Dummies Guide to Cruising with the Teens

My teens are all grown up and one of the nicest experiences we shared as a family has been to go on cruise vacations. Follow these simple guidelines and you can enjoy that cruise with your teens.

1. You can pick any ship and it will work out.
The bigger ships will have more teens and more facilities and programs specifically for them. This is not as important since teens will usually find each other on their own to have fun, irrespective of whether there are programs available on the cruise. The opposite applies when you travel with younger kids, they need more structure.

2. Teens will gripe initially about the trip but usually end up enjoying it.
I am sure you have seen this in your teens, not just when you are planning a cruise but just about anything else. It's pretty much standard to hear that they would rather be left behind at home to be with their friends .. but what usually happens at the end of each cruise is that you teens will be happy that they went with you.

3. Teens can carry their own luggage (just kidding!)
It's true though ... Remember those days when you had to carry them and their stuff when they were younger? With teens, you can now focus on more exotic locations which you could not go to before.

4. Teens need breathing room, space-wise.
When the kids were small, going for a triple cabin worked since it was cozier for everyone. Teens need their space, so you need to match your budget with choices available -- mini-suites or family suites which can hold five or more people, adjoining cabins with a private connecting door between them (similar set-up you can find in hotels), two adjoining cabins with no privacy door, or cabins facing each other with one across the hall and one with a balcony and a nice ocean view!

Options will vary for each cruise that you take so it's recommended that you reach out to a cruise counselor before you even start booking. In my experience, mini-suites are usually larger than the largest regular room, with curtains separating the sleeping areas. A regular suite will be larger than two regular rooms combined and might be less expensive than the two rooms.

If you will be charged the same for a full suite versus two regular rooms, then you need to evaluate which one is better in terms of comfort and privacy. The full suite might be comfortable for the entire family at the expense of privacy requirements for your teens. Just keep in mind that if you go with separate rooms, it's harder to monitor your teens. To mitigate this, you can always go for the adjoining rooms set up so you can at least hear what is going on with your teens next door.

Due to the above factors, adjoining cabins are usually the first to be booked during summer and spring breaks, so try to reserve them months in advance.

5. In addition to their need for space, teens need their freedom too.
As a parent, you just want to enjoy that cruise vacation with the entire family. Your teens, on the other hand, might have a different agenda and might just want to be as far away from you as possible!

This is where cruise vacations works great -- you can be together as a family unit while doing those on-shore excursions away from the ship, but once you come on-board, let your teens set their own activities with other teens. All you need to do is implement a simple curfew and check up on them a few times.

If you follow these basic guidelines, you are set in terms of enjoying that cruise with your teens. Our kids grow up too fast and before you know it, they will be out of the house, so I say enjoy the time you have with them as much as possible!

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