Loosening The Apron Strings

Gaby watching the waves go by.

Family holidays stay with you forever, so you want them to be full of quality family time and of course lots of fun. A cruise holiday ticks all of the boxes; plenty of entertainment for the kids day and night, fun activities for the whole family to enjoy together and great kids club facilities for piece of mind when you need some time to relax.  Our firm favorite for the family is Royal Caribbean.

Whether I want them to or not, my children are increasingly becoming more independent. They want their space and their autonomy at home, and the same is true when we are on holiday. Now, I am not at all willing to let them set out on the streets of the wide wide world anytime soon, but a cruise holiday is a perfect training ground for them. This mostly contained environment is the ideal location to begin loosening the apron strings and let them venture out on their own a bit.

After two other cruises, my children aged 9 and 13 have a good feeling about how to find their way around and where to go to find food and fun. This third cruise seemed like a good time to let them loose (within reason) to have some independence. Before we let them go, we as a family plan to make the whole venture safe and successful.

• Set some expectations.  It helps to start out the cruise with everyone on the same page.  For our family, we wanted everyone to plan to have all breakfast and evening meals together but we also just wanted to have a regular chance to check in with each other. Most sea days were spent around the pool where we ended up having lunch anyway.
• some ground rules.  Before setting our children loose on the ship, we created some extra special “Maritime Rules.” In our case, we wanted the children to stay together in pairs for safety.  Of course, we reiterated that they were not to be in anyone’s cabin and they were not to let anyone in our cabin. Failure to comply with Maritime law would result in immediate cessation of all free roaming privileges.
• Discuss your plans. Over breakfast we took a look at the daily Program Guide and discussed what everyone wanted to do alone and what we wanted to do as a family. From that discussion, we drew up a basic plan for the day. Since our children are still on the youngish end of the spectrum, we tried to break the day into 1-2 hour blocks. That way, they still had some freedom, but we could keep an eye on them with regular check-ins.
• Have a system. Even after discussing our plans, we wanted to try to keep a running tab on where everyone would be, so we set up a message system to keep everyone informed. Anytime anyone entered or left the cabin, they made a quick note of where they were going, who they were with, and when they would be back. The time was also noted, as a record of when they checked in.
• Book the children their own room. If you have a family larger than four, you will have to book two staterooms anyway, but even with four, older kids will love the freedom of having their own room. My children still bunk with us in our cabin.
• Give them some spending privileges.  Throwing caution to the wind, we allowed our children spending privileges on the cruise cards and gave them a reasonable spending limit for each day of the cruise. I do caution you however to keep an eye on the games arcade!
• Expect alone time to become family time. As much as my children were initially excited about going it alone, they naturally gravitated back towards their family pretty quickly. It was not uncommon to send them out to find something to do alone, and find us all gathered together at a quiz,  bingo or going to a show together. That actually gives me hope for the future. I am happy to see that they feel confident enough to head out on their own, but connected enough to find happiness in spending time together.