Traveling with children can be stressful, no matter what their age (and honestly, even with spouses, lol:). One of the things we pride ourselves on is the range of countries and cultures we’ve helped our boys experience over the years. They’ve been to about 30 countries so far on our annual Kaila Family adventures. We take two trips each year, and they’re our chance to help the boys understand and embrace different cultures around the world. When we travel, we let them lead the way through immigration, get the cars, handle the luggage, and order the Uber. They stand with me at hotel check-ins, review the itinerary before we finalize travel, and lead the way when we’re heading to restaurants. We want them to know how to lead when we aren’t there, so we have them practice while we are.
Yes, I’m the Passport Control Center. And I own it.
As a mom, I’m of course the Passport Control Center, as my family likes to call me. I hold the passports for the duration of our travels and only pull them out when the kids have to clear a checkpoint, where they wait on the other end to hand them back. I know, they travel on their own and carry their own passports when they do, but honestly, there are times when I wonder how those passports make it home in one piece :). I’m sure plenty of parents can relate.
Aside from the “sacred passport,” we let the boys lead the way when we travel now. Even when I want to jump in, Sunny pulls me back and reminds me that these are important life skills they’re learning. In China, where Google Translate becomes your bestie, the boys had to figure out how to navigate and deal with adversity in real time. There was one moment, though, in Xi’an where the patience I had to exhibit was tested. The airport uses automated check-in and weighing machines, and while the technology worked fine, the language barrier was real. Some of our bags were overweight, and we needed to attach family members to the check-in so we could share the weight limit across our tickets. It was a testament to my sheer willpower that we made it out of there without one child getting a severe Arctic Circle treatment (that’s when Mom gives the cold shoulder, but on an Arctic-level freeze).
The moment that stayed with me
We made it to security, and there was an issue with Sunny’s ticket. The airline uses passports to track everything, and the agent had entered an extra digit in his ticket number, so he told us to go ahead. The boys were on their own as they passed through security, and I’d like to think they did a great job in the face of some uncertainty. They stayed calm while Dad went back up to the ticket counter, grabbed all the bags, and then proceeded to buy their meat buns. Because the real purpose of their travel is almost always food. Off to the gate we went.
Sunny made it to the gate on time, we all boarded, and we fit all of our luggage into the overhead bins. Win for the day. The flight was extremely full, economy only, with a layout very similar to our dearly departed Spirit Airlines. The reason I’m sharing this story is what happened once we were in our seats. A young woman, probably in her twenties, boarded the plane after us. There was a line, and she was struggling to find space in the overhead bins. As the flight attendant moved her bag toward the back of the plane, she tucked her passport and boarding pass into the outer mesh pocket of that same bag, the one heading several rows behind her seat. The mother in me couldn’t resist. I told her to take her passport out and keep it on her. She was from an Eastern European country, the accent was thick, but I could tell she understood me, and she grabbed her passport just as the bag was carried away.
That’s when it really sank in for me. Thank goodness we’ve taught our boys how to travel internationally, and more importantly, how to guard their passport with their life. Kids should learn how to travel, absolutely, but they also need to understand the value of their international travel documents and what those documents mean for their safety and security abroad.
The leadership thread I keep coming back to
There’s a broader leadership thread in all of this, and it’s one I keep coming back to as a parent and as a business owner.
The first lesson is that we develop people by stepping back, not by stepping in. Every time I want to grab the passport, order the Uber, or handle the check-in machine myself, I’m robbing the boys of a chance to learn. The same is true on a team. The leaders I admire most aren’t the ones doing everything, they’re the ones intentionally creating space for their people to figure it out, fail safely, and grow from it. Sunny pulling me back at check-in is no different than a CEO pulling a manager back from rescuing their direct report.
The second is that life skills aren’t taught in a classroom, they’re modeled in real moments. School won’t teach my boys how to stay calm when a ticket gets flagged at security, how to handle a language barrier with grace, or why a passport is worth guarding with your life. Those lessons only land when they live them. The same is true at work. Onboarding decks and SOPs only go so far. People learn by watching how their leaders handle pressure, ambiguity, and small moments of friction.
The third is that small mistakes have big consequences when the stakes are high. A passport tucked into a mesh pocket of a bag heading several rows away may feel like a small thing, until that bag goes missing. In business, it’s the same. The small process shortcut, the email sent without a second read, the customer concern brushed off in a hurry. Those tiny moments are where trust gets built or quietly broken. Great leaders teach their teams to recognize which “small things” are actually the most important.
The question worth sitting with
If you’re a leader, a parent, or both, the question worth sitting with is this. Where in your life are you doing for others what they really need to learn to do for themselves? Because the most valuable thing we can give the people we love and lead isn’t our protection. It’s our trust that they can handle it, paired with the patience to let them try.
