A break for single parents

Since having kids, I now divide the world into two kinds of people: the ones who give me the evil eye when my children are howling and the ones who offer to help. Nowhere does this Manichean division seem more true than when I’m traveling. My heart bleeds when I see a mother struggling to keep a couple of children calm while herding them and all their belongings onto an airplane and I’m always shocked that everyone isn’t leaping forward to help. On Guatemalan buses, friends have told me, a crying baby is handed from arm to arm among the passengers. America a child-friendly culture, my tuckus.

My mother tells epic tales of traveling alone with me, so I’m delighted to learn (via Mothertalkers and Newsweek) of organizations that cater to single parents. About time. These organizations offer not only assistance, but company, something single parents could use just as much.

You will learn from this experience, or else

At a dinner party last night, we got into a discussion about what country it would be most educational to take children to. A friend who’s a former teacher mentioned she’d taken a group of high school students to Poland about ten years ago. To which my partner responded, “Poland? Poland? You could have gone to any European country and you chose Poland?”

Sorry, Poles and Pole-philes, no offense, but Warsaw just doesn’t have the allure of Rome or Barcelona or even London. Too many Soviet-era concrete high rises. Learning about WWII and the concentration camps was a major reason behind our friend’s decision to take the kids there, but as my partner noted, teens aren’t likely to be transformed by a trip to Auschwitz if they are dragged there against their will. Which is an important truth about education in general—you can't make a person learn. Education happens when a teacher somehow taps into a student’s desire to learn.

So here’s a fun game: Where would you take a group of American children for an educational trip of, say, a week? My vote: Cuba. Why? It’s a dramatically different culture from ours, with a dramatically different economic system that has been vilified in this country, yet despite poverty has achieved remarkable successes. Such as healthcare for all and literacy for all. And, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of cheap oil imports, Cuba transitioned major elements of its economy away from oil (including by moving toward organic agriculture on a large scale). Plus it’s warmer than Poland, with better music. And cooler cars. Lectures on economic systems and oil use go down better when they’re followed by sunbathing.

What travels did you find transformative, readers?