Take a look on Pinterest these days and you will find many pins that deal with teaching your children old-fashioned skills. Traveling provides a means of teaching some of those types of skills; one of which I believe is Resilience.
Resilience is the ability to overcome or come back from difficulty. When I was teaching at a local college, we would jokingly refer to many of the Millennials as teacups; meaning that when presented with the smallest of obstacles, they would simply crack like fine china. It was sad and very disheartening. I vowed that my children would not be like that.
On a recent trip to New Mexico, I had the wonderful chance to show my little guy the lesson of resilience. We were about 20 miles from the New Mexico border when the car suddenly jolted and made the most horrendous noise. I was not sure if it was a blow-out, the transmission or any number of horrible mechanical malfunctions. Everyone in the car was holding their breath as I quickly made my way to the side of this very busy highway.
Once on the side of the road, my husband and I jumped out of the car to assess the damage. We dropped to all fours, looked at the undercarriage and breathed a sigh of relief. It was just the metal splash guard that had partially come unattached and we were pushing it along the road. Apparently, at my last oil change, just a few days prior, the mechanic had not properly replaced the screws and six of the ten had fallen out. After some deliberation, my husband decided that the zipties he had purchased in Winslow would be good surrogates for the missing screws. Thirty minutes later we were back on the road.
Now, the entire time this was going on, my son was asking a million questions. He watched everything we did with an intense curiosity and was very upset that we would not let him out of the car so he could help. The first opportunity he got, he jumped out of the car and looked under the front to see our handiwork. It was exciting!
This was only a mild setback, but it could have become a major ordeal. That first day of the trip, on the side of a major highway, my little guy learned to remain calm in the face of difficulty. He also witnessed how thinking outside of the box can be the key to solving your problems. He saw that an oxygen-dependent old man and a woman did not have to wait for someone to come save them; that they had the power to rescue themselves. Such a powerful lesson and an important life skill to learn