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To tell the truth, how many people regret the most during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday is that they decided to take their parents out on a trip?
It's not an exaggeration, searching for "travel with parents" on social media is like entering a wonderful family story sharing session.
"Take the whole family out on a trip, do a strategy for three days, and go home after playing for three hours", "When you enter the restaurant, my mother says you go in and eat, I'll stand at the door and wait", "The food is not delicious, the fun is not fun, and the scenery is not good".
In the fantasy, it is the filial piety of the mother and the son, but in fact, the chicken flies and the dog jumps. I finally looked forward to the small long vacation, which can be liberated from the workplace for a few days, but I didn't expect that taking my parents to travel would be more torturous than going to work to serve Party A. Ask the heavens and the earth, why is it so difficult to travel with your parents?
Collapse, foreshadowing before arrival
Although everyone usually thinks that the purpose of traveling is to relieve the pressure of going to work and school on weekdays, in fact, travel itself is a "time bomb" with countless stressors lurking.
Two American scholars summarized a vacation stress model through investigation, and classified the stressors in tourism into three types: pre-trip stressors, in-trip stressors, and destination stressors [1].
Yes, the stress of a trip often starts before departure, and even more so when traveling with parents.
It's quite simple to see how many people are excited to offer their parents on a family trip, but before they even step out of the house, half of their enthusiasm has been extinguished.
Where to play is the first problem in front of us. A study in Taiwan, China, found that respondents over the age of 40 were more receptive to shorter travel durations and preferred closer destinations [2].
△ Ancient town. (Photo/pixabay)
The alternative places for small and long holidays in the hearts of young people are Xinjiang prairie, Sanya Bay beach, and even Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, so they want to take advantage of the holiday to fly far away and see different scenery; And the list of destinations given by your parents is likely to be an unknown scenic spot, ancient village and ancient town in a neighboring city or county.
Finally succeeded in convincing them to travel far away, and the family faced a huge difference in their itinerary.
A study surveyed the preference of Chinese tourists to travel abroad in a group and found that age had a significant impact on scheduling preference. The youth group (18~35 years old) and the middle-aged group (35~55 years old) both preferred a schedule with more free time, while the older group (≥55 years old) preferred a compact itinerary with more attractions but less free time [3].
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Mom's itinerary has always adhered to the guiding principle of "come and come", and pay attention to the cost-effective experience of visiting multiple attractions in a short time. As for the vacation and relaxation that young people crave to relax, relax and decompress, they really can't understand it when they retire at home on weekdays.
In a survey of people over 50 years old in Hangzhou, relaxing vacations were listed as one of the least important travel motivations [4].
When you, the family travel project manager, scratch your ears and cheeks in the early stage to coordinate the needs of all parties, thinking that everything is done. But on the day of travel, I finally understood the plan of no matter how dense it was, and accidents could not be avoided when landing, especially with my parents.
When traveling between cities, a single unsatisfactory approach to weather, mode of transportation, and travel time can cause panic and reduce people's well-being, especially for people over the age of 60 [5].
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Among them, the most important factor influencing panic and anxiety is the mode of transportation.
Among the three modes of intercity transportation, airplane, train, and high-speed rail, travel by high-speed rail is most associated with negative emotions [5]. According to the researchers, this may be due to the fact that the high-speed rail stations in major cities in China are too large, and the journey from the security checkpoint to the ticket gate area is long and irritating [5]. If your parents are keen to fill their bags with snacks from their hometown, you may feel more empathetic.
Taking parents on long-distance flights across time zones is even more of a head-iron behavior. After experiencing long-distance flights, even athletes have significantly reduced bed time, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and sleep quality, and the fatigue when going to bed has increased significantly[6], not to mention elderly parents.
"Oh, it's really hard to go out and play, it's better to lie at home." Listening to your parents' complaints on the high-speed train, you silently looked out the window, only hating that this journey could not be withdrawn at this moment.
After all, it's all coming.
If you can't play together, the contradiction is about to erupt
Arriving at the destination, this journey to challenge the parent-child relationship has truly begun.
The young people who are tortured by 996 on weekdays finally have a small long vacation, and the dream way to travel is, of course, to sleep in the hotel until they wake up naturally, and visit the scenic spots leisurely.
However, on the second day of the trip, the hotel curtains were pulled open, and the loud voices of your parents and the dazzling sunlight shattered your illusions: "It's seven o'clock, it's time to go!" "Are you here to travel or to sleep?" ”
After listening to you, there was a turbidity in your chest, but seriously, your parents didn't mean it. In old age, they can't sleep, wake up early, and of course want to leave earlier than tossing and turning in the hotel.
After the age of 50, a series of significant changes occur in the structure of sleep, not only in bedtime and wake-up times, but also in the overall duration of sleep [7].
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Mom and Dad who wake you up at seven o'clock are likely to wake up at five or six o'clock in the morning. Maybe looking at you sleeping and the slightly lit sky outside the window, they also want to sleep a little longer, but unfortunately, it is difficult for them to fall asleep again. Young people can still fall asleep when woken up, but older people may have a longer sleep onset latency than younger people [7].
Young people who go out early in the morning with sleepy eyes have to be angry again when it is time to eat at noon.
Somehow, as soon as I went out, my hometown became what my parents called "white moonlight". Young people travel to try local food, but are often rejected by their parents, and they always stare at Chinese restaurants when they travel abroad.
Even if you try it reluctantly, you will comment disappointedly: "It's not as good as fried noodles at home", "It's better to eat this all the way to eat at home".
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But seriously, middle-aged and elderly people are indeed not as "edible" as young people.
In a survey of 8850 Chinese adults, the dietary preferences of the middle-aged (41-60 years) and older (60-year-old) groups were lower than those of the younger adults (18-40 years) [8].
As they get older, they have some oral defects and are more wary of novel and unknown foods [9]. Instead of trying a variety of foods that can cause discomfort, it is better to eat foods that you are used to.
The most devastating thing for young people is that before their parents set off, they kept saying: "Anything is fine" and "I will listen to you", but after departure, they turned their faces and did not admit their accounts: they did not agree anywhere, and they could find thorns everywhere.
Eating high-end restaurants "spending money indiscriminately" and "being too pitiful", eating street food "unhygienic" and "eating by yourself"; On the one hand, the tickets to the scenic spot are too expensive, "you guys go in, I'll just wait at the door", and on the other hand, hundreds of inferior souvenirs in the scenic spot are said to be bought, which makes people's eyes dark.
On the journey of filial piety, it is really you who are even more unhappy
It is said that travel is a demon mirror, and friends who get along very well on weekdays may also take a sharp turn for the worse after a trip. When it comes to the stressful situation of travel[1], the intergenerational conflicts hidden in the past parent-child relationship emerge one by one, and it is easy for people to feel broken.
You think you're an independent adult, but in the eyes of your parents, you're still a kid who needs to be educated and managed. In a survey of 590 parents of college students in the United States, less than 20 percent of parents believe that their children are already adults, and about seven out of ten parents believe that they are still children in many ways [10].
This means that parents will still use their authority to interfere in their children's decisions. However, when authority exceeds the wishes of a child who already has a certain sense of independence, it often leads to poor quality of parent-child relationships [11]. It is conceivable that in a situation where decisions are often made in a situation such as travel, parental authority interference and parent-child conflict will only increase more than usual.
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On weekdays, everyone goes to school and goes to work, and the emperor is far away, and the infrequent contact greatly reduces the probability of conflicts with parents from the source. Leng Buding's family needs to spend several days together day and night during the trip, and often faces the situation of making decisions, which naturally makes the parent-child relationship in crisis.
Even if you are already a self-sufficient adult, the conflict situation does not necessarily get better. A study of 612 parents in Hong Kong found that adult children were older and had a higher level of intergenerational conflict. Scholars believe that the older a child is, the less frequent the contact with his or her parents, and the greater the generational differences, which leads to more sources of conflict [12].
Maybe when it comes to getting along with parents, I really have to believe that "distance produces beauty".
In addition to the insurmountable generational differences, the reason why traveling with parents is so painful is that adult children have to play the roles of "children" and "tourists" at the same time in travel, which inevitably leads to conflicts between the two roles [13].
Traveling with parents, to put it bluntly, is more of a journey of filial piety. In family tourism activities, a kind of mutual filial piety of "reciprocating the kindness of parents" affects children's travel decision-making behavior, so that children often take their parents' travel needs as the premise when making decisions [14]. Children of China, especially.
A study published in Tourism Management, a top international academic journal on tourism, analyzed the posts published on tourism websites and concluded that the motivations of Chinese adult children to travel with their parents include three types of motivations: parent-oriented, family-oriented, and self-oriented [15].
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Although children who post rarely express a single motivation, family reunification and relationship enhancement are the main motivations. When parent-directed motivation and self-directed motivation conflict during travel, self-directed motivation is more likely to be subordinated to parental needs and desires [15].
Therefore, if you want to travel with your parents without destroying the family relationship, it is best to treat it as a "job" from the beginning. As the child "Party B", meeting the needs of the parents "Party A" and maintaining the relationship between the two parties is the main task of your journey.
But then again, it's obvious that it's hard to come out on vacation to play, why did you fall into a tragic cycle of part-time work?
There is no way, perhaps the only solution is to pay for a reliable tour group for your parents. The hardship of traveling with parents is enough to endure once!
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