Vacations with college Kids

What’s your take on going on vacations with your 18+ students? Does it feels weird to exclude them?

We did our first trip without our D last summer when she was doing her study abroad. It was weird and I was constantly thinking about what she’d enjoy.

We are going away again without her next year as she will be doing her co-op. Kind of feeling like it’s going to be the new normal.

Thankfully we still get in some shorter trips/vacations during winter and spring breaks. Hard though not having the whole summer anymore!

Interested in this topic. Have 2 DS—20, and 22. Both are lifeguards in the summer in a town where we have a family summer cottage. DH and I are both teachers, so we are on vacation all summer with them. It’s more of an issue for DS20, as he turns 18 this summer and will be off to college next fall, and while it’s a little different since it’s a lengthy (8 week) visit, it’s definitely a new normal every year!

I’m interested in other families experiences and takeaway tips. Parenting throws new decisions towards parents at every turn. We can learn from each other.

I’ve posted elsewhere on this topic that I don’t have much interest in travel, but it would never occur to me to take our grown son anywhere with us. When he was growing up, we made a huge distinction between “vacation” (just me and DH) and “family trip” (with kid). We’ve taken exactly four family trips in his lifetime. Not my idea of fun. We love our son and enjoy being with him, but taking care of a (perfectly well-behaved) kid on the road was not my idea of vacation. Once he was a teenager, HE was the one who would prefer a sharp stick in the eye to traveling with the 'rents. He hasn’t traveled with us anywhere but to school since he was a tyke.

We have taken a family trip to the same beach every year since D20 was 1, to the same beach my parents brought me every year. I’m not sure how i’ll feel in a few years when it is just DH and me. On the other hand, she and I love international travel and went away last spring just the 2 of us. She has expressed interest in doing something similar every other year when she is an adult and offered to pay when she has a job so we’ll see.

My son turns 18 next summer and I really HOPE he still wants to travel with us. I think he will. This past summer we took a road trip out west and we all had so much fun. I’m a single parent, so it’s just myself and his 9 year old brother. It would be very weird not having him with. I know eventually it will not be a regular thing, but my brothers and I still go places with our parents and I’m 50!

When she was growing up we never took a vacation without my daughter. The exception were trips with my husband for work where they included a spouse.

Taking vacation with my daughter once she was in college was difficult. She would be busy all summer as well as the school year. We did squeeze in some fun trips with her during that time (but they were mostly long weekends).

Now that she is working, it is actually nice to have all three of us being flexible with when we can take off (at one point I worked at a school and that restricted when I could take off). Vacations are now in three flavors - me and husband, me and daughter, and all three of us. The all three vacations have been harder to make happen but we have done them.

My daughter’s friends are not big travelers (she has only had one friend trip in all her adult years), so I feel it is important to plan trips with her, or else she wouldn’t go anywhere!

Nothing beats snowboarding/skiing.

  1. Very active holiday.
  2. The vibrant, happy mood on the slopes is so infectious.
  3. By design the sport, is independent enough, to avoid any awkwardness like a city or a beach. No worries, about what to do to entertain them at any moment.
  4. No matter how much better than a parent a young adult gets at snowboarding, without fail, the teens/twenties always want to enjoy a few runs with their parent(s).
  5. Everyone is exhausted by the end of the day and wants to share dinner, a glass, a fireplace, a crepe or smores, and plenty of laughs about old family stories and the funny falls of the day.
  6. Entertaining, yet expensive enough, that the starving students or just employed gravitate towards saying, “Of course, I’ll go!”

The less crowded, the better. Think pockets of the Rockies.

@bloomfield88 100% agreed!

It carries over to other types of active vacation as well - our D is all in for stuff like white water rafting, hiking, coasteering, kayaking, etc… We’ll take her on an adventure hopefully between her college graduation and the start of her job!

Our kids are now all working so it will be different and more challenging, especially with limited vacation time Over the past 8 years, since oldest finished college, there have been different configurations of kids and parent on trips. But our kids are still happy to travel with us when we are going somewhere good or to see family on the opposite coast, especially when we are paying for accommodations. So far none of them have significant others that add to the vacation travel. DH and I plan to do more trips without the kids, but hope to continue to travel with them in various combinations. This past summer we all went to the west coast, but the kids did not stay as long as DH and I, returning to work or traveling elsewhere to see friends.

We’re confronting this now with D19 just having started college (we also have an S22). We go almost every year to the island that inspired my screen name, but we would need to rent a house now for next summer and we have no idea what job D19 will have. At least so far, it would feel weird to plan a long family vacation without expecting her to come at all. It’ll actually be easier once the kids are out of college and working, since they can time their vacations to ours if we’re all so inclined. Can’t really take two weeks off from a short summer internship. Guess we’ll see what happens this summer, but it could just be a staycation.

I feel very, very lucky that my kids enjoy traveling with me AND they generally pay their own way now that they are adults with jobs.

During college we did smaller trips like visiting family in other cities or I’d go to the college region and we’d do a vacation weekend in that area. Of course I traveled without them in college too, as before - I have been semi-nomadic for a couple of years now (I work online).

My empty nest coping mechanism is to leave the nest also, I guess.

Nope!! It gets super hard to include all the kids when everyone has jobs, and sports etc. And besides it is just way to costly now that they are grown. It is our time now.

Agree about skiing/snowboarding. One of my favorite memories is the trip my family took when I was a college senior and my sister was a freshman. We were the typical Texans invading Colorado. We’d never been on a ski slope in our lives and we bought all the cold winter garb. I still remember walking in a grocery store parking lot and loving the sound of my “snowboots” crunching in the snow. I think that’s when I decided I wanted to move north eventually.

Maybe this will change in time, but our kids (ages 19 - 25) seem to turn into infants the minute they are in our house/door and let me do everything unless I keep commanding them to do for themselves. (including paying)

Since I am always looking for ways to have time together and share experiences, I actively work on finding vacations we can all enjoy as a family. Skiing, hiking – great options but we are all up for museums, theater, etc.

We give DS the option of inviting a friend if we are staying somewhere where that isn’t a problem.

We get plenty of time alone (on vacation and at home) without kids and are likely to get more as school breaks turn into precious paid vacation.

So count me in the “I’ll prioritize family time over my own preferences” camp.

@Vineyarder

We rent a vacation place at the Jersey Shore. It’s already rented for next September. Our kids know the dates, and they are invited to come if they can get the time off. We let them know the day we book the place. Where we go, most places have three bedrooms so it’s not like we would be getting a different place based on who can or can’t come.

The most our kids have done is an overnight…they had work and school obligations…and one lives 2500 miles away.

D19 has only been at college a couple of months so we don’t have much experience of this, but where practical, we have still invited her to go away with us (so far long weekends, she wants to be home for winter break; we have the weekends away planned until Presidents’ Day so far). Some she has said yes to (most) and one no. She actually seems to be more keen to go away with us now than she was when she lived at home.

We still take our grown kids on vacation with us once (our sometimes twice) a year. Along with significant others at times - the whole entourage. It’s really fun.