Surf-free tranquility

Seeking a beach with calm waters is parents’ key to vacationing with a tempestuous toddler — and actually enjoying it

Even before I became a parent, I knew how terrible traveling with toddlers could be. “It stops being a vacation and becomes a trip,” a friend said after returning from her first big family getaway. Browsing through social media, I found many versions of the same story: “It looked idyllic, but we were actually miserable.”

It was not until our most recent trip that my wife and I cracked the code of enjoyable travel with a toddler: a beach without waves.

The realization came while sitting in the warm shallow waters off Holbox Island, just north of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. As I watched my daughter splash, it hit me that this was both exhilarating for her and relaxing for me, a rare combination. The novelty of the situation was keeping her fully engaged far longer than her 2-year-old attention span typically allowed. Simultaneously, the wave-free shallowness — in any direction, as far as you could throw a Frisbee, the water barely reached her waist — freed me from the worry I’d felt at other beaches. It was as low-anxiety as a baby pool, but rather than tuning out children fighting over water blasters, I was immersed in 83-degree water, enjoying the view.

Upon return, I wondered where else we could find similarly placid waters. The key, I learned, is finding beaches where waves lose momentum before reaching shore. Waves, which are created by wind, grow larger in uninterrupted expanses of ocean, but if there is a harbor wall, reef or a sliver of land around a cove, the waves are forced to break there, explained Bob Guza, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Shallowness, in turn, is often related to wave size. Small waves will not carry away sand as effectively as big waves will, said Kevin B. Johnson, a professor at Florida Institute of Technology’s Department of Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences.

Below are suggestions for beaches in the Caribbean, Central America and Hawaii, all with warm, shallow, largely wave-free waters.