As the parents of teens, my husband and I work to balance being mindful of how they spend their time and giving them more freedom as they get older. In our Northern Virginia suburban neighborhood, that can be tricky, as there are daily posts on Nextdoor, Ring, and other social media about what the local kids are up to.
But as our two kids grow and take on more responsibilities at school and in other activities, we try to give them low-stakes opportunities for greater autonomy — particularly since our oldest is heading to college in the fall.
One practical way has come courtesy of Amtrak trains.
My kids use Amtrak to get to their grandparents
My in-laws live a few hours away, and each summer, each of our kids has a few days at what we all call “Grandma and Papa Camp.”
Sometimes we drive them to their grandparents’ home, or we’ll meet halfway to drop off or pick up one of our kids.
But more recently, each of our kids has made the approximately 3-hour train trip on their own, traveling separately during their respective weeks at camp.
Amtrak puts some guardrails in place for unaccompanied minors
Since our kids were under 16 when we started doing this (and one still is), we needed to follow certain rules, including planning the trip between two crewed stations.
The booking process takes a little longer than when buying other Amtrak tickets because you cannot make a reservation for an unaccompanied minor online or in the Amtrak app. Instead, you have to book by phone or purchase a ticket at a station with a ticket office.
When you make the reservation, you’re given instructions for the next steps: Arrive at least one hour prior to departure, and be ready to see the station manager to complete some paperwork to confirm details about you, the child traveling, and their destination. It doesn’t take long to complete it once you find the station manager, which we imagine may be more challenging at larger stations.
The rest of the process is similarly structured: The manager gives a wristband to the child traveling and asks them a few basic questions, such as where they are getting off the train and who is meeting them at the station. You’re then told where to stand on the platform and which car your child should board when the train arrives.
Our kids were each escorted onto the train by an Amtrak employee and shown where to sit. Our kids tend to be seated in the café car, which is staffed. That made us more comfortable, and our kids consider that spot a perk, since passengers aren’t usually encouraged to linger. They each got to stay for the length of their trip and even had a table to themselves.
When the train approaches their stop, a conductor makes sure the traveling child is ready. Once the train arrives at the station and our traveler is in the care of their grandparents or us, off they go.
I’m glad they can experience this small act of independence
While it was slightly unnerving the first time each kid waved goodbye from the train, it feels ordinary now. Our son enjoys looking out the window and taking pictures of familiar places along the route, and our daughter tends to spend her train time reading.
It’s a short trip, but we appreciate that they can exercise some independence and enjoy the train on their own during the day and for short distances.
A side perk is that they have been earning Amtrak Guest Rewards points along the way, which we can use for a family trip to New York or an adventure on the Auto Train.
After five years in Qatar, Elisa Orsi and her husband, David Sleight, knew they were ready to leave the desert behind.
They had moved from Australia to the Middle Eastern country in 2019 with their three kids — all under 6 — after Sleight accepted ajob there.
Already big travelers before they had kids, the couple used school holidays to see the world after starting a family, before later leveraging Sleight’s teaching career to travel even more.
The family moved to Qatar from Australia because they wanted to experience more of the world.
“Usually when people have children, it deters them from travel, but we went completely the other way,” Orsi, 37, a stay-at-home mom, told Business Insider.
Life in Qatar felt safe and comfortable, and it served as a base from which they could explore the region, traveling to places like Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt.
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Gradually, the couple found themselves looking for something new.
“By the time we came back from our summer holiday in 2024, we said, ‘OK, we’re done. We need a change,'” Orsi said.
In August 2024, the family packed up their bags and moved to Hangzhou, a bustling city in eastern China.
Moving to China
China had been on their radar for a long time, though neither of them had visited before.
It wasn’t until Sleight came across an online job ad for a teaching role in Hangzhou that they began looking into the city.
The family had traveled through other parts of Asia and always wondered what life in China was like.
“I was impressed with the natural beauty and how modern the city appeared. I knew China was very well connected by the railway infrastructure, so I wasn’t overly concerned about the location,” Sleight, 45, told Business Insider.
The couple looped their kids, who are now 11, 9, and 7, into the conversation about moving to China early. “We wanted to give them lots of time to process and to get an understanding of what was happening,” she said.
“We have a philosophy that we talk to our children, and we keep them informed about the decisions we make,” Orsi said.
The couple involved their three young children in conversations about the move early on.
To ease the transition, they showed their kids YouTube videos about China and the school they would attend.
When they arrived in Hangzhou, Orsi said their first impressions quickly put any lingering nerves at ease.
“We were actually quite shocked to see how clean, how modern, how organized, and how convenient everything is,” Orsi said. “Sometimes you watch videos, but unless you’re actually in it, you can’t really understand it to that degree until it affects your life.”
Their children attend an international school, and Sleight teaches English in the school’s bilingual program.
House-hunting was a breeze because the school put them in contact with a real-estate agent ahead of their move.
They live in an apartment about five minutes away from the school.
“We wanted to have a bedroom for each of the kids, and we were looking for amenities,” she said. “Most importantly, we wanted to be close to the school.”
Within 10 days of arriving in China, the family moved into a four-bedroom apartment. It’s about a five-minute drive from the school and roughly 50 minutes outside the city center, in a neighborhood dominated by local Chinese families.
Rent is 5,500 Chinese yuan, or about $790 a month, and is covered by the school as part of Sleight’s employment contract.
Life in Hangzhou
Moves like the couple’s have become more common in recent years. China’s latest national census shows that 845,697 foreigners were living in the country in 2020, up from 593,832 a decade earlier.
Even with a growing foreign community, the transition isn’t always easy.
The biggest challenge has been the language barrier, though translation apps have helped. Orsi is learning Mandarin through online apps, while the children learn it at school.
Sleight relies on support from bilingual teachers and staff, and many parents at the school speak English.
“During staff meetings and presentations, I wear an earpiece and listen to a live translation provided by the school’s professional translator,” he said. Sleight added that parents and staff also communicate through a messaging app with built-in translation.
In China, the family also had to get used to a system in which nearly everything, including payments, is done on a smartphone.
Despite those adjustments, Orsi said safety has been one of the most striking aspects of life in China. She said she’s often asked about the presence of surveillance cameras, but sees them as a positive.
Orsi said the level of safety in China has given her children more freedom to move about on their own.
“If anything were to go wrong, the issue would be resolved very, very quickly. So the children, they can be outside on their own,” Orsi said. She added that she probably wouldn’t feel comfortable giving her kids the same level of freedom even in Townsville, a city in North Queensland, where they lived before moving to Qatar.
It’s also common to see children wearing kid-friendly smartwatches, which let them be more independent.
“You can see their location, they can call you, they can pay for things, and so they can go anywhere. They’ll organize their own play dates and go and meet their friends,” she said.
As a woman, Orsi also feels safe walking alone, including from the train station late at night. “I have not thought about it twice. I wouldn’t do it in Australia. And I wouldn’t do it in Argentina, where I’m from,” she said. Orsi moved to Australia in her teens and later met Sleight while working at a telecommunications company.
The family has been using school holidays to travel around China, including to the Great Wall.
It took a year, but Orsi says the family finally feels settled in their new home. Most of their social circle has grown out of the school community, including other parents and foreign teachers.
The longer school days have also given Orsi more time for herself. She said she’s picked up new hobbies, including learning to play the piano, going to the gym, and focusing on content creation for their YouTube channel, where she and Sleight document their family life in China.
Sleight is on a three-year contract at the school. As for what comes next, Orsi said the family hasn’t made any firm decisions.
“I think we would probably like to move elsewhere and go to another country when our contract is up, but that could change,” she said. “We may very well decide to stay in China and move to another school or experience a different city.”
Do you have a story to share about relocating to a new city? Contact this reporter at agoh@businessinsider.com.
When I first found out I was pregnant, I frankly didn’t put much thought into long-term childcare plans. Living in New York City, my husband and I knew we wouldn’t have the traditional village available to us — my parents, while local and thrilled to get a first grandchild, are older and weren’t particularly eager to volunteer for solo babysitting, while his parents live thousands of miles away.
But we were in a uniquely lucky situation: We both happened to have flexible, largely remote jobs.
For the first few months of my surprisingly generous parental leave, my husband and I, cocooned in newborn bliss (and perhaps slightly delirious from sleep deprivation), didn’t stress about what would happen when I went back to work. I figured we could make it work through a combination of creative time management and strategically scheduled naps — at least until our daughter was eligible for 3-K, free schooling available in New York City for kids the year they turn 3.
My husband became the primary parent
Surprisingly, this plan ended up working, for the most part, and for just shy of a year, we managed a fairly even 50-50 split in parenting duties. As time went on and my own work ramped up and the baby potato turned into a sprinting toddler, it became clear that my husband would need to become the primary parent.
It wasn’t something either of us had considered before having a child, but it made the most sense: He found far greater fulfillment in being a father than he’d ever found in his career, whereas I had always defined myself by my work as a writer and editor. He kept his job but scaled back, working largely in the evenings and weekends so he could be free during the day for stay-at-home parenting.
As our daughter became a toddler, she blossomed under my husband’s full-time care, with constant adventuring and frequent playdates keeping her days busy. We didn’t need outside childcare — but as it turned out, she did.
I’d considered traditional childcare, but couldn’t stomach the cost
New York City has notoriously high childcare costs.
The author says traditional childcare was too expensive in New York City.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
In the interim between our delicate balancing act and deciding my husband would drastically scale down his work, I considered a number of different options, from traditional daycares (upward of $2,500 a month in my neighborhood for full-time programs) to nanny-share arrangements with other local families (maybe slightly cheaper, but a pain to coordinate).
We were lucky in that we were able to avoid childcare costs, which would have effectively canceled out one of our salaries, though I still toyed with the idea of enrolling her somewhere part time to get her used to the idea in case our situation changed.
Enter Barnard College’s Center for Toddler Development.
I first heard about the program in a local moms’ book club I’d joined. One of our first reads was “How Toddlers Thrive” by Tovah P. Klein, a prominent child psychologist — and incidentally the then-director of the Toddler Center. Another mom in the book club with a daughter two years older than mine mentioned she was now applying.
I was frankly flabbergasted when she explained the details. It’s part research program, where the toddlers are minded by teachers and selected students from the college’s graduate program and observed for published research purposes from behind a one-way mirror, and part “school,” albeit an extremely part-time one, with each “class” of toddlers meeting only twice a week for two hours each day for the duration of the school year.
I was intrigued by the program’s unique “gentle separation period” and its said mission to help toddlers have a positive first school experience while supporting healthy social and emotional development through hands-on, child-guided play.
At that point, my daughter was only 18 months old (the halfway point to our 3-K end goal), but I’d already started to suspect that separation might be an eventual issue. With two working-from-home parents, she was used to having us around constantly — and had never had a babysitter.
The few times we’d tried to step out to grab a coffee and handed her to a grandparent, she would shriek like she was being abandoned. Over the next several months, she also grew more shy, coinciding with her stranger danger peaking.
We paid $7,500 for our 2-year-old
Convinced our future would be filled with school refusals and drop-off meltdowns, I hardcore pitched the Toddler Center to my husband for the coming school year. We didn’t need it for childcare, but I became convinced we did need it to help give our daughter the gentlest, most gradual introduction to being away from us. He was less convinced, sure she would grow out of it and be OK with separating by 3-K, but agreed in the end.
If the program details were mind-boggling, the price point was eye-watering. Though there isn’t a set, publicly announced tuition rate, the Toddler Center offers sliding-scale tuition and payment plans to make the program accessible to a broader range of the population. According to its website, a third of Toddler Center families pay tuition on a sliding scale (I assume the higher-profile alum parents like Amy Schumer, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Robert De Niro paid full sticker price for their kids to attend).
After submitting a sliding-scale tuition application, which required forking over the previous year’s tax returns to prove we were indeed not flush with cash, we landed on $7,500 as the final figure for our almost 2-year-old to take her first baby steps toward school.
At first, it was torturous
It did not go well.
The author says at first, her daughter wasn’t comfortable with either of her parents leaving.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
The first few weeks of the program allowed the parents in the classroom, gradually moving us farther from it (a separate, no-toys-allowed room in the back, meant to be unappealing to the kids) to encourage the toddlers to ignore them and play in the main classroom area. That trick didn’t work on our daughter, who simply sat next to the chair of whichever of us had taken her in that day, chattering happily as we tried to gently encourage her to go away.
As I’d dreaded, the initial actual separation — when parents would bring their kids into the classroom and tell them they were leaving — was horrendous. The Toddler Center mandated that only one parent or caregiver drop off their child each morning.
For the first few weeks after separation, we could both sit in the observation room, where we were treated to a front-row show of our daughter sobbing hysterically and trying to reason with the grad students to open the door she was convinced we were right behind. It was excruciating, and plenty of tears were shed on our end as well.
There was virtually no improvement for months, which was far longer than I expected. And I felt an immense amount of guilt for having come up with this idea in the first place: Were we actually traumatizing her instead of helping her? Had I epically miscalculated this? Did I pay $7,500 to torture my toddler and myself?
I was wracked with doubt, and we debated withdrawing her from the program before the first semester had even finished. It was particularly hard on my husband, who, as the primary parent, was typically the one dropping her off and dealing with the meltdowns — and who also really missed her on school days.
Suddenly, though, and for no particular reason at all, it got better. A lot better.
Instead of sobbing by the door for a full hour and a half, she started interacting with the other kids. She found a favorite grad student she’d attach herself to. She played happily on the classroom slide. And eventually, she comforted the other toddlers during their hard separation days, assuring them their mommies or daddies would be back.
The Toddler Center was expensive, but extremely worth it for us
While it was difficult for my husband to be apart from his little buddy for the few hours a week she was at the program, they turned it into an opportunity for new adventures. In the spring semester, he began biking with her to school, stopping to pick up flowers on the way there and back. Another tradition became that he would bring her a blueberry muffin from a local café every day at pickup. These small rituals helped them bond even more.
The author says the $7,500 she spent was worth it.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
I don’t pretend to have a handle on the intricacies of toddler psychology, and I can’t tell you what the flipped-switch moment was where it finally clicked for my kid that being left at school with her teachers didn’t mean we were gone forever. And yes, for the record, she still cried during drop-off the first few weeks of 3-K.
But I am convinced that completing the Toddler Center program drastically reduced her adjustment period for “real school.” Tossing her into the deep end for six hours a day, five days a week, was simply not the right option for our family.
In the end, I’m glad I listened to my gut, dug into our pockets, and toughed out the tears — and I’d like to think my daughter, somewhere deep down in her toddler brain, is too.
