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Notes -
For those of you who are parents, what were your favorite experiences/things to share with your children? For those of you who aren't, what are your most meaningful memories of things your parents shared with you?
I'm thinking of books/movies/tv shows, camping trips, activities, sports, video/board games, puzzles, family stories, hobbies - anything you can think of that was meaningful.
I’m not a parent but my best memories are generally of us doing active things together. Playing sports (I still suck at tennis, but I had a great time playing it with my brothers). My grandma used to bake, so I remember doing that with her. My other grandma liked to tell stories and would pretty much make them up for us around bedtime.
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Reading aloud to your family, particularly when your children are relatively young, is a wonderful and memorable tradition. Of course you should read with your children to help them learn how to read, but that involves sitting with them viewing the page, asking them to sound out words, etc. What I'm talking about is sitting around in a living room, no phones or tablets or other screens, everyone listening to one person read. For this exercise with grade school children I particularly recommend E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues, and a lot of Rudyard Kipling. As children get older, swap in classic novels as well as challenging nonfiction.
Also, assuming you are American, get your children to the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. at least once between the ages of about 9 and 14. The museums are free to enter, so you only have to pay the cost of travel. The National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Natural History, Museum of American History, and the Air and Space Museum are especially remarkable. I have been to museums across the country and while there are some good experiences to be had everywhere, ultimately none favorably compares.
The main experiences that I think do hold a candle to the National Mall are either one-off ticketed experiences or noteworthy natural features of the (mostly, western) U.S. (Redwoods, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, etc.). You can't really pack several of those into just a day or two, and that makes a difference. For example, standing beneath the Saturn V at the Kennedy Space Center is a really unique experience that you can't have in Washington, D.C.--but traveling to central Florida, driving out to the coast, shelling out the admission fee, seeing the whole park in 4 or 5 hours, and then wondering whether you should grab a couple hours at the beach or just drive back to Orlando for the theme parks, lacks a density that the National Mall can deliver every day, several days running. (And as a bonus, you might Notice something amusingly culture-warry, like the peculiarly mono-racial character of certain Smithsonian occupations...)
Everything on your list of examples also works, of course, but one you seem to have missed entirely is cooking together. I suppose, given the prevalence of Meal Bars in rationalsphere culture, it is something we tend to overlook, but "family recipes" are a thing for a reason. And I've not thought of this before, but it occurs to me that "going out to eat as a family" was, in my own childhood, a somewhat formal affair, and a memorable one, while today it seems to be quite a commonplace occurrence for many families. I wonder just how much "favorite experiences" and "meaningful memories" depends on a conscious choice by parents to organize a group effort to do something that would be easier to just handle alone, such that it is clear that the real, meaningful point of the activity is to be together.
Thank you for the kind recommendations, and apologies that I've been too busy to revisit this thread until now.
Never heard of any of them! I will follow up and probably benefit from reading them myself.
I spent some time in DC! I agree, it should definitely be a bucket list item, although I got a lot more mileage out of the monuments, congress, white house, congressional library, etc. than the museums. Perhaps the calculus is flipped at that age.
It's true, to the degree that I somehow reached adulthood with a complete ignorance of cuisine beyond meat and potatoes. To a degree that someone had to explain to me what to do with mangoes, cilantro and other not-very-exotic foodstuffs.
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The Air Force museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH is also extremely impressive, and free. Not a lot else great around it, but it's in a good location to be a road trip stop.
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Going to second the reading aloud thing. My family would alternate who would read the stories between the best readers each night, and it remains perhaps my fondest family memory of all. We would read all sorts of things, but LotR and Of Mice and Men stand out to me. The former because it started a long obsession with Tolkien's work, and the latter because there is nothing quite like sobbing along with your family to a beautiful book as you try to choke out the words.
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The word meaningful bears a heavy load, and I hesitate to mention what comes to mind as the activities seem so trite. I'll mention them anyway.
Movies. My mom made some disastrous choices in taking me to films. JAWS was released the year I turned seven, and for reasons I cannot fathom even in hindsight, she took us to see it. Me, at seven, watching that film. It was of course bad enough that you saw the commercial advertisements on television constantly that summer and felt a creeping horror at what might be contained in the film. To actually have to sit in a darkened theater and behold it, then be expected, after the lights went up ( and yes, no one moved until the credits had finished and the buoy raft successfully reached the beach) to carry on with normal life, well. It was by far one of the most vivid memories of moviegoing youth. I feared swimming even in pools for years, as cliched as that undoubtedly sounds.
But she did take us to happy films. I saw Star Wars with her and Superman: The Movie, both of which were very memorable experiences for reasons I will not bore you with here.
Beach Trips. This may sound ironic on the heels of my story about watching JAWS, but we used to rent a cabin every year on the white sandy dunes on the Gulf of Mexico. My best memories are before the first big hurricane of those years (Fredric) which wiped clean the entirety of cabins in the area we had frequented (these were rebuilt, along with the first of what were to be many condominium towers along the coast. It was better before.) I have stores of memories about the beach trips, including fishing off the pier withy dad, eating lots of fried food with hushpuppies, ranging up and down the sea reed dunes, and sitting around on the deck putting together jigsaw puzzles.
These were days before smartphones and the net, when there were often vast stretches of unstructured time not to be filled with staring at electronics (as I am doing now). Games, short of solitaire, were played as a family. It was a different time.
As it happens I am also a parent. My boys are still young but getting less young every day. I have tried, before they got their phones, to establish connections via movies (It's easier now with streaming services, if very different). And bicycle rides, puzzles, board games (which they are still keen to if we can get everyone involved) and beachcombing. Trying to hit the high points. But I have no idea if what resonated or resonates for me will for them.
I also showed my youngest son JAWS.
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