Capturing a Kid’s-Eye View of Travel

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Last summer, while preparing a travel essay about my childhood years in Budapest, I spent some time revisiting my family’s old home videos.

Because we lived in Hungary during the early 1990s, I traveled quite extensively throughout Europe when I was young — to Rome, Paris, Prague, Madrid and a long list of other cities, beginning when I was 4 years old. And because my parents were eager to record our adventures on camcorder, I’ve got receipts (as the kids say) for how I behaved.

Several moments in the tapes stood out to me: my two siblings and I gazing up in awe at Michelangelo’s David, growing antsy at the Louvre, giggling beneath the Eiffel Tower, climbing on the base of a statue outside the Cloth Hall in Krakow, Poland. In one particularly amusing clip, the camera pans across the Circus Maximus in Rome — my dad is operating the camcorder while my mom reads from our Fodor’s guidebook — only to find the three of us tumbling down one of the grassy embankments.

“More than 300,000 spectators could watch chariot and horse races while the emperors looked on from this very spot,” my mom says, solemnly. Then: “They’re rolling down the hill,” she adds, with obvious disappointment (and arguably a faint hint of delight). “Do you see them?”

The videos got me thinking: Had I experienced the great sites of Europe at too young an age? Would I have benefited more if I’d been a little older? Surely there were cultural and historical lessons that had flown over my head.

And yet I must have gained something from all of our traveling, even if only subconsciously or by osmosis.

A few months ago, I aired some of these thoughts during a meeting with my Travel colleagues while we planned a family travel project. The idea for an article slowly emerged: We’d try to find out how children’s travel experiences differed from those of their parents. And to do so, we’d enlist families around the world to share their perspectives — and their pictures.

The idea was simple: We’d send a handful of reporters to popular tourist destinations around the world and have them look for families traveling with young kids. The reporters would then ask the parents and the children to carry around disposable cameras, with instructions to capture whatever caught their attention.

Our first attempt was a bust. Ceylan Yeginsu, a Travel…