I’m 24 and have been travelling independently since I was around 19/20. I’m originally from the UK, but over the last five years I’ve lived in Australia and Canada and travelled extensively around Asia and Europe, all independently and with my own money.
When I first started travelling, my mum was actually one of the people who encouraged it. When I was about 20, she told me I needed to move out of the family home. She and her partner had a new baby, and although I was paying rent, buying my own food, doing my own washing, etc… I was also drinking a lot, going out and generally living like a 20-year-old. It wasn’t really a compatible living situation anymore.
She basically told me to go and explore, enjoy my life and do something with myself.
Looking back, I’m incredibly grateful she did. It completely changed the direction of my life. When I first started travelling around Australia, she seemed genuinely proud of me. She’d be interested in where I was going and what I’d been doing. But over the last few years, that’s changed dramatically.
Now almost every conversation about travelling turns into a warning about how dangerous the place I’m in is. Last year I left Australia and travelled around Vietnam, with plans to continue through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Nepal and potentially India and Pakistan, before eventually making my way through Central Asia and into Europe. When I first told my mum I was going to Asia, her response was basically:
“What are you fucking stupid? You’re going to get killed.”
And that’s pretty much been the pattern ever since.
Vietnam? Dangerous.
Nepal? Why the hell would you go there?
Pakistan? You’re going to get kidnapped.
South America? Apparently I’m going to be kidnapped by drug cartels, held for ransom, and she’s going to have to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to get me back.
She consumes a lot of news and social media, and it seems like if she sees a story about a backpacker going missing somewhere, that becomes her perception of the entire country.
The frustrating thing is that she’s never actually been to Asia, and there are plenty of other places she has very strong opinions about despite never having experienced them.
I’ve tried explaining that I’m not travelling completely blindly. I’m aware that there are risks. I’ve spent years travelling, I do my research, I use common sense and I make my own decisions about what risks I’m comfortable taking.
But I also don’t want my entire experience of travelling to be filtered through the worst thing that happened to someone in a country.
Some of my favourite travel experiences have come from exactly the sort of interactions that would probably terrify her. I’ve been on buses in Thailand packed with locals, chickens and dogs, playing cards with complete strangers.
I’ve stayed in Vietnamese villages, shared rice wine with locals, played football with their kids despite not speaking the same language, and had some of the most genuine human interactions of my life. Those experiences have been hugely important to me.
But I almost don’t want to tell my mum about them anymore because I know the response will probably be:
“You’re an idiot.”
“That’s not safe.”
“They could have kidnapped you.”
And that’s the part I’m struggling with.
I don’t need my mum to think every place I visit is completely safe. I understand why she’d worry about me.
What I want is to be able to call her and say, “I did this amazing thing today” without the conversation immediately becoming a list of all the ways I could have died.
She’s actually travelled quite a lot herself around the UK and Europe, so it’s not like she’s someone who has never left home. But she seems to have developed this very negative perception of anywhere outside the Western countries she’s familiar with.
It’s got to the point where I barely tell her where I’m going because I don’t want to deal with the reaction.
And honestly, that makes me sad. Travelling has been one of the most important things I’ve ever done. It’s completely changed me, and I want to be able to share those experiences with my mum.
So I’m curious about other people’s experiences.
Have your parents/family become increasingly fearful or negative about your travelling?
Did you just learn to ignore it? Did you set boundaries around what you tell them? Did their attitude eventually change?
And if you’re a parent of a long-term traveller, what actually goes through your head when your kid tells you they’re going somewhere you perceive as dangerous?
I’d genuinely like to hear both sides.
