Tag: kids

To find out how children’s travel experiences differ from their parents’, we enlisted families around the world to share their perspectives — and their pictures.

Riding atop his father’s shoulders, Villum Vejlin Sogaard arrived at the gate to board the ferry departing from Lower Manhattan like a miniature, triumphant explorer.

His eyes darted from the downtown skyline to souvenir vendors to fellow tourists with tickets in hand. It was the 6-year-old’s first time in the United States and he was about to see one of the country’s iconic landmarks: the Statue of Liberty.

“I think it’s a must-see when you’re in the city,” said Simon Vejlin Sogaard, Villum’s father, who had traveled with several other family members from their home in Denmark. “It’s a great piece of history. And it was actually even more interesting to know the history behind the statue and what it stands for — which, I think, is more important.”

Villum was perhaps too young to appreciate, as his father did, what the statue represents. Instead, when he reached Liberty Island and made his way up the steps to cast his eyes on the giant green woman, her arm extended with a torch, he was awed mainly by her sheer scale.

The differences in the perspectives of Mr. Vejlin Sogaard and his young son are emblematic of what many families experience while vacationing, and they raise questions frequently asked by parents around the world: Do young children benefit from traveling to new places? If so, how? Do they find value in seeing historical landmarks and museums? And how might a trip through a child’s eyes differ from their parents’ perspective?

We set out to learn just that.

This year, The New York Times dispatched a team of reporters to popular tourist landmarks in several cities across the world, from Washington, D.C., to Bangkok. At each location, a parent and their child were both given disposable cameras and were tasked with taking photographs of what they