Have Teens Will Travel, a Survival Guide

I have three grown up kids now and one of the nicest thing we did as a family was to go on cruise vacations. Follow these simple guidelines and you can enjoy that cruise with your teens.

1. Any ship will do!.
Odds are the bigger the ship, the more teens will be on-board and the more activities available 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. These programs are more important if you have younger kids in tow since the structure it provides means less worries on keeping the small ones entertained.

2. Teens will gripe initially about the trip but usually end up enjoying it.
Teens griping about something is almost a universal rule, so don't let this faze you. It's pretty much standard to hear that they would rather be left behind at home to be with their friends .. but from my experience, at the end of each cruise, my teens are always glad they came with mom and dad.

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.
If you have younger kids, a triple cabin or a quad cabin will work since it's a bit cozier than the larger rooms. 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!

Each cruise will present you with various options so it's best to confirm the details with a cruise counselor before you book it. 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 suite might be able to accommodate your entire family but separate rooms will provide more privacy to your teens. If you go with the separate rooms approach, you will not be able to track your teens activity as much. To address this, you can always book adjoining rooms so you can at least hear your teens activities 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!

Not a problem with cruise vacations -- you can compromise by being together on those on-shore excursions but when you are on board the ship, let your teens set their own activities away from you. Just adopt a simple curfew and check on them once in a while.

Just follow these simple tips and you are on your way to a relaxing cruise with your teenagers. 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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Monty is a bored retiree living in the middle of the Las Vegas desert. In an effort to relieve the boredom, he has started setting up a varied collection of sites, so if you are looking for a store with the best selection and pricing on tiffany lamps or just looking for an ipad case for your iPad, try visiting his sites.

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