Dads love their kids and want to take them on holiday, but it's not always easy says David Atkinson.
The immigration officials at Schiphol airport looked confused. A man travelling alone with two young children – surely he must be up to no good?
He checked our passports and looked puzzled. Yes, I was their father. But where, he asked, was their mother?
For me, I never thought being a single father and travel would be mutually exclusive concepts. After all, like the old Mark Twain quote, travel helps to broaden the mind.
But sometimes the people we have encountered along the way could have used a little mind broadening of their own.
So maybe, as we celebrate Father’s Day for the weekend of June 17, we should consider a little-recognised truth: dads love their kids. And sometimes they even want to go on holiday together.
Catering for single parent travellers
There are around two million single parents in the UK, according to Gingerbread, the national charity working with single-parent families. That’s nearly a quarter of families with dependent children. And the proportion of single parents who are fathers has remained stable at around 10% for over ten years.
The travel industry is slowly getting better at recognising societal changes, catering for non-nuclear families with empathy and practical consideration.
More forward-thinking companies such as Mango Holidays offer dedicated single-parent trips, while Activities Abroad coordinates group trips to encourage both kids and parents to foster new friendships.
Meanwhile holidays parks, such as Landal GreenParks, the Dutch alternative to Center Parcs, offers group activities but also your own lodge to retire to when you fancy some family time alone.
And we’ve often used the National Trust’s handy single-parent membership (annual fee £75), offering free entry to over 500 places and free parking at most National Trust car parks. It has kept us busy with day trips to Wales from our home in Chester.
Dads often feel like an afterthought
But some travel experiences make dads feel like an afterthought. The company HolyMama, for example, organises yoga retreats for mums and toddlers with dads welcome on certain itineraries.
Nobody begrudges hard-working mums a break but don’t dads want some chill-out time, too?
Travel, it seems, still has a long way to go – especially for the often-overlooked single dads.
Lessons from the road
Being responsible for not just myself but two little girls while in a strange city, or different country, could seem like a daunting proposition. But I was always determined not to let divorce prevent me from sharing my love of travel with Maya (now 12) and Olivia (now 8).
Indeed, I’ve taken my two daughters away since they were pre-school-age, helping to us to bond as a unit and learn things never covered in any school classroom.
After nights in hotel rooms watching the BBC news channel with just the minibar and the girls’ snoring for company, I’ve also learnt a few tricks along the way.
Much as we love spending time together, it’s great for them to meet children their own age. So resorts with kids’ clubs, or cruises, offer a ready-made community of new playmates – and some rare quiet time for me.
On a Baltic cruise aboard P&O’s Britannia, for example, they would spend the mornings doing activities in the clubs for their respective age groups, then we would come back together for lunch by the pool and a lazy afternoon on deck.
Choosing other accommodation styles has also worked well for us. One of our favourite family trips was to West Sweden, where we stayed on a farm in the Bohuslan archipelago a couple of hours from Gothenburg. It was part of the Meet The Swedes group of family homestays.
The Lekander family met us off the bus and took us into their home, the children fishing for crabs in a local rock pool while dad Bjorn introduced me to the joys of a traditional Swedish midsummer barbecue.
Fostering a sense of community
Most of all, joining up with other dads, single or otherwise, has helped to foster a sense of community.
I recently re-connected with an old school friend who had lost his wife to cancer. He and I are now planning a summer trip, taking his little boy and my two girls for a traditional seaside holiday of ice creams and crazy golf in Wales.
We’ll probably be the only single dads in the village but we can go for a quiet pint in the beer garden while the children pay nearby, both knowing we empathise with the pressures the other faces.
Back at Schiphol airport, meanwhile, the confused immigration official finally waved us through to start our family cycling trip around the canals and backstreets of child-friendly Utrecht.
Research regularly shows the importance of fathers to the development of children in all aspects of their lives – from early-age literary to teenage role models.
Yet fathers often feel that they are put down or relegated to second-division status in advertising campaigns. Some 69% of respondents felt they were misrepresented by brands, according to the Men Are On The Edge survey for the magazine The Book of Man.
So let’s celebrate dads this weekend and think about ways we can encourage all single-parent families to explore the world with their children.
After all, dads deserve a break, too.
David Atkinson is the author of Inside Fatherhood; follow him @atkinsondavid. Photo by Steven Van Loy on Unsplash.