Cultural Events: The Ultimate Close-to-Home Adventure for Kids

Looking for an easy way to expose your kids (and yourselves!) to some more adventures? Want to prepare your kids for international travel? Here’s one of the easiest ways to get your kids ready to experience new cultures:

Go to local cultural events! Whether it’s an ethnic festival, Harmony Day celebrations, or multicultural days, there are sure to be a few cultural events close to where you live.

Five Benefits of Attending Cultural Events

1. Try international foods – at home we get stuck eating what’s familiar and popular with our families. It’s easy to forget there are families down the road eating completely different cuisines! When we travel abroad (or even to new towns, or camping, or going on a plane) kids often have to eat unfamiliar foods. Cultural festivals are great for experiencing the FUN of trying new flavours in a stress-free way.

2. Be the minority – cultural events allow kids to see people who look different to them as being the majority. Whether you’re at a Hindu, Japanese, Thai, Ethiopian or Mexican festival, it’s a chance to see cultural costumes and outfits and let your kids be the odd ones out. When they travel abroad it won’t be such a huge cultural shock.

Taking your kids to local international festivals is a great way to expose them to new cultures!

3. Celebrate cultural differences – these festivals are an opportunity to show differences being celebrated. Whether it’s costumes, customs, music, dances, food, languages or beliefs, festivals show that we can enjoy what’s different about other people and places around the world. What a great mindset to have before travelling!

4. Hear different languages – The chance to hear different languages and see people speaking them in normal life can be inspiring, mind-boggling and really interesting for kids who only speak one language. Sometimes it can start a conversation about learning languages. Also, people at international festivals will often have ‘strange’ or unfamiliar accents even when speaking your native language (for us, that’s English). All of this is good exposure and practise for kids.

5. Trying new and different things is great for fostering an adventurous and ‘have-a-go’ spirit. This mindset and attitude of accepting, celebrating and embracing different cultures is a wonderful thing to share with children. Whether they are going to travel or not, it could spark a love and interest of other places around the world. It will also help with open-mindedness. Plus travel and adventures will not be so daunting, stressful or anxiety-inducing for kids who have built up their comfort levels at experiencing unfamiliar situations.

Bonus! Of course there is the bonus benefit of getting to go to the events! These are usually so much fun with great music and food. We LOVE attending local cultural festivals.

So if you want to take your family on an international vacation, try to expose your kids to cultural events as much as you can. It’s a comfortable way to experience being uncomfortable!

Cultural Events: The Ultimate Close-to-Home Adventure for Kids

Five Benefits of Attending Cultural Events

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