TPP 375a: How Can Our Family Navigate Vacations When They Throw Off My Child's Need for Routine
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
19 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 1 hour ago
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Maybelline. Hey, it's Debbie. To help get ready for summer break, travel and vacations, Playback Friday episodes during the month of May will be focused on navigating big breaks and family getaways with our neurodivergent kids. Let the prepping and planning begin. I'm Debbie Reber and welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. Here's today's episode. Hey, everyone. I'm flying solo on today's Parent Lean In episode. And I really love this question that's come in. It brings up a lot of things I've given thought to and consideration to over the years. And I also know this is a topic that impacts many listeners.
So here's the question. Our nearly five-year-old, no formal diagnosis yet, but most likely autism, is really tied to his routines. And this creates challenges for our family, especially when it comes to vacations. It typically takes him about a day to adapt, and then he seems to be doing fine, but he's only willing to do things he wants to do, which obviously impacts everyone else in the family. Then when we get home, it takes weeks for him to readjust to the rules and routines of our household. Do we need to just not travel? Traveling and vacation is really important to my husband and me, but sometimes it feels like it's so hard that it's not worth it. I would love your thoughts. Okay, so I have thoughts per usual.
And this is actually something I did a podcast episode about many, many, many years ago with Asher. And I'll include a link to that in the show notes page because Asher and I had a conversation about how we navigated vacations. But I'm going to share with you some of my best tips. We did a lot of traveling. We still do. But from the time Ash was pretty little, we traveled quite a bit. And then when we were living abroad from the time he was nine until 14, we did a ton of travel. So we got pretty good at it. And I figured out a lot of stuff. So The first thing that has always made the biggest difference is that pre-trip planning, right? So just like we would do before a holiday break or any kind of break and routine to sit down and have a bunch of conversations.
And I say a bunch because usually one big conversation doesn't do it, but start kind of planting the seeds that there's a trip coming up, there's a vacation coming up, we are making plans, right? And actually involve the child in planning the activities. Give them a chance to express the things that they really want to do, what their preferences are. They might have ideas about what to do, depending on where you're going. That may not be on your radar at all, so it's good to get clear on what those things are. If you have a kind of an itinerary that you've already created, you could go through that. You know, I actually, during one of our trips, I made like a PDF that I printed out and it was like a day by day, very detailed, but not so detailed that it was hard to engage with.
But it had pictures of where we were going. It had kind of a very rough, like morning, do this, evening, do this. But really kind of laid out the proposed flow, but also again, leaving some windows open for free time or things that I knew that my kid wanted to do or that he had already expressed. So for example, we always had pool days. I always had to find places that had a pool. That was very, very important to when my kid was younger. And so sometimes depending on the length of the trip, I would have to build in like half a day at the pool, even if we were in some like really cool location. And the last thing I wanted to do was stay at a, inside a hotel with the pool.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:57
2
What is the listener’s question about vacation challenges for a routine‑bound child?
6:57–15:02
3
How can pre‑trip planning and involving the child reduce travel stress?
15:02–18:59
4
What visual tools (PDFs, whiteboards, worksheets) help kids understand the itinerary?
18:59–19:20
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids