Don’t Stress So Much About Creating Memories

Parents of little ones, you can relax. Your kids’ memories will not be what you expect.

We were at Disneyland, Josiah was five years old, and we were chatting as he held my hand. 

“Mommy, is it true that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth?” he asked me. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think that there are a lot of happy places. Like Chaza Mwamba [our favorite beach house in Tanzania].”

He thought about this for a moment and then decided, “I think the plane is the happiest place.”

I’m not sure I had learned the Required Parent Poker Face at this point in my parenting.

“The plane?” I sputtered.

The plane, for me, was probably the Least Happiest Place on Earth. Being locked in a metal tube for sixteen hours, thirty thousand feet above the earth, unable to sleep, is not my idea of fun.

“I get to watch so many movies,” Josiah explained. 

‘Tis true. Long-haul flights were the only time in my children’s lives when they got to watch as many movies as they wanted, pausing only to eat the endless snacks handed to them by smiling flight attendants. I suppose, for a five-year-old, this was the definition of a bliss even greater than Disneyland.

In the summer of 2017, my parents took us to the awe-inspiring Zion National Park in Utah, where we rode bikes through valleys guarded by massive red-rock cliffs. My children’s memories of that trip? Playing Wiffle Ball in the sprinklers with Gil and playing four square with their grandparents at our Airbnb. They remember nothing about Zion.

In 2019, we extended a layover in Istanbul, Turkey, for a few days on a trip back to the States from Tanzania. During a recent recollection of that trip, guess what Johnny said he remembered? Not the tours of historic buildings or the fun ice cream street vendors. Not the boat trip down the Bosporus Strait or when we visited two continents on the same day. Nope. He said, “I remember how on the night before we left for Turkey, we got to eat all the Parmesan cheese.”

Ah. The Parmesan cheese. In Tanzania, Parmesan cheese came with us from the States and was carefully rationed. We made a Costco-sized container last us two years. But on the night before we left for our trip to Turkey, everyone got to go hog-wild with what was left of the Parmesan cheese. In a seven-year-old’s mind, a routine pasta meal became a frenzied feast of Parmesan abundance. Apparently, it was something worth remembering for the rest of his life.

I don’t regret taking my kids on those vacations. The majesty of creation increases kids’ capacity for awe, even if they don’t remember it. Exposing them to historical or cultural sites expands their knowledge and perspective, even if it doesn’t stand out as significant in their memories. But if I had understood which experiences actually felt important to them, I would have been a lot less worried about creating perfect family memories. 

In disbelief, our family watched a video of George Kamel interviewing people at Disneyland about their debt. I wonder if those parents felt like an epic vacation to Disneyland was worth taking on thousands of dollars of debt because they feel so much pressure to create Carefully Cultivated Memories. The unspoken rule is that your children will certainly have a deprived childhood, will feel unloved and unimportant, if they don’t get to do all the things and experience all the thrills. 

I can’t help but wonder how many of those kids in that video will remember watching movies on the plane as more fun than Disneyland. 

There are probably a lot of parents of little kids who are anxiously staring into this summer’s calendar and worrying about whether they are planning something extravagant enough or memorable enough to check all the required parenting boxes, when actually, they probably just need to plan a day for watching endless movies with endless snacks. Or a Wiffle Ball game in the sprinklers. Or some other sort of small extravagance equivalent to a feast of Parmesan cheese.

What kids really need this summer is to feel connected to you, to have unexpected fun, and to revel in simple abundance. Take my children’s memories as permission to relax.