagoda, park, cave, amusement park.. the best part of the travel for the kid was the pool at one hotel.
My wife remembers going to Disney World with her grandparents when she was 6 or so. Her fondest memories were the hotel pool and the lizards that lounged around it. Those poor grandparents. Imagine spending a lot of money and then dealing with a tantrum when you say "Let's go to Disney World."
yep, my parents took my sister & I to Florida. My mother went with my sister to Disney World. I didn't go, I stayed back at the place with my father & we played marbles. I got to see a turtle run down a hill. Great time. Thankfully they knew amusement parks weren't of interest to me already from when we'd gone to Universal Studios & I mostly remember sitting on a bench
Wow, we did the exact same trip a couple years ago, and also stayed at that amazing cabin place. Took home 80 lbs of crystals! Highly recommend.
We also stopped by the Arkansas diamond mine and tried our hand at it. Way less fun, with a near zero chance of finding so much as a speck of a diamond.
If they like that consider taking them clamming if that's a thing near you. I don't really eat clams and thought I might get bored digging in the mud, but somehow it hits some "natural slot machine" desire in my head.
Our son loved the Monorail as much as the park, and when by luck of the draw we were the first in line at one of them, he was invited into the cabin by the engineer(? conductor?) and got to "drive" one was the highlight for him for years.
My son loves to ride a bus too, I'm not a fan, and near me buses are single deck, quite old and unpleasant and really quite expensive.
I discovered they city park and ride scheme was the perfect solution. It's cheaper than parking in the city centre and unlimited bus rides to and from the centre on nice new double decker buses.
This really hits home. Like everyone, I tend to fall into routines and get comfortable with the familiar. But having kids constantly pushes you out of that comfort zone because they're excited by things that might seem small or inconvenient to you. Embracing their enthusiasm is not only good for them but for you too. It brings some variety and breaks the routine. I always have to resist the urge to tell my kids, "No, we're not doing that because..." Just going with the flow and joining in their little adventures is incredibly rewarding. It's not just about making them happy—you gain just as much. Their joy is just the bonus.
Certainly it's true that kids can get a lot of joy out of something that to an adult seems really small or boring. But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.
Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?
They naturally take all the space they can get, learning their limits. Issue is, they don't hear "no" often enough early on, to know that there are limits.
I think many adults also get distraught or enraged by tiny things - it is an emotional regulation problem, not an age problem (but adults can and should be better than children).
An analogy I've heard in the past is that emotions are like a button fixed in a box with a ball in it. When you're younger the box is smaller so the ball hits the buttons more often as there is less free space. As you grow, your box grows too, so your ball has more space in the box and more empty space on the walls for the ball the bounce off of, making the buttons less likely to be pushed.
That analogy seems a bit contrived, but the "button pushing" reminds me of something.
At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.
To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".
The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.
I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.
Thinking about it… yes, I suppose it did change my perspective.
It made me feel a lot more empathy for the “lone woman in a dark parking lot” scenario.
It made me realise I’m a meat computer running on chemicals and I’m not as in control of my emotions as I previously liked to think.
I realised that strong feelings can occur without an apparent matching cause. Feeling good without a success, feeling bad without hurt, etc… Emotions exist in and of themselves and can be directly triggered.
Etc… probably too much to write here, and things that are probably obvious to most readers but wasn’t obvious to me until that incident.
PS: It reminds me of instinct: we humans don’t have many that can override our conscious minds, but we do have some. The feeling of drowning for example can trigger completely involuntary actions. Unless you’ve experienced something like this, you just don’t know what it’s like to have biology overrule your thoughts.
This "ball and button in a box" analogy is precisely the one that people told me about when I was processing grief.
Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.
When you're a kid, so many experiences are new, so the emotional response is higher.
A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.
As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.
Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>
I don’t think it’s an either or. They are two sides of the same coin in that “kids experience stronger emotions”, but my experience leads me to see multiple reasons for that.
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.
From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)
Yesterday the rain was torrential when I picked up my 5yo from school with my 2yo. I brought wellies and we walked up and down the streams of water running down the hill. The kids were more excited than anything we've paid for recently.
The issue is you don’t know which of the 0-5 dollar products to spend that will make them excited.
A strategy is therefore to buy lots of cheap stuff and experiences, and let the kids have the option to choose. Then throw away the stuff they don’t care for.
If you buy expensive things, you tend to try to force that thing onto the kid, which can be counter productive.
We took a trip to North Carolina with our at the time 5 year old. The only things we took for entertainment was one of those pens with 4 different inks and a pad of paper.
If I may amend, try a "Wow, that's beautiful! That must have taken a lot of work!" and you might keep your kid drawing long-term. It's nearly always better to praise effort over skill IMO.
I've been spending my entire adult life trying to rediscover this spiritual joy of being a child. I remember it so fondly. My daughter is about to turn 2 and I'm secretly hoping that she can help me find at least a little of it.
A while ago I was at our patio table with my 4 year old, we were building a house/castle thing out of scrap cardboard. At one point while painting it she pauses and looks over at the garden/woods. I asked her what she saw, she smiled at me and said, "I'm just... happy." I'll never forget it :-)
While rediscovering the world with kids is more wholesome, if you want the raw experience of looking at nature with novelty in your mind, try LSD or magic mushrooms.
I've been to restaurants where two adults and two kids are sitting at a table. The adults looking at their phones and the kids watching something on tablets makes for poor chances of an interesting little moment to happen.
Before he was even 3 my son knew the menu at the local Indian place we went to weekly and he'd pick out which curry he wanted that day. He asks about the decorations and paintings on the wall of every restaurant we go to, and generally stays engaged with us throughout the entire meal.
Yes it is more work, but it also means he is learning patience and manners.
Do the things that will give your kids the greatest exposure to different ways of being, living, and seeing. That ain't done by having entrenched routines.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadBrilliant idea for a memorable 3rd Birthday!
A couple of times I took the bus to the ferry, walked to the light rail, took that to the airport, flew, then picked up a rental car and drove in to work. Maybe the airport train too. Pretty much all the modes but a bike.
Decades later it still left a positive impact on me.
Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.
Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Funnily, when I was in Helsinki, I did ride couple of trams to the terminus. But in my brain, this was stored in another department, "urban research going to the fringe". Not "going out with the kid".
When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
They still talk about that trip.
The "make your own waffle" station at the included breakfast was also a huge hit. The park and rides were satisfactory.
When pressed for a favorite activity within the park, it was "that time we ran all the way from Japan to Soarin', dodging people".
My family are pretty regular Disneyland goers. Last year we finally made it to Disney World for the first time.
My four “kids” were between the ages of 12-23.
And I think their favorite part of the trip was the Skyliner.
I stopped offering stuff to my kids for birthdays a long time ago, they got enough from uncles and aunts. I prefer offering "events" like going some place special. Memories are more important than plastic stuff.
Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.
Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.
Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.
So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.
also parents have gotten rid of BB guns and fireworks!
Things a screen and all the gadgets and fancy engineering in the world can never replace.
As per the examples in this thread, what kids do and don't like has very little in common with adults' expectations of what they'll like.
We also stopped by the Arkansas diamond mine and tried our hand at it. Way less fun, with a near zero chance of finding so much as a speck of a diamond.
The crystals were beautiful, and the kids could find them with ease. Tons of fun.
They each got their own pickaxe, which they loved.
They claimed they were already expert diggers because of all the hours they spent playing Minecraft. "We know how to dig, Dad."
I asked kids (7 or so yo) what was the favourite part?
He answered Singapore, because it was cold (aka air conditioning everywhere)
I discovered they city park and ride scheme was the perfect solution. It's cheaper than parking in the city centre and unlimited bus rides to and from the centre on nice new double decker buses.
Because it’s easy to forget. :)
Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?
Oof isn't this the truth. The tiniest things will drive my son into full meltdowns right now.
At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.
To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".
The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.
I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.
Did it change how you much control you feel you have in regards to being in charge of your own thoughts and emotions?
Thinking about it… yes, I suppose it did change my perspective.
It made me feel a lot more empathy for the “lone woman in a dark parking lot” scenario.
It made me realise I’m a meat computer running on chemicals and I’m not as in control of my emotions as I previously liked to think.
I realised that strong feelings can occur without an apparent matching cause. Feeling good without a success, feeling bad without hurt, etc… Emotions exist in and of themselves and can be directly triggered.
Etc… probably too much to write here, and things that are probably obvious to most readers but wasn’t obvious to me until that incident.
PS: It reminds me of instinct: we humans don’t have many that can override our conscious minds, but we do have some. The feeling of drowning for example can trigger completely involuntary actions. Unless you’ve experienced something like this, you just don’t know what it’s like to have biology overrule your thoughts.
Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.
A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.
As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.
Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.
A strategy is therefore to buy lots of cheap stuff and experiences, and let the kids have the option to choose. Then throw away the stuff they don’t care for.
If you buy expensive things, you tend to try to force that thing onto the kid, which can be counter productive.
Kept him occupied for the 16 hours.
Bigs things happen in the little moments, and you have to have those little moments for them to happen.
I've been to restaurants where two adults and two kids are sitting at a table. The adults looking at their phones and the kids watching something on tablets makes for poor chances of an interesting little moment to happen.
It's irrelevant: you can smell many of them even after they have left the wagon or room, still you're not with them.
Before he was even 3 my son knew the menu at the local Indian place we went to weekly and he'd pick out which curry he wanted that day. He asks about the decorations and paintings on the wall of every restaurant we go to, and generally stays engaged with us throughout the entire meal.
Yes it is more work, but it also means he is learning patience and manners.