Take Your Kids on an Adventure Trip – It’s the Gift That Keeps on Giving

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Adventure travel takes us to some of the most beautiful, most untouched, and sometimes remotest places in the world.

Whether it’s hiking up Mount Denali or gliding over the Serengeti in a hot air balloon, adventure travel invites us to learn about other places, other people and other ecosystems – and also about ourselves. It teaches us things we couldn’t have discovered indoors, in a city, or near to home.

At Follow Alice, we see this all the time. We host adventure trips to some of the world’s most unique natural spaces and iconic locations. Time and again, clients share with us how much their adventure impacted their lives, sometimes in surprising ways.

You simply can’t anticipate what you and your child might learn as you push yourselves to reach a mountain top, or what you might realise when you gaze into the eyes of a wild gorilla. Travel is, as they say, the ultimate teacher.

Adventure travel is the gift you receive many times

We encourage you to invest in an adventure trip with your child (or children) as it really is the gift that keeps on giving. How so, you ask? Well, for starters, you benefit from it in three phases:

In the planning phase.
During the trip itself.
In retrospect.

But there’s even more to it than that. Here are some of the specific gifts an adventure trip can give you and your kid, from the anticipation all the way through to the remembering …

The gift of anticipation

Anticipation is a powerful emotion, and it can benefit us in many ways.

Research has shown that positive anticipation improves your outlook as well as your physical health. For instance, positive anticipation can lower your cortisol (the stress hormone). More generally speaking, it simply gives you something fairly big to look forward to, and this imbues your life with a general sense of optimism and momentum.

So spend time talking with your kid about the upcoming trip.

Let’s say you’re going to trek to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Chat about what to expect. Paint a picture of the two of you sitting by the fireplace in a cosy dining room, about to be served steaming plates of food and talking about the yaks, temples and world-renowned snowy peaks you saw that day.

Not only will this positive anticipation benefit your kid in the ways discussed above, it can also offer a means for bonding in the present. Many fathers struggle to connect with their kids, unable to find anything in common – a trip like this could be that very thing!

Working from there, consider other ways you could milk the situation in the present. Perhaps you could paint a flag that you’ll carry with you and fly victoriously when the two of you stand at the base of Mount Everest! The ways to benefit from an upcoming trip are as limitless as your imagination.

The gift of mentorship

Another pre-trip gift, if you will, is teaching your child how to plan and prepare for travel. These are practical life skills they usually aren’t taught in school.

Here are some ways you might mentor your child during the planning phase, especially if they’re a little older:

Discuss the logistics of travelling to another country, from booking flights to researching medical precautions, buying health insurance and exchanging currencies.
Apply for your visas together, whether in person or online.
Discuss what you’ll need to pack and then work together to arrange buying, borrowing or renting the things you lack.

Preparedness is an invaluable life skill that’s best learned during childhood.

You could also decide to learn a few phrases in the local language to help you better get around and connect with locals. Gamify the experience by using a language app like Duolingo where the two of you share your results with one another in order to stay motivated.

The gift of a near-future goal

Planning for an adventure trip can give some structure and discipline to one’s routine, which can be a real gift if your kid is flailing about a little or feeling directionless.

The most obvious goal is a new level of health and fitness in order to cope with the rigours of a physically challenging adventure trip.

Sticking with the Everest Base Camp trek example, for instance, this is your chance to help your child learn how to set a health goal and work steadily towards it. Research the physical fitness required and sit together to plan a training schedule to ensure you’ll both be prepared. Perhaps you can even do the training together as a way to further grow your relationship through the experience?

A note: try to find the sweet spot in settling on a challenge that will stretch your child but not go so far as to overwhelm them. Also ensure you allow enough time for them to get into the required shape, otherwise you’re setting them up to fail.

The gift of opening us up

In February of 2022, I was sitting with my nephew on the shore of Lake Natron in remotest northern Tanzania. There wasn’t another soul to be seen. We were parked in camp chairs with sundowners in hand, watching the changing colours of the Great Rift Valley escarpment. And it was in this serene setting that my nephew and I had one of those long and deep connecting chats that you never forget.

Wild settings have ways of opening us up. In fact, psychologists tell us that being outdoors in open spaces helps to open up our thoughts and feelings. Our internal world starts to reflect the expansiveness of our surroundings. That’s one of the reasons why we often find insights and answers, even hope, when we step take a stroll in nature.

If you’re facing some sort of relational roadblock with your child, perhaps the way forward can be found together in the great outdoors? Maybe there’s a habit or situation in their lives you want to help them to overcome? Or perhaps you simply want to carve out some quality time and space to forge a deeper bond? An adventure trip might just be the key.

The gift of discomfort

You can only grow when you step outside of your comfort zone. An adventure trips often require just that – embracing some level of disruption, awkwardness or unpleasantness. Whether this means eating unfamiliar food, sleeping in a tent, not being able to shower every day, disconnecting from the internet, or pushing yourself physically – we can’t become all we could be without being willing to stomach some discomfort.

Use the adventure to help your child learn how to accept and even welcome discomfort. And teach them how to self-soothe and self-motivate should they start to feel stressed or panicked at any point.

It might be that your adventure trip is also a great opportunity for you to show your kid that you too are willing to embrace daunting tasks. Our kids often struggle with similar things to us, and they also tend to take their lead from us. So if the trip represents stretching yourself socially, for instance, let them see you put yourself in situations where you’re forced to make conversation with new people.

Use the adventure as a chance to model for your child the courage and willingness to change that you wish for them in their own lives.

The gift of present-mindedness

Many kids are desperately in need of an experience that forces them to disconnect from the online world. Adventure trips often take place in remote regions where there’s little or no signal or Wi-Fi. So one of the greatest gifts of an adventure trip is the present-mindedness it bestows – even if it’s forced upon you.

The day my nephew and I arrived at our Lake Natron eco camp, we were told the Wi-Fi was down. So that was it – no connectivity for the next 48 hours. To say he was miffed is an understatement. Forlorn, grumpy, panicked … here was a young man who felt unmoored at the reality of being offline.

But the next day we hiked up a narrow gorge into the escarpment to reach a waterfall oasis. He stood under a pounding stream of water while his Maasai guide draped a shuka over his shoulders and spoke some words in the Maa language.

This day was the very definition of memorable. And for my nephew, it was even more that that. That evening he shared with me an important realisation: he could survive without his phone. He even perhaps enjoyed it on a level.

It’s easy to roll your eyes as an adult at how obvious this seems, but revelations usually arise out of personal experience, not the words of others.

The gift of pushing yourself beyond imagined limits

The perfect adventure trip challenges you, at least a little. The most obvious challenge is a physical one. But it could also be about existing without your usual creature comforts, or something else.

You know what sort of challenge might help your kid best. So you could use an adventure trip as the setting to help show them that they can do hard things. And that you believe in them.

And speaking of hard things, many kids are scared to try something new in case they’re not good at it. Use the adventure to encourage them in taking risks. This is an incredible opportunity to show up as your child’s greatest supporter and believer.

The gift of achievement

Following on from the previous point, if you tackle an adventure trip that has a challenging element to it – a degree of risk that you won’t manage to complete the trek, for instance – then there’s the opportunity to feel a real sense of achievement if you accomplish it.

Perhaps your child is going through a difficult phase of life and feeling a bit knocked down? An adventure trip could offer them the chance for an important win in life!

And you never know how that victory might stay with them through life … sometimes we return in our minds to hard-earned wins from many years before to remind ourselves of how capable we really are.

That said, not all expectations are met on a trip, whether it’s reaching a physical destination, seeing the wildlife you hoped to find, or something else. So try to hold any expectations lightly. Don’t work to wrangle a trip into being what you expected, in case you miss out on the surprising ways that it is. And remember too that achievement might not end up looking like the thing you expected.

The gift of an inner reset

We all know that it’s easy to go on a holiday that delivers you back home in need of another break to recover from your travels! Weaving through busy city streets, standing in long lines, looking up directions … these things drain us, even if they are also tied up with fun and excitement.

But nature calms us – not just mentally, but also physiologically. Basically, nature is therapy.

There are many studies backing up this claim. For instance, forest environments have been proved to reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure, and boost the immune system. How is this, you ask? There are various aspects involved, for instance: birdsong, running water and rustling leaves emit soothing frequencies, and you actually inhale essential oils with every breath.

Adventure travel, which takes you into pristine natural environments, is therefore a great way to help reset the nervous system. If you have a child who’s super stressed from schoolwork, is overloaded with media, or something else, then book an adventure trip as the experience should help them to reclaim some inner calm.

The gift of a new perspective

Adventure trips often take you to remote regions in developing nations where communities are underserved or even neglected by governments. This can open one’s eyes to the different and varied ways that people around the world must forge a livelihood. While nowhere in the world is without poverty and struggle, some places open our eyes in wholly new ways.

Much childhood angst in first-world nations comes from comparing yourself to the thin slice of society that surrounds you at school, or to the glamorised versions of life you see on social media. Children who travel to remote locations and developing countries are exposed to a different sort of existence.

Choosing to gift your child this sort of exposure could help to set them on a road towards becoming a kinder, more compassionate person, as well as someone with a deep sense of gratitude for all that they have.

The gift of lifetime memories

Finally, an adventure trip never stops giving, because even long after you return home, the memories are there for you to revisit. And if it’s a trip that you did with your child, you can enjoy the experience of reminiscing together over your shared memories over the years and even decades to come.

This is why experiences make better gets than things. Any material gift, no matter how hotly desired or how expensive, will become commonplace with time. It’s human nature to grow accustomed to the things we see or experience every day.

Not so memories. Memories only grow in value with time. And during tough times, what better medicine than to revisit that special trip you had together and the unique memories it created?

Want some adventure trip ideas?

As mentioned, Follow Alice specialises in adventure trips. We love organising holidays that bring people together to create unforgettable memories.

Here are some of our most popular adventure trips: