Growing Community: Leaving The Aspen Bubble Expands Horizons

If you’re a regular kid growing up in the Aspen bubble, the chances are better than average (and by average, we’re talking about the general population of this country) that at some point you’ll have done some pretty incredible traveling by the time you graduate from our high school.

Many families who ended up here in the valley, did so precisely because of a love of travel and adventure. The mountains draw us, but so too do beautiful beaches and sophisticated foreign cities, and so in turn we share these passions with our families.

Some of our children may have benefited from the generosity of wealthy Aspenites who have gorgeous homes in places where they have palm trees (a sure indicator of “exotic” for many kids), as well as Paris, London — well, you name it. Sometimes Aspen children might even be invited to fly there on a friend’s private jet to get to the aforementioned locales. What could be more “Aspen” than such experiences? And how do we keep them grounded in normality afterwards?

Goethe, the German intellectual who was the subject of the 1949 festival that initiated what we now know as the Aspen Institute, wrote: “The best education for a clever person is found in travel.” So, we wonder, what do modern children, who appear to be so worldly because of what they think they know from looking at their phones, gain from travel, in an increasingly homogeneous world? And how, as parents, can we help them extract the maximum personal value from seeing other people, places and things?

As the glow of the Aspen schools’ spring break starts to ebb away, this may be a good time to reflect on the value to family life of leaving home to travel now and then. Let’s be clear that a day in Grand Junction, a camping trip in Utah or a weekend in Denver count as travel, just as much as the private jet to Maui. This is about leaving the routine and opening our eyes to new things.

And of course, many of the best parts of being on vacation are common to any destination, however exotic: the chance to try new foods, make a friend at a playground, in a campground or on a beach, visit a museum, feel a small sense of freedom in running around barefoot or exploring a new environment. Even tiny children can experience these stimuli, and we urge parents to embrace the travel disruption, the unfamiliar bedrooms, the disturbed routines and occasional discomfort and make time to explain, ask questions and encourage children to look around and appreciate both similarities and differences. 

Curiosity is hard-wired into children, but when we see kids staring at their phones or being given an iPad for distraction while away on vacation, we wonder what that does to the curiosity instinct, and sometimes our hearts sink. We’ll give a break to every parent who needs a few minutes of peace and quiet and provides some kind of technological diversion during transitions or fractious moments, but when devices become an expectation or habit, it’s a bit sad. Our very recent personal experience has included seeing a toddler in a stroller looking at an iPhone in a gorgeous botanical garden, and a teenager being driven around a new city, engrossed in the antics of their friends on TikTok rather than the world through the car window. 

None of us wants to spend a break sermonizing to our kids, but it doesn’t do harm to anyone, at any age, to be reminded that life is not perfect for everyone. If you travel, for example, to Los Angeles, along with the fabled palm trees, fancy homes, cars and beautiful beaches, you’ll see significant homelessness, the impacts of addiction and long lines of cars waiting to drive through a food bank. The same is true for most big cities and many developing countries. The discomfort that accompanies the pleasure is part of what makes travel so valuable, and children too need to have a sense of this. Bottom line, it’s worth taking every opportunity while away from home, to open children’s eyes to the wider world in all its facets.

And then there’s the truth that life in a place as idyllic as Aspen isn’t perfect either. The vacationers we encounter on the gondola or other tourist settings are often surprised to learn that it can be hard to bring up a family in this expensive, complicated town.  Everything that exists in cities, for better or worse, is here too. So, here’s hoping that those of you who got away for spring break, as well as those of you who had a staycation, had a wonderful, stimulating, eye-opening time. 

Growing Community is written by Katherine Sand, director of Aspen Family Connections; Renee Giles, AFC’s early childhood connector; and Megan Monaghan, co-manager of Kids First. It features topics of interest related to early childhood, parenting and education. To reach the authors, email ksand@aspenk12.net, rgiles@aspenk12.net or megan.monaghan@aspen.gov.

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