Lorna Thornber.
Taking children outside their comfort zones can teach them difficult but important lessons, writes
Controversial UK child psychologist Oliver James gave parents yet another reason to doubt themselves when he claimed that taking children to unfamiliar places on holiday is bad for their mental health. Children and teens need consistency, he argued. Learning to cope with the stresses of daily existence is tough enough for kids without being thrust into some alien environment. What they truly need, he contended, is to return to the same old spot year in, year out. The ideal destination? ‘‘A reasonably warm, but not too hot beach with calm waves and icecream nearby.’’
For our family, a trip up to Auckland to see the grandparents was about as exotic as our holidays got. But as a kid, even they were a thrill. My little sister Claire even found the interminable drive an adventure. The stops in Opotiki for a quick swim and mince pie from the dairy (never permitted by my health-conscious mum ordinarily); accusing each other of having let one rip as we held our noses through Rotorua; throwing up in the natural roller coaster that is the Waioeka Gorge... We delighted in the break from routine, safe in the knowledge that the trip, like those that had gone before it, would be a blast. Once in Auckland, Claire and I would relish doing everything we couldn’t back home. Go swimming in the grandparents’ giant spa bath, visit the massive toy department at The Warehouse, burn our bare feet on black sand beaches with waves that frequently threatened to drown us. It was good, honest and entirely predictable fun.
I was nearly 9 when we moved to Auckland permanently and sure it would be the adventure of my lifetime. Things were great until I started school and suddenly had to resurrect an old routine in a new environment. On my first day at my new school, the teacher assigned a girl named Friena to look out for me and we got along well enough until morning tea, when Friena’s best friend told her she wasn’t allowed to play with me. Friena promptly ran off and I locked myself in the toilets to hide my tears; suddenly sick at the thought of all I’d left behind.
I had my first overseas holiday at 16, thanks to a six-week student exchange programme to Tahiti. The aim was to improve my French, but I was more interested in exploring what looked like it would be heaven on Earth. Arriving in Papeete was a bit of a shock. In place of the tropical paradise I’d imagined was a scruffy port city; my new home seemed hardly big enough to accommodate my host family. I shared a mattress in a windowless structure outside the main house with my host siblings and accompanied them to school, where I drew on my minimal Maori language skills to try to make sense of the Tahitian they preferred to speak over French. When it was time for their holidays, we flew to the remote atoll they’d grown up on: a place so unused to tourists the local children would stare at me as if they’d seen a ghost. They were a family of pearl farmers and I soon fell in love with their unhurried way of life on an island more beautiful than I’d seen on any postcard. We spent lazy days floating on the transparent lagoon in my host dad’s tin speed boat, waiting for him to spear enough fish to cook over a bonfire. We ate oysters prised from the rocks just seconds before, swam with sharks my host siblings convinced me didn’t have a taste for humans, and spent evenings watching reruns of Friends dubbed in French. A simple life, I decided, wasn’t so bad after all. In my last week, wanting a souvenir I’d never forget, I got a tattoo of a dolphin in a traditional Tahitian design on my ankle. When I look at it today I am suddenly 16 again, enthralled – and convinced I am changed forever –- by my first overseas experience.
As lovely as it can be for kids to return to their favourite holiday haunts, trips out of their comfort zones challenge them in new ways. Moving to a new place longterm can be tough, but the longterm benefits are often worth it. Most kids find their feet eventually and, from there, there’s no telling where they’ll go. As Dr Seuss said in his last book for children: ‘‘You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes, you can steer yourself any direction you choose.’’