It’s difficult and scary for any parent to let their child
travel throughout a foreign country, especially on their own. I wanted to write this blog entry to explain
to parents just how important traveling the world is for their children. I have met countless girls around the world
who have told me that although they’d love to travel far and wide, their
parents would never let them do such a thing. As an only child with a single
mom, I knew just how difficult it was for my mom to accept the fact that I
wanted to travel the world on my own.
Despite the fact that my mom has always been my biggest supporter and
encourager throughout my life, seeing your daughter get on a plane by herself with
just a backpack and no returning ticket, heading to a foreign third-world
country, cannot be easy. It was hard
enough for her to see me move across the country for college let alone fly to
the other side of the world. I give my
mom all of the credit in the world for the strength, support, love, and
acceptance. My mom knows just how hard I have worked throughout
the years and how much I help others achieve their goals, that she wants
nothing more than for me to live my dreams.
I am blessed with a mom that is selfless enough to put her worries aside
and to see her daughter achieve her dream of traveling the world. I think that if parents only knew just how
much their child would gain from traveling, they would see its importance.
As a young twenty-something year-old or someone who just
graduated from college, you are still learning life lessons, absorbing as much knowledge
as possible, seeking direction of what you want to do in life, setting goals
for yourself, and trying to become the best person that you can be while
finding your life’s purpose. This is the
perfect time for you do some traveling.
Let me tell you why.
Traveling teaches you things that you’d never expect to
learn in places and situations that you never expected to be in. Although I learned a lot of things throughout
my school years, I owe it to my travels for helping me become the person that I
am with the accomplishments that I have achieved. Traveling has helped mold myself and my
character in a way that no schooling nor work would ever have been able to
do. What I mean by this is that
traveling provides and supplies you with so much. Traveling the world has:
- · Forced me to make my own decisions
- · Put in me in situations that required me to solve my own problems
- · Exposed me to worldly other cultures, languages, dialects, holidays, traditions, people, animals, wildlife, and much more.
- · Taught me lessons by making mistakes and learning from them
- · Taught me to just go with the flow of things
- · Taught me to appreciate my own country and its freedoms (when I was younger I always wanted to live in a foreign country and work but after traveling so much, I learned that I don’t want to live in any other country for the rest of my life except for the U.S. Each and every time that I am getting ready to return home from traveling overseas, I get the best sensation and an overwhelming excitement of coming back to U.S soil)
- · Taught me to appreciate what I have, don’t have, and have access to (like clean bathrooms, actual toilets, clean water, clean clothes, housing, safety, security, money, work, food, etc.)
- · Taught me how to figure things out by using the resources that I have (this can be in reference of navigation, preparing food, washing clothing, staying clean, etc.)
- · Made me an expert at booking trips, flights, accommodations, and all travel arrangements
- · Opened me to new foods and people
- · Enabled me to now have friends all around the world from all around the world
- · Opened my eyes to just how good we have it (when you see other countries with such extreme poverty, crisis, disaster, and crime)
- · Made me realize just how little you need in life to simply be happy (my time and the people in the Philippines definitely helped me by displaying to me how happy they are with what they have despite living on an island that was completely wiped out and destroyed by a typhoon)
- · Taught me a lot about what it the most important to prepare for when traveling (such as passport info, visas, visa-on-arrival stickers, entrance and exit fees, currency, etc.)
- · Forced me to become comfortable, accepting, and carefree for the places that I have slept in and the transportation that I have been on (I have slept in the strangest places and in all types of places including hostels, crappy hostels, in train and bus stations, in airports, with people I just met, on long over night buses or trains which are usually packed, dirty, and driving way too fast, on ferries and ships, in huts and bungalows, on small islands, in huge cities, in homes of local families, on a beach in a tent that kept getting blown over by the wind and washed to sea from the high tide, on an island that was destroyed by a typhoon, and many other places. I am now an expert at becoming a human pretzel as a 6 foot tall girl trying to sleep across two small seats on a bus for over 15 hours)
- · Helped me figure out what’s most important to me in life (my mom, my dog, my dreams, my passions, helping others especially those who are less fortunate)
- · Helped me prove to myself just how capable and strong I am
- · Provided me with a clearer vision of what I want to do with my life
- · Strengthened my passions and goals
- · Forced me to learn the value of hard work, budgeting, and managing your money well
- · Taught me just how affordable traveling the world can actually be
- · Made me face uncomfortable situations and taught me how to deal with getting out of my comfort zone
- · Taught me how to communicate with others who don’t speak my language
- · Allowed me to try new things (such as adventure, food, dance, religions, etc)
- · Taught me how to handle sudden changes (such as sudden unexpected transportation/flight schedule changes)
- · Taught me to be humble, kind, spontaneous, patient, compassionate, and adventurous
- · Taught me to adapt
- · Taught me how to keep myself safe at all times
- · Taught me to accept everyone despite people’s differences
- · Taught me just how miniscule and unimportant materialistic things are
- · Taught me to be more assertive, to stand up for myself, and to not get taken advantage of (although it will happen while traveling)
- · Showed me how to live minimally and simplistically with what’s in my backpack only
- · Taught me how to prepare a meal using minimal resources
- · Taught me how to use foreign currency and how to get the best rates
- · Taught me that you can’t help everybody and every animal in the world, although I wish I could (I think I give more food to animals and the homeless while traveling than I consume myself)
- · Taught me about countries that I knew very little, if anything, about (such as Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, Laos, Slovenia, Honduras, etc)
- · Showed me just how beautiful the world is in many aspects
- · Taught me how to work hard and to make things happen for myself
- · Taught me to be self-sufficient
- · Inspired my art
- · Inspired me to write my blog site to help provide important travel information and to inspire others to travel
The reason that I wanted to share all of these things that
traveling has done for me is because I want parents to realize just how much their
children can benefit from traveling the world.
Parents should put their worries, insecurities, and fears aside and realize
that travel can provide your child with so much that will help them in their life
whether it be knowledge, lessons learned, meeting new people, being challenged,
getting out of their comfort zone, gaining appreciation, learning how problem
solve, learning information about other countries and their people, or gaining
focus, clarity, and direction for their own life. Parents should want the absolute best for
their children, no matter what. Parents should
teach and display selflessness and sacrifice.
Parents want their children to attend the best schools to gain the best
knowledge to then get the best job, but what I want them to know is that travel
can provide knowledge, social, and life skills that their children wouldn’t
otherwise learn or would learn much later in life. I wish all parents would encourage and
support their children to go out and to see the world, gain experience,
knowledge, exposure, and learn things that they never had the chance to
experience. Parents should be able to
trust the power of travel and realize how it will be a life-transforming experience
that will help mold their child into the best human being that they can be and
help them accomplish so much more in life.
Travel helps people become well-cultured, accepting of others,
kind-hearted, risk-taking, learning new things, seeks adventure, appreciate the
world and the people in it, the value of hard-work, how to be self-sufficient,
how to be goal-oriented, how to take of myself, and much much more.
People always are surprised when I say that I travel by
myself. I am asked if I am ever afraid
or worried. Girls tell me that they want
to travel but they don’t because either they’re too afraid, they don’t have anyone
to travel with, they don’t have enough money, their parents won’t let them,
they don’t know exactly when or how to, and many other reasons. I wish for those who desire to travel to
realize that you are capable of doing anything that you dream of doing,
including traveling the world. It always
seemed like a far-fetched thing for me to do and as a youth I never thought it
would actually be possible but, I overcame those doubts and fears and was
determined to make my dream happen. By
working hard, setting goals, managing my money, challenging myself, and taking
that leap, I am proud of all that I have accomplished and I am thrilled to be
able to help others do the same. I have
always been safe everywhere that I have gone but safety is a choice. I have always tried to make the smartest
decision, avoided possible bad situations, made sure that I set myself up for
success, and followed my own safety tips.
Check out my Staying Safe blog post on these safety tips!
Parents fear so many things when it comes to their child
traveling such as where will my child sleep, what will my child eat, will they
be warm enough, will they be safe, will they need help and I can’t be there,
what if they need me for something, will my child be scared, what if my child
gets hurt, what if something goes wrong and they can’t get back home, what if
what if what if! You can “what if” for
days when it comes to a parent’s worries for their children. Although I’m not a parent myself, I can
completely and fully understand the worry and fear that a parent has for their
child being in a foreign country by their self, let alone worrying about their
child on a daily basis when they’re not traveling. I get it. But, parents should realize that
instilling fear and worry about the possible dangers in the world won’t teach
their children anything good. They
should be able to trust that they did a good enough job in raising a smart and
clear-headed child and trust that they will make the best decision possible by
staying safe and solving problems to the best of their ability.
Before my first backpacking experience ever, which was to
Western Europe, my mom expressed her fears and worries to me. She worried about my safety and everything
else that a parent would worry about for their child, let alone their daughter
who is by herself in a third-world country.
Despite how much I told her not to watch silly Lifetime movies and
movies like “Hostel” or “Taken”, she still did and she of course was worried
about me staying in these things called Hostels. Check out my “How to Look Past Hostel’s Bad
Rap!” blog post and read why hostels aren’t as bad as people think. But of course, she sacrificed her motherly
fears and knew that it was what I wanted to do.
She had all the trust in the world in me and allowed me to follow my
dreams. I wanted to be able to show my
mom what it was like to backpack so that her fears and worries would be put
more at ease. I decided to take my mom
on her first backpacking trip. We first
went Oahu, Hawaii and stayed in a woofing organic farm up in the western
mountain about an hour away from Waikiki.
After arriving late at night and it being her first experience, she
definitely was scared and crying. When morning
came, she saw the beauty of the farm and after staying there for over a week,
she gained love and appreciation for the experience and location. We then flew to Fiji, Sydney, Australia, and
Auckland, New Zealand before returning to Hawaii for a few days then going back
home to Wisconsin. We stayed in hostels
at each place and flew on budget flights. We traveled on a budget and lived out
of our backpacks. (I will write a blog
post about that entire trip more in depth soon) After that entire trip, my mom loves
stayed in hostels and she now knows the type of traveling that I do. She trusts my decisions and ability to take
care of myself. My mom and her friend
have also backpacked with me in 2013 throughout Thailand. My mom was able to inform her friend about
hostels, backpacking, and traveling on a budget. I was so proud of her excitement and acceptance
for what was to come. My mom and her
friend were such troopers and did such a great job at be the best backpacking
partners that they could be, despite me taking them completely out of their
comfort zone. They both are more
open-minded, cultured, well-informed, and confident in not only my travel
abilities but about the world in general.
I wish this for all parents.
After reading this blog post, I hope for parents to take
from it all of the things that traveling will do for their children. I want for parents to know that if my single
mom with an only child could allow and encourage me to live my dreams, so can
they. Parents, if you are hesitant and
fearful, then try to backpack at least once with your children. You will benefit in so many ways as well. Please reach out to me in any way with any
questions or unanswered concerns that you may have about backpacking!
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