Life-Changing Trips: Family Gap Years

by Rhonda Carrier

Camping in the grounds of a hotel in Lahore, while travelling overland to India post-university (a desperate bid to delay the need to get a job), I met a French family doing something much more adventurous –driving all the way around the world in a camper-van, loading it onto ferries and ships where necessary. The two older girls, who must have been about 7 and 9, did homework every evening in the van. The youngest was only about 3.

Half of me was envious and hoped that when parenthood eventually caught up with me, I’d do something similarly adventurous with my own kids. Half of me thought they were mad. Some of the scrapes we had got into during our own journey thus far – driving through the night to flee robbers who’d woken us trying to break into our van in Romania, being extorted at gunpoint in the hilly hinterlands of eastern Turkey – made me wonder about the wisdom of undertaking such a journey with children. And while the couple’s older daughters were no doubt seeing things their classmates probably never would, the youngest probably wouldn’t remember much of the trip at all.

A new Channel 4 series airing this autumn (from Sept 6th), ‘My Crazy Family Gap Year’, follows six British families who have done or are doing what many of us only fantasise about: uprooting themselves to seek out life-changing experiences. The affluent Willmotts of Episode 1, for instance, take their kids out of their cosy private schools to witness the reality of childhood poverty around the globe, visiting 26 countries in 12 months (a figure that itself raises questions of cultural pornography). Steered largely by their practising Buddhist mother, the 12-, 9- and 5-year-old kids stay with a nomadic family in Mongolia and live amidst a tribe in the Papuan rainforest who’ve never come across Western children before.

Parts of the Willmotts’ trip – the genuine friendships they make with people so very different from themselves, and the discoveries that members of the family make about both the world and themselves – are deeply moving. But watching as a parent, one is struck above all by the danger that Mrs Willmott is prepared to put her family into on her quest to enlighten them. After only Day 4, her two sons are lucky to escape with their lives as she has the family haring along perilous mountain roads in her unstoppable mission to get the family a private audience with the Dalai Lama – their driver loses control and the car they are travelling in leaves the road and rolls twice. She’s also insistent they will have no immunisations despite taking them into one of the world’s worst malarial hotspots, relying instead on homeopathy.

And the parents’ hypocrisy, at times, is astounding – Mrs Willmott is supposedly desperate to show her children how badly other people around the world have it, yet the family are not prepared to stint on themselves: their main flights are all taken in business-class, and after the first stage of their trip, they take ‘three weeks R&R’ somewhere swanky to recover from witnessing so much poverty and lack.

This first episode was the only one available to preview, but the trailer for the next had the father admitting that by sailing round the world with his two very young sons (the youngest only 2), he was putting their lives in danger. Of course, none of us can ever totally protect our kids from accidents or other forms of harm, but the insistence on putting young children in situations of extreme risk on the pretext that you are making them into more rounded individuals is more than dubious, particularly when many of the children involved are too young to have any lasting memory of their experience – and often no willingness to be there in the first place.

My Crazy Family Gap Year makes for great TV – the kind that will have you shouting and waving your fist at the screen while also stirring up your own longing for adventure and distant climes. Those who, like me, find it compulsive viewing might also like to track the adventures of the French parents who recently set off on a three-year trip around the world in a converted lorry with their children aged 8, 6 and 19 months – you can follow their blog from the comfort and security of your living room.

Strangely enough, gap years were in the news a lot this week as parents were urged not to ‘follow Emma Thompson’, the actress planning to take her 10-year-old daughter out of school for a year to travel.

Said Margaret Morrissey of education campaign group Parents Outloud: “She might see the world and have a fantastic experience, but she'll miss an awful lot in a year and will be way behind her peers. A child might not ever properly catch up after a break that long.” She added that while the actress might be able to afford a private tutor for her daughter, most children would find it ‘extremely difficult’ to readjust after a 12-month break.

Here at TakeTheFamily, we are big fans of ‘eduvacations’, when parents of mainly primary-school-age kids take them on holidays that have some educational value, in term time if necessary. But would we take a gap year with our family? Would you?

For me, it wouldn’t be so much about what my children missed education-wise – like the family I met in Pakistan, I’d home-tutor my boys en route, make them do homework daily, and expect the benefits in life experience and increased cultural awareness to outweigh any ‘falling behind’ (I’m not big on targets, assessments and other academic monitoring in any case, but more about that some other time!). But putting my kids into the position where they might get very sick and even die is unthinkable.

Perhaps the question raised most in my mind by these families’ experiences – and what makes me want to see the rest of the C4 shows – is what actually propels the parents to make their great leap. Most people wish they could travel more – and travel more adventurously. Seldom families ever get beyond a week or two somewhere familiar and easy. What is the catalyst for these more dramatic decisions? Are the parents simply fed up with domestic drudgery and routines, or are some of these families actually (and perhaps subconsciously) running away from problems? If so, do they leave these problems behind or actually just find that they take them with them?

I’ll also be interested to see what the kids themselves make of their parents’ decisions and how the children react to the often extreme and sometimes frightening situations they are thrown into. And beyond what the parents hope to gain from their experience, what do they envisage for their families after the gap year is over? Will it be easy to reintegrate with old friends and networks, and will they find it easy to re-adjust to an affluent, in many ways selfish, Western lifestyle?

The programs promise us, among other ‘life-changing’ experiences, an African car crash with young kids, miles from medical help, and life-threatening food poisoning in the Pacific Ocean. As someone who is constantly lured by the seductive promise of escape and the unknown but unsure whether sure an adventure would be wonderful or nightmarish with three young boys in tow, I’ll be an avid viewer.

In a poll we recently ran here at Takethefamily.com, about 50% of respondents claimed to have had a holiday that has changed their life to some degree. We’d love to hear more of your stories, so please post your best (or worst!) experiences on our Forum. In the meantime, we have a few ideas of our own for life-changing family holidays that don’t necessarily involve selling all your worldly possessions or bunking off school/work for a year! For a full-on family gap year isn’t the only – or necessarily the best – solution to the problem of diminishing quality family time in a era in which social networking and personal gadgetry often seem to drive a wedge between individuals rather than bringing them closer together.

Volunteering Holidays
See Georgina Allen’s feature on putting something back into the world on a Volunteering Holidays with Kids.

Adventure Holidays
See our page on organised Adventure Holidays with Kids – or use our partners’ itineraries to inspire you on your independent travels!

Learning Holidays
See our feature on educational but fun learning holidays in the UK and abroad.

See also our Features:
Near-Disasters with Kids
The Outback with Kids
Best Safaris with Kids

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