Socialization Skills / Exposing Baby

A significant reason to include your baby or child in your travels is that he or she will gain both socialization and behavior skills from the experiences. As a travel writer, I have been taking my daughter, Mandalin, with me to numerous hotels, restaurants, and area attractions since she was two months-old. I am convinced that it is a result of this exposure to people and places that she is now a highly social and outgoing preschooler. Her earliest experiences are of friendly by-passers and fellow travelers gooing and gawing at her in hotel lobbies, restaurants, shops, and parks. At first she was shy and, like many babies with their mothers, clung closely to me only. Very quickly though, she opened up to new people and soon became an incorrigible flirt. Everywhere I take her, she smiles and bats her eyelashes at the people who stop to admire and talk to her, adoring the attention. She loves the diverse traveling situations my husband and I take her on, within which she is highly adaptable. When she began school, she adjusted well to meeting and making new friends.

Mandalin is certainly not the only child who can acquire a sunny disposition from traveling; taking your baby or child traveling with you will produce similar positive results. If you have the opportunity for foreign travel, your youngster can gain an intuitive comfort in dealing with new languages, cultures, and people--the younger the child, the better. The earlier a baby/child begins to process new people into his or her repertoire, and sees that smiling and communicating with them is safe and even pleasurable (even without the same vocabulary or language), the more quickly the youngster becomes unafraid of and confident in meeting new people. Of course, I am not advocating that children be unguarded or overly trusting of strangers that can potentially hurt or kidnap them; I am talking about babies and children gaining adaptive social skills within a safe, parentally-supervised construct. Mandalin's openness to others does not detract from her affection for me or her father. She is extremely loving and attentive to us, and she is interested in other people as well.

Behavioral skills are another benefit your child will reap from traveling with you. Many parents of babies and young children have told me that the thought of taking their youngsters into an elegant restaurant with them essentially makes their hair stand up on end. I, too, admit to feeling a current of fear bolting through my body when my husband and I wheeled two month-old Mandalin up to the front entrance of the five-star restaurant, El Bizcocho, at the Rancho Bernardo Inn (Incidentally, this inn did not score high enough in the respective categories to make it into this site). I saw a wave of nervousness washing over the Maitre'D's face as we approached, and I wondered right then if maybe taking her along was not such a good idea after all. I suddenly envisioned Mandalin becoming struck with colic mid-meal, and our leaving our lobster, salmon and white wine, rushing her back to our room.

Instead, aside from our own nervousness, the situation ran quite smoothly especially for a first time. Mandalin cried a little--not enough to disturb the people eating next to us, who barely glanced our way during their meal--and we then fed her a bottle which quickly abated her cries, and put her to sleep. We began to relax and eat our meal in peace.

Since this time, over the next several years, Mandalin has "dined" with her father and I in numerous four and five-star restaurants for my research. Each time it got easier for her and for us to take her, and she became an very well-behaved baby and then child. Unless the service in the restaurant took an inordinately long time (for instance, three hours), she rarely cried, and when she was not flirting with waiters and other customers, she usually played happily with a toy or fell asleep in her stroller while we ate. Again, the repetition of these experiences has conditioned her behavior. She has learned what appropriate behavior in a restaurant is, and provided that we are in and out within a reasonable time frame, she can behave accordingly. Waiters and other customers invariably made comments to us such as, "What a well-behaved baby! What's your secret?" If you follow these tips, and frequently take your baby or child into such settings, you will find that your baby will gradually become more comfortable within them. You will then gain confidence in your ability to take your youngster into a variety of new travel situations.