A multigenerational holiday has its peculiar advantages. If your adult children have only recently left home, it may be the only way you can guarantee seeing them. If you’ve got children who have children, it may be the only time you get to see your grandchildren without actually babysitting. But a successful multigenerational holiday – lively but not exhausting, stimulating but not fraught – requires a certain amount of strategic planning, and the foresight to avoid some basic pitfalls. Here are six tips to get you through.
1. Don’t restrict yourselves to family. The ideal multigenerational holiday includes an extended social circle: friends, your kids’ friends, godparents, whatever. Not only do they provide fresh perspectives or new topics of conversation, but their presence will ensure your own family is better behaved.
2. When scheduling excursions, be forgiving about start times. Across two or more generations, the range of waking hours will be considerable – some people will get up before six, others will be impossible to rouse before 11. This is often a huge source of conflict at home, but on vacation you need to let it slide. Don’t plan any group outings that begin before midday.
3. Remember: not everybody has to do everything. If the twentysomethings in your group don’t fancy a three-hour cave tour, leave them behind. Splinter excursions are the key to happiness. Make sure that at least one representative from each generation knows how to drive.
4. Insist on communal eating. This, really, is the central focus of the multigenerational holiday: the preparing, eating and clearing up of huge meals. Not breakfast though. Breakfast is a personal responsibility.
5. Keep a running list of things you need, or may need. In a big group of varying ages, there is bound to be a shopping trip setting off every day, if not twice a day. As long as you make sure they take the up-to-date list with them, the person going to the supermarket may never have to be you.
6. Try it at Christmas. Breaks including several generations are usually limited to school holidays, but if you can’t afford summer prices then the last week of December is a good shout. You’d be with family anyway at this time, and it won’t feel like an ordinary Christmas – it will feel like an escape.
