Why travel is your child’s best teacher

“When I grow up I want to be a Koala,” said my four year old, standing in a eucalyptus forest just outside Sydney, Australia.

“Why?”

“Because they eat leaves and I want to know what it is like to eat leaves.”

“Why don’t you try enjoy leaves now, and then you’ll know if you want to grow up to be a Koala?” I suggested, trying to head off unrealistic dreams like a responsible grown up.

“No, because I might not like them now. But I will when I grow up, because Koalas like them.”

Kids hey, they say the darnedest things! We were listening to a man tell us stories of the lives lived in the gum trees, and how only a few varieties are chosen by koalas. The one’s they choose are high in protein content and water, which means koalas rarely need to drink; he told us their name means ‘no drink’ in Aborigine.

Of course, eucalyptus leaves are actually poisonous and it would have been a tricky situation had my son taken up that suggestion, but being in that dry, heady forest half-way round the world gave me the chance to see something interesting about my four year old. In that moment I glimpsed sight of his emotional intelligence, he showed an astute awareness of his limitations, and didn’t set himself up for failure.

Before I had children I wasn’t aware of travel’s astonishing, and unique, ability to grow the more extraordinary, unquantifiable strengths in us human beings. I was aware of it’s universally acknowledged benefits, like being “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” as Mark Twain said; Instinctively I wanted to give them the experience I’d enjoyed, show them the one world they were a part of, but in taking my children travelling over nearly two decades I have seen how it truly grows people. At a more profound depth than our conventional world of formalised education and our media will accommodate.

Travel itself brings you back to a greater sense of childlike wonder, but watching children experience it while having a rudimentary sense of how things work anyway has educated me on Travel’s innate gift of developing people as round as the globe itself.

We are born with a sense that we are the centre of the universe and in control of all we survey, and yet we see ourselves as being insignificant, little, people who cannot really make a difference in the world. Intellectually we know better, but we believe these two contradictory things viscerally and live by them; and this makes us prioritise our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more self-aware, and have self-control. Be more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving. We want to be more emotionally intelligent, something that has been shown in studies to be a deciding factor in long-term success, far above mere intelligence quotient.