Coping with family holidays

We all have memories of miserable holidays spent shivering in tents as the rain lashes down outside, but they needn't be miserable.

Unfortunately for the planet’s diminishing oil reserves, family holidays are a great deal easier in a car than using public transport. This is especially true when your kids are too small to carry their own luggage, leaving you to cart around the vast amounts of stuff they require. The stuff you need for a small child on an ordinary holiday takes up far more space than the actual child! Even if you can’t drive, you may want to learn.

It can be harder to relax on holiday with small children, because you still have to do the work of looking after them, so holidays will generally be less indulgent (although, if you can team up with friends who have kids, you can take it in turns to escape and do grown-up things for a few hours). However, if you are quite childish yourself, this can be a great opportunity to do stuff you’d find hard to justify without children, such as fulfilling that long-held dream of going to LegoLand.

In the first few years it can be a good idea to not go too far for your holidays. Children get better at travelling as they get older, and early on all new places are interesting to them, so they won’t necessarily be more impressed by going to Barcelona than by going to Blackpool.

Plane journeys in particular can be extremely difficult. Before you were a parent, you probably found kids on planes annoying. Now you'll be the one shrugging uselessly as other passengers lob rock hard bread rolls at you in annoyance. If your child is still a baby it can be particularly difficult, as you can't explain about popping ears. One solution is to get them to drink from a bottle as the plane ascends and descends, keeping thier mind off it. If all else fails, you might just have to tough it out - if it helps, bear in mind you'll probably never see any of your passengers again after the flight!

But if you’re up for trying a foreign holiday, go for it. Don’t be too much of a martyr to your kids by stopping doing anything you want to do. After all, they’re here to share your life, not dictate it completely.