Mixed-Generation Holidays Are Family Gold

Author Libby Purves writes movingly about holidays with adult children and the trip her family took five months before her son’s death

- Libby Purves

Reports from the travel Industry say there's a boom in adult families holidaying together. Not only do more and more young adults come boomeranging home after university to live in their childhood bedroom, but now – horrors! – we are told that the Bank of Mom and Dad has moved into the holiday business. There’s a reported rise in even twenty-somethings with jobs being taken on fully funded holidays with their parents. Just as if they were six-years-old with buckets and spades.

Of course there will be some whose youthful holiday plans involve rather more drink, drugs, promiscuous hookups and dangerous moped behaviour than they want their parents to know about. I remember my dad – on a family holiday when we four were in our late teens and early twenties – observing darkly, “I cannot admire the children’s Way of Life”. He meant our tendency to get in at 2am after singing our heads off at a local pub and skinny-dipping in the harbour. We explained that actually, Dad, it’s not a ‘way of life’, it’s a holiday.