The Self-Driven Child

Independent Travel: A low-cost, high-impact way to prepare teens for college and life

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 41

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Ready to ignite your child’s wanderlust? In this episode of The Self-Driven Child Podcast, I sit down with the incredible Blake Bole, an expert in self-directed learning and international travel for teens and young adults. From unschooling to transformative travel experiences, Blake shares how navigating the world independently helps young people develop autonomy, financial responsibility, and stress tolerance—essential skills for life. We explore the power of independent travel, the magic of gap years, and how simple, unstructured adventures can foster confidence and resilience.

 

Episode Highlights:
[00:56] - Introducing Blake Bole: A lifelong traveler and advocate for unschooling and alternative education.
[03:22] - What is unschooling? Blake explains this full-time self-directed learning approach.
[06:25] - How travel fosters independence and resilience in young people.
[08:59] - The importance of managing money and decision-making during travel.
[12:07] - Stories of thrift and teamwork among teens learning to feed themselves on a budget.
[18:38] - The transformative power of gap years and independent travel experiences.
[28:01] - Overcoming fears about safety and risk in travel for young people.
[34:22] - Micro-adventures and creative challenges that foster self-reliance.
[42:45] - Blake’s “Gap Year Launch Pad” program: A structured way to start independent travel.
[48:03] - The lifelong benefits of developing autonomy, mastery, and purpose through travel.

 

Links & Resources:

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Blake Bole:

Experiences that I am more interested in promoting more resemble basic, independent travel, independent budget travel, or backpacking, as we used to call it. But probably your average spend per day is going to be lower. It's going to be below $50 for everything all inclusive. I think that is just the experience that people of almost any age, independent travel, not signing up for a package, not signing up for a tour, not really having your hand held. You can meet up with people along the way. You can say, I have family friends here and here, I'm going to plan my itinerary around visiting them so I know that I have familiar faces in a warm bed and a nice meal waiting for me, but in between, it is my adventure. That is what I'm a fan of, but I keep trying to find my own little ways to like add some value to the lives of already quite independent young adults and their parents.

Ned Johnson:

Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick shoot of the books, the self driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives and what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home. Does this time of year have you wishing you could travel more or maybe recent events have you indulging in dreams of living abroad and perhaps never coming back, or maybe you just got a college bound kid who you know could really benefit from a gap year to travel. I've had those thoughts too. So really enjoyed talking to Blake Bowles, who knows a lot about opportunities to travel and live abroad, especially for teens and young adults. This conversation might ignite your wanderlust or perhaps make you just envy. Blake, either way, take a listen. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. So Blake, welcome back to the podcast. Where are you right now? I've got to ask, it's

Blake Bole:

great to be back, Ned. I'm in Vienna, Austria at the moment, as

Ned Johnson:

one does so for folks who don't know you and your work. Can you just talk a little bit about how you navigate this planet, how you young people navigate this planet?

Blake Bole:

Sure, I've been a lifelong traveler ever since finishing university, and so me being in Europe right now is not a highly surprising thing. I managed to get a two year residency permit, which lets me stay here and not have to come and go and to fund my adventures and my my habits of writing and dancing, which don't make much money. I run international travel programs for teenagers through my company unschool adventures, and I've been doing that since 2008 mostly working with homeschooled, unschooled And alternatively schooled, delightful young adults ages 14 to 19, but sometimes a little bit older. Every year, it's a it's a new blank canvas. I almost never repeat trips, and so I'm always innovating and iterating and just coming up with ideas that are really fun for young people, but also fun for me and my friends who I hire as my co leaders. Oh, I love

Ned Johnson:

that. So talk to folk for folks who don't know, explain a little bit what unschooling is, and then thereafter, I'd love to hear how and why travel is such a central part of of that experience for the young folks with whom you work,

Blake Bole:

my quick answer to the what is unschooling question is full time, self directed learning, and so it's giving as much autonomy and putting the young person as much in the driver's seat as possible, as reasonable. Can

Ned Johnson:

I pause right there? I was just at a conference this week with two big speakers, one of whom was Dr Peter Gray. And he went through a, you know, an hour long presentation on why play matters so much. And he's, you know, probably the nations are not what the world's forest authorities on on why play is so important. But has a lot to say about unschooling and just the way that you articulated of just of parents of adults, really, not just parents of adults, giving kids all the runway they can possibly handle. And it's funny, because he's a developmental biologist, right? And so he started looking at what Hunter gathered tribes look like. And for young people, even, you know, all the way through adolescence, their life was about play the idea that young people can develop and educate themselves, you know, full stop with adults as needed, but not with adults taking it's really for a lot of people, and myself included, it's like, Wait, that can be a thing, because it's so outside of what a lot of us imagine. But of course, that's what you've been living for the last several decades? Yeah,

Blake Bole:

Peter is a friend, and I love his book, free to learn. I think that his arguments hold a lot of power, especially for younger kids who where you can really imagine, like a fully play based education. I push back a bit on the the hunter gatherer argument. Yeah. Yeah, cross cultural comparisons are dangerous. And I I expressed those, those reservations in my last book, Why are you still sending your kids to school? But in general, I'm totally with him. And Peter ended up sending one of his kids to the Sudbury Valley School just outside of Boston, and that is a school that's fully democratically run. And so if you're a five year old, or you're the founder of the school, you have the same vote when it comes to deciding matters of importance to the school community. And it's a free school, not in the sense that it's free. It's a private school. They charge too, yeah, but you really are free to do whatever you want, and that includes free to do nothing, just sit around, hang out, be on your phone, chit chat with your friends, sit on the couch, and the adults will not intervene and truly give you your autonomy, which is a very scary idea and really ruffles feathers. And that was also one of my entry points into the world of alternative education, yeah, and it's

Ned Johnson:

important for people to know Sudbury if you're thinking, you know, a democracy, fully democratic school. It's been around for what, 50 years. I mean, it's still, it's still going strong,

Blake Bole:

and it was largely inspired by by summer hill in the UK, which is almost 100 years old, I believe.

Ned Johnson:

So I'll go back to the second part of the question. So, how and when did travel become, in your view, so significant for some of the self directed learning for unschooling kids? You

Blake Bole:

know, I don't think that it's really specific to unschoolers or self directed learners. Although to be a traveler in this more long term travel sense, you do need to be very self directed. You do need to make all sorts of decisions for yourself in a very unpredictable, changing environment, especially if there are big language barriers, and so I see the natural overlap there, but it's not like unschoolers are much more likely to be world travelers. I think that travel holds this transformative power for everyone, but the teenagers who I've worked with are by and large normal teenagers, and many of them just want to, like, be at home and hang out with their friends. And yeah, locally, and I have just managed to find the ones who do have this itch to travel, and they don't want to wait until they're 18 or 22 to do it. And so I've been taking teenagers who are 1415, 1617, years old on these long international trips and giving them a lot of autonomy, a bit like the Sudbury Valley School does, yeah, to explore the local areas that we're visiting, whether they're big cities or rural areas, and to do it in small groups. You know, no international travel is risk free, but we have a perfect safety record over 15 years, and I just, I'm helping young people get out there and explore, because that's what was important to me when I was young, even though I was not alternatively educated myself. I

Ned Johnson:

have a family who, when each child reached the age of 13, was put in charge of the family summer vacation, basically. So here's the budget, here's the time frame. You pick the place, you make the arrangements, you figure out the hotels, the agenda, the agenda, the whole darn thing, which, again, for a lot of us older folks, like you're making to show up there and we're gonna live, you know, oops, we forgot the hotel kind of thing. But, but it really, it's interesting to think about what travel does for a bunch of reasons, but I start with even just, you know, kind of core executive functions of planning and organizing. You know, I have the experience often My wife has executive functions out her ears. So a lot of times I just, I'm along for the ride and there to carry suitcases, and frankly, have not had to do a lot of the planning. But when you turn that around, if you put that on me, or you put that on any young person where all of a sudden they're responsible for it, it's a heck of a good way to help people become responsible, right? I mean, I guess a lot of adults say, Well, you know, he has to be responsible. Well, how does one become responsible without the need to be responsible, right?

Blake Bole:

I think my answer to that is yes and no. I think that any opportunity to give a young person a bit more autonomy and responsibility, especially over how they spend their time, can be positive, but also people are much more careful when they spend their own money. And if you are a 14 year old who's been put in charge of the family vacation budget, you're like, great, we're gonna spend all the money over here and over here. And when you actually have your own money, hopefully that you have earned, or, yeah, saved, and you know, you know that it's not going to be replenished by some magical money ferry, then that is credit. Is when the real responsibility kicks in, right there. And that's why I think that working with slightly older teenagers, 18 and up and early 20 somethings, who are really in legal charge of their own life and they have their own bank accounts, I think that's really where the rubber hits the road, and we're really interesting. Transformative growth can happen through the group trips I do with younger teens too. But. But there really is something different about being legally and financially in charge of your own life.

Ned Johnson:

So yeah, I'm 100% with you. I can reflect on my own experiences first time out of college and having a very meager salary and and really having to think about everything you spend, at least for me at that point, you know, down to this sandwich is $3.45 and that one is $2.85 I know people can't believe can't believe that, yes, I'm 104 years old. The sandwiches used to cost that little. But paint us a picture of what you have seen when a young person is spending his or her own money traveling. You know, when they're responsible for their own wherewithal. I mean, does something jump to mind of watching some of a kid make a decision about money that would have been very differently if they could have just whipped out a parent's credit

Blake Bole:

card. What I've seen on all of my unschool ventures trips is young people managing their own lunch money. And this might sound trivial, but often, this is the first time that they've been doing this where really they have to feed themselves. Like my co leaders and I are not going to do this for them. We're not going to be like, go buy a sandwich over there. Buy this sandwich with this budget. We just say, Here's your breakfast. Dinner will be tonight. Feed yourself in the middle of the day, and if they show up like a ravenous pack of wolves at dinner, they fail to eat lunch. I say, No, no, no, that's not how this works. You need to feed yourself lunch. Don't show up here. Hangry, yeah. And so I witnessed the immediate development of thrift and young people suddenly realizing, like, oh, instead of going and buying some expensive thing at a restaurant, if I pool my resources with my friends at a grocery store, we can have a feast for half the price of something we would have purchased that's prepared for us. And it's just this little thing where you recognize that time is money and money is freedom, and if I just eat a little bit differently and I'm a bit smarter about how I spend my lunch money, then all of a sudden I can go get boba tea later on with my friends. And just that, I think that that right there is one of the key things to developing this, like functional young adulthood or executive functioning. And I think thrift and managing money is such a core part of

Ned Johnson:

it. I love that. I love that what, what jumps to mind is that so often we adults, teachers, all you know, folks, parents, feel that we need to we're going back to Sudbury and Peter, feel that we need to teach kids thrift and teach them this and that, and frankly, everything. As opposed to just putting them in the environment where they learn it for themselves,

Blake Bole:

it's kicking them out of the nest. And in my case, I'll be taking a group of teenagers to Greece and Turkey in early 2025 and like normal, breakfast provided dinners, provided lunch. Good luck. And there's probably some language barriers you're gonna have to surmount to they're always doing this in small groups. They have friends at their side. They have Google Translate on their phone, then mobile data. And if they ever really are in a bad situation, they can call me or my co leader. Yeah, they will experience temporary discomfort if they don't solve their own problems, if they don't self direct the their way into the next you know, Hero sandwich or or Turkish pizza. Hmm,

Ned Johnson:

two things jump to mind for me. One, when my daughter, whom I adore, who's in her second year of college, but I must have asked roughly a million times when she was a kid. Oh, and can you please remember to put your dish in the dishwasher, and it always ended up in the sink. And I didn't like, lose my mind about it, but I was always a little like, really. Oh, well. And then she studied abroad for, I guess, a month at the end of her first year of college, and they were living in a group, you know, was college provided, but in a group home, and exactly what you're just they had no there was no meal plan, right? There was no cafeteria, and they would have to go out and go to the grocery store and feed themselves and so on and so forth. And my daughter reported being the last one in part, to leave their housing. And people had not adequate cleaned up. And so she was left to clean up everything. And she said I was so annoyed by other people making meals, generally and particularly on the last day, that they wouldn't clean up. She said, I will never again do that to another person. And I thought, well, there it is, right? Because I you so often feel that if I don't teach my kid, how is he or she ever going to make a way in the in the world and learn these lessons? And you're like, oh, oh yeah, the universe, plenty of other ways to learn these lessons. It's

Blake Bole:

not the universe, it's the peer group. One of my favorite books the nurture assumption, by Judith Rich Harris, yes, yeah. She makes the point. As soon as you hit adolescents, young people become intensely peer focused and take their cues about what's right and wrong more from peers than from adults. And so it becomes very I mean, this is kind of obvious, but it becomes very hard to teach, or kind of force moral instruction down an adolescent's throat, but what is very effective is putting them within a peer environment. And in which there are certain norms and responsibilities, like if the young adults themselves are supposed to cook and clean up their space, instead of having some paid person to come and do it like in a college dorm, maybe. And so I witnessed this on one of the few programs that I did run multiple times, which was a writing residential writing retreat program with 20 teens for a month, and they would be doing the cooking and the cleaning. And you know, this is an everyday thing, and I've never seen teenagers who on day one were so lackadaisical about leaving their tea mugs out, turn into the most stringent like, do not leave your tea mug out. Do not use another T mug if you've already used one today, label your mug, and they would police each other. And, you know, sometimes we staff, we'd have to be like, All right, well, calm down a bit. This is not the end of the world.

Ned Johnson:

Yeah. Oh, I love that. So I do test prep, right? So I spent all of my time with 17 year olds, some of whom are learning to police themselves that way, and some of whom grow up with entire staff whom they get to police. I guess I'd term it that way. The SAT, this is feels a far feel better, hopefully land the plane. The SAT used to have all these analogies. So you're teaching kids all these analogies. And the analogy, there's a boy, that student with whom I was working, who was struggling, it was Civ is to draining. Well, he didn't know what a sieve was, and so I sort of explained, well, sieve, it's, it's like a colander, like, if you're, you know, if your mom was making spaghetti or whatever, and you know when the you cook the spaghetti, and then you pour it in there, the water drains out the bottom. And he looks at me, he's like, my mom doesn't cook. And I'm thinking, your dad's the cook? No, it's like, in my head, I'm going, I just moved to here to DC, and I'm like, geez, you guys must eat out a lot. And he looks at me with all the condescension that a 17 year old can throw at a tutor, duh, housekeeper. And of course, this was not what I grew up in. I just didn't, just didn't know, okay, so I managed to, you know, recover and keep on going. So here's the fun thing, I see him. So that was his junior year. I see him a year later, two years later, he gotten into university that he didn't think that much of. And so I asked him, so how is this, and I won't name the school or the state, he's like, Oh my god, the people, there's such idiots, there's such morons. And then he had washed out of college by November, right? All these people were so stupid, and he washed out. And I keep thinking about that experience, right? And not not that, not that, just moment, perhaps the disdain for me and for other people, but also that I don't think he probably ever cleaned a tea mug or cooked a meal in his entire life. And so one of the things that I'm loving, where your observations about this the travel generally, particularly when it's not parents leading and a bunch of kids like, you know, ducklings falling behind, but where they're responsible for it. Of of how does that help them develop? Bill and I met, you know, my writing partner wrote a piece for The Times about the 6789, kids we knew who were home at Thanksgiving, or by Thanksgiving to stay, they'd already washed out of school, right? And that's a heck of a way to, you know, burn 50, 6070,$80,000 and the basic observation was that these young people had simply had had way too little experience running their own lives, you know. And so I love this idea even you know whether it doesn't to your point, not just for unschooling kids, but for any kid to have the opportunity not just to travel, but to travel where they're more self directed, or where isn't a parent, you know, Marc in them and managing thing every step of the way. Do you see a mix of kids? I mean, is it all over the place with the folks who travel with you? No,

Blake Bole:

I get a lot of unschoolers. And, yeah, kids from cool alternative schools. But every now and then, I've run these programs for older teens and early 20 somethings. And then there's young people coming from all sorts of backgrounds, although they probably still have parents who are a bit sympathetic to self directed learning. Yeah, yeah. I

Ned Johnson:

have a lot of families who are already talking about their students doing gap years, and sometimes the kids who just need the opportunity to grow up a little more, the kids who are widely burned out from school and from life, you know, they're widely ADHD. We're just waiting for, you know, another year of of prefrontal cortical maturation, right? Which would would help them, but I suspect that, as one can imagine, a lot of times, kids may not be on board with that right, because they don't want to follow the sequence with their friends. They've real. This isn't what everyone else is doing. Where my head is going is thinking about it doesn't necessarily have to be binary, where you're on the lazy river going right into college with everyone else, or you step out of the river and do a gap year and have these experiences. It hadn't really occurred to me that a lot of parents send kids on trips for summer travel, but most of them, I suspect, are more structured and less self directed than the kind of programs. You run and you're talking about, and I'm not meaning to sort of, you know, poo, poo, any other travel experience, because I think it's all great, but this idea of putting a lot more autonomy within the program, and there's some concerns that, you know, people may have, and I'll have to talk about that in a moment, but walk us through, what does travel with Blake look like? Perhaps that may be different than what parents imagined. Or can you paint a picture of how to trip with you might be different from what parents are pictured with a typical summer travel experience?

Blake Bole:

Yeah, I want to just go one step backwards first and say that the term gap year can mean so many different things, and you can go to Australia or New Zealand on a working holiday visa and just go become a server at a restaurant in some random city. And that can be a gap year. You can do service stuff. You can stay within the US and and do a gap year. But there are these organized programs that I think are mostly wonderful, and you do get more autonomy than your average school experience or travel program for someone who's school age, and they often involve service, but also a little bit of like broad academic learning and then some travel and adventure. And there's only one big difficult aspect to these is that they cost almost as much as a as a semester of college does. They can cost anywhere between 15 to$30,000 and there are some scholarships or some financial aid available, but no, they're pretty restrictive from that side of things. And so the kind of gap year experiences that I am more interested in promoting more resemble just basic independent travel, independent budget travel, or backpacking, as we used to call it, and the kind of stuff that you might have done in your early as opposed to glamping, right? It can include glamping too, yeah, but you probably your average spend per day is going to be lower. It's going to be below$50 for everything, all inclusive, wow. I think that is just the experience that people of almost any age, but 20s, 30s and beyond, but also young adults who have finished secondary education and are thinking about taking a break before University, or they have washed out of university and they need to do something different before you just sort of like hit that hard reset before maybe re entering higher education. Or those who have finished higher education and they're thinking about a graduate degree or thinking, I just need a break. I just finished a 16 year grind before I go on to work. Just extended travel, independent travel, not signing up for a package, not signing up for a tour, not really having your hand held, and you can bring a friend along. You can meet up with people along the way. You can say, I have family friends here, and here, I'm going to plan my itinerary around visiting them, so I know that I have familiar faces in a warm bed and a nice meal waiting for me. But in between, it is my adventure. That is what I'm a fan of, and I want this to exist regardless of whether I can make any money in the process. And honestly, working with anyone who's highly independent, it's hard to make money doing this, but I keep trying to find my own little ways to, like, add some value to the lives of already quite independent young adults and their parents. I

Ned Johnson:

interviewed some while back Lenore skin azi, you know, with Peter Gray and let grow. And she had an article right at the start of the school year about, could this one thing basically fix, as it were, adolescent teen anxiety. She talked about simply allowing kids to do a thing that they want without parents, you know, jumping in and telling them a canter, managing for them, or taking all the measures to keep them overly safe. And I know this is something that Peter talks about a lot with play, that play by definition, kids want to have some risk to it, and this is how they learn to navigate. You know, like all animals, learn to navigate the world by play that mimics what the more dangerous things they do growing up. But the challenge is, we've so often overprotect, you know, Jonathan heights point in anxious generation, we over protect kids, right? And the challenge is, you don't learn to do hard things without experiencing hard things. I'm thinking my my son did a summer camping, you know, for a month at a time for a lot of his young adolescents. And he tells the story when it grows. It grows every year that he tells it. But where they're hiking for, I don't know, five, six days or whatever, and that the first day they're hiking, they had to get from point B into his telling. Now it's, it's like, you know, 43 miles in a day, I'm exaggerating slightly. And gets longer every year. And it was in the pouring rain. They started this trip like and just from the moment they got off a bus until they tried to put up their tent, it just rained and rained and rained and rained and rained. And that, had to be frank. Actually pretty miserable for everybody. But he tells that story more than anything else about his time at camp, because it's become like inside out, you know, this, this touch point of memory of I did this hard thing. And so when I think about, and I go back to Lenoir, what she was talking about, you know, with free range kids that you my kid really wants to go the city route, on Long Island by though, I can't let them go on the on the, you know, the subway Long Island, it'll be unsafe, right? And the challenge there is, it seems to me, two things. One, when we're over protecting kids, we're one, depriving them of the experience to get wet for 12 hours and realize that they can handle that, or get lost on the subway and figure it out, and we're also giving them this drip feed of the world is wildly dangerous. Don't go any place other than you've already gone, because you'll end up dead. And it seems to me, I mean, for any kid who's even never been on a plane or travel to the country, this independent travel is really hitting both of those things. Yeah,

Blake Bole:

yeah. And just to pick up lenores Mantle there, yeah, as far as I understand, a standard like two week fancy summer camp session costs about$5,000 these days. And I say, take that $5,000 yeah, give it to your graduating senior and send them off to Europe for two months. That will cover the cost of the flight and all of the on the ground costs. And it will also cover like a little emergency slush fund that will send them off there for two months in a very safe part of the world and a part of the world where everyone's going to speak English to you when you need them to speak English to you. I've been spending a lot of time in Europe, and I can tell you, it's extremely accessible. You don't need to have strong travel skills. You don't need to have strong language skills. You can figure pretty much all of it out on the ground, and there's wonderful resources online, and that those two months, over the course of one summer. You know, you don't have to take a gap here to do this. You can just say, I'm not going to go to a two week summer camp. I'm going to go go travel in Europe for two months. That will will radically alter a young person's life, and it is something that very few people are willing to do for the reasons that you just outlined, because it seems scary and dangerous, and it's like maybe something that that I did when in my youth, you know, maybe when I traveled in the 90s, that was okay somehow, and now, for some reason, it's not okay, or it's more scary, or the fact that smartphones exist and your your kid can literally text you from anywhere in the world At any moment, like some, does not make this a lower risk situation. So this, this is what I want to see, more of, like yes, fewer guard rails, a little bit more calculated risk taking and realizing that everything we imagine that needs to be so expensive to have this transformative experience, it often does not.

Ned Johnson:

My friend, our friend, Jess Leahy, talks about she was studying abroad in Italy, memory serves, and her parents were coming to meet her, but there were no cell phones. This is what you know, late 80s, early 90s, and they didn't speak Italian, and she had to figure out how to get to the airport by public transportation and get them back by public transportation. She said, I was, I don't 19 or 20 at the time, and then, as they do in Italy, the trains were on strike, because that's just what they do in Italy, and go on strike. Yep, that's the rainstorm, exactly, right? And she's like, holy cow, right? And her Italian was, you know, nascent. And she said it was really, it was, it was a challenge. But I, she said, I don't know that I've ever been more proud than figuring out how to get there, you know, as a, you know, budding adult and and I did this, and I navigated my parent I've just never been more proud. And it seems I imagine people, you know, you get that you only, you only get those opportunities when you when you have to, right? Well,

Blake Bole:

that's the power of self directed learning. You get to overcome these little obstacles, and they just, they build up, they accumulate, and all of a sudden you feel competent, and you feel like you can handle freedom, and it's not this like guardrail, guardrail, guardrail. All of a sudden drop you into this pit of freedom and then you freak out. That's kind of the normal thing to do. I consider it borderline abusive, the way that we we treat young people, to give them no real chances to practice autonomy and then drop them into the real world like a like a stone to the deep end of the pool. Can

Ned Johnson:

you So you mentioned autonomy a bunch of times. And of course, we're both big fans of that. Could you run folks through the lens of self determination theory, of what travel does, and hitting the core components of SDT? My

Blake Bole:

favorite book for explaining self determination theory in kind of everyday language is drive by Daniel Pink, and he that's from 20. Nine, but still extremely relevant. And he summarizes it as autonomy, mastery and purpose. And those are the ingredients necessary for someone to be intrinsically motivated, which is, at the end of the day, what essentially everyone wants from their young people is to like, discover what they're into, and be intrinsically motivated to work hard to achieve it. And so school can provide some of these experiences. A great university definitely can provide some of these experiences. But there's just nothing quite like being out in like the organic, real world and experiencing your autonomy and developing your mastery and finding a sense of purpose, like out there in the public, not in this curated greenhouse environment of higher education, of like, of a fancy summer camp, or like an expensive, even an expensive, Gap Year program, but just being out there and like staying in a youth hostel In some large city where, like most of the people in your room, don't speak the language that you speak, they're kind of making it difficult for you to get some sleep at night, and you just need to, like, communicate your boundaries to some strangers in a friendly yet effective manner, like that right there that will develop your autonomy, mastery and purpose, trying to make friends with people who you've you're crossing paths with in the kitchen, or, like, strike up a conversation with someone who's kind of cute in the the common area. I mean, this is stuff that we want to do. We want to connect with other people. I mean, there's this wonderful movie from the 90s, what's it called, before sunrise? I believe that's it. And it's a story about an American guy meeting a French woman on a train, and they decide to get off the train together in Vienna. And this guy just has, like, 24 hours before he he takes his flight back to the US. And they kind of wander around Vienna all night and get into these, like, fun, interesting situations. And it's a romance, and it's this, you know, it's a movie that I think it spawned many sequels, but those kinds of experiences like how to organically meet other people and have meaningful friendships and travel partnerships and maybe romances of some kind, this is the stuff that travel can offer. And like, you don't need any extrinsic motivation for this. You just need the opportunity, and you need to feel like you have some confidence before you go into this. So it's not like, Yeah, you get air dropped into a hostel and you have no way to know how to orient yourself or stand up for yourself when someone is making too much noise at night.

Ned Johnson:

Love the way that you express that when I was talking with Lenore, hitting the same points that you're she was making the same points that you're making. That for so many, especially children who are anxious, we use cognitive behavioral therapy with exposure so trying to coax kids to do things that are a little stressful in order to develop stress tolerance and kind of unwind that anxiety. But with all the scenarios that you just described, if you want to talk to someone's little cute, you need to figure out how to get food. You want to figure out to travel there. You want people to be quiet, whatever. You have to do things that are a little bit outside of your comfort zone. But because you have autonomy, you have a drive, you have you know purpose to do this, and you're increasingly feeling competent, you already have the motivation to do the thing that's hard, as opposed to parents, adults, clinicians trying to come up with an extrinsic motivator to get to kid to do the thing that's hard. And I should point out, when all those science is quite clear, it's when we do things that are hard, particularly for reason that matters to us, that we wire brains for both intrinsic motivation, carry which generalizes in other places, and wire brains for stress tolerance, aka resilience, in a way that also generalizes in other experiences.

Blake Bole:

You can tell when you meet a young person who has traveled and not done it in this, this short term, highly controlled way, you just you can tell they carry themselves a bit differently. They will speak to you as an equal. It is a transformative experience. You are not the same person afterward, just more travel, more independent travel.

Ned Johnson:

I remember travel. I was with my kids, and they were, I don't know eight and 10 or something. I forget we're getting lunch and layover somewhere. And I saw this, all this group of young people. And old guy that I am, anyone under the age of 30, looks like a teenager, so I don't really know that they but they look like they're 17, 1819, and this group of young women. And my default reaction is they must be from New York, because they, you know, they carry themselves a certain, you know, confidence, swag, or whatever it happens to be. But your point makes me think it could actually be from anywhere, but perhaps if they've traveled to Newark or abroad, they've developed that Juna Sequa of confidence. Let me ask this for parents. I picture a lot of parents listening to this saying, this is yes, yes, yes. This is just what my kid needs. This is what I need, you know, I like to do this as well. And then, but, or very quickly, often, the fear comes rushing in, but what if, right, you know. And to your point, this was fine in the 90s, but now it feels unsafe, because it's not just children, but we adults who have consumed this drip feed of how scary the world is, share some thoughts on how to make parents feel that it's safe to trust their kids to travel independently. It depends

Blake Bole:

on where you go. There are some places you can go that are genuinely, I think, scarier, and I would be concerned if one of my friends or a younger sibling was going there. So it pays to do your research and to, you know, just go into the US Department of State travel advisory web page and just look at what's actually going on in a certain country. Because if you are afraid of your child traveling to Colombia, for example, your information might be a decade out of date and and so it pays to, just like Expo, do some exposure therapy yourself to the reality of what's going on in the ground in foreign countries. So once you've done that, and you've assessed that your young person is actually going to a country that is probably no more or less dangerous than the United States is. Then at that point, you might just need to take a step back from your own expectation of constant communication with your child, which you've enjoyed almost without a break since they were given their first device. And this might actually be something that is more of a personal practice for the adult than it is for the young person to say, hey, I really want to honor that you're going to have this experience. And of course, I'm here if you need me in case of an emergency, something bad going something bad happening that you can't solve yourself. Maybe send me some postcards. Write me some letters, like I did with my parents when I was traveling in the 80s or 90s. Those,

Ned Johnson:

those will be lovely or keepsakes, unless you're going to print out the whole text chain, they will.

Blake Bole:

And then we can have a call once a week and catch up, but maybe, like tuning down the the constant communication over over, texting could be one graceful way to do that, just so that you as a parent deprogram yourself from thinking, if I haven't heard from my kid in the past 24 hours, then they've been abducted. They've been, you know, taken hostage, etc. What the worst case scenario, you can start binge watching the movie Taken with Liam Neeson, right? That's clearly what happened. Yeah,

Ned Johnson:

and parents could start think about, you know, particularly for parents who are listening to whose kids are going off to college, they might even start doing that now. Or if you have a kid who's going to go off to on travel that let's try to not text each other for 24 hours at a time, 48 hours of time, and build our own stress tolerance for that right? If you're addicted to that constant communication, then of course, you're going to go through a withdrawal. It might be worth having a text detox for a period of time before your kid travels, so then it doesn't feel that alarming. The other thought that popped to mind for me that would be helpful both to parents and to kids, is to make a list of all the things in the event of a, what would you do in the event of B, what would you do? There's a wonderful researcher named Josh Compton who talks about inoculation theory, and he really plays this more for kids in high school. You know, if you were at a party and someone tried to give you this or ask you to do that or whatever, how would you respond? And they kind of just role play it. And when it's done in a gentle way, again, I pose the question as an adult, my kid comes with the answer, rather than my telling my kid the answer, and this is done repeatedly on the oculation theory says that experience then generalizes the kids kind of projectively, if that's the word, go into problem solving mode, anticipating and coming up with plans for things. And we know the brain science on that talks about how, how wildly that improves thinking and decreases stress. Because you can know if this were to occur, I have a plan for that, in ways that I think are quite helpful, both to the parent, to the kid and to the parent. Because if the parent knows, wow, Blake has really thought this through. He actually does have a plan for this. I had no idea. He actually, you know, could, could, could think on his feet that way.

Blake Bole:

Yeah, and this speaks to the power of, you know, before jumping into like, All right, here's $5,000 go travel in Europe for two months, having never done anything like this before. This speaks to the power of helping facilitate and offer more micro adventures. For a teenager as as they they're going through and just, there's no prescription for, like, by this age, they should be able to do this. It's just like, keep pushing the envelope a little bit more. And I'm a big fan of of offering one way travel opportunities. And so, for example, Hey, we're going to buy you a train ticket from here to your grandparents place two states away, and then here's some money. Here's a pre loaded credit card. We want you to get yourselves back. I love this. I did this once with a group of teens in 2015 I ran a program called the adventure semester in Colorado, and one of our it was 10 weeks long, and we really got to build up this group of 20 teens towards bigger and bigger levels of responsibility and autonomy. And in the final week in Denver, we the staff each got to hand pick some of the teams we wanted to offer like a bespoke challenge to and so I chose three of them that have some musical abilities and had proven themselves through previous micro adventures. And I blindfolded them and drove them in my car from Denver to Boulder one morning. So that's about an hour, hour and a half away. And then I dropped them off there. They were instructed to bring their musical instruments. And I said, Okay, you have no cash on you, right? I made sure none of them had any money. I said, Great. Your mission is to figure out where you are, earn enough money to get yourself back to our home base in Denver in time for dinner. Good luck. I love it. And you know what? They did it. They did great and they documented it. They took some photos and videos of themselves busking in Boulder in order to earn the bus money to get themselves back to Denver later,

Ned Johnson:

I have to this you. It's a beautiful image, and you just hit a pain point in my soul, in that, in that I sang in college in an a capella group with my best friend, and we were scheming about going to Europe and just busking, you know, sort of backpacking through Europe and busking. And we were young enough and and maybe cute enough and musical, just enough that we credibly could have, you know, Sung do up on street corners, and got enough to buy a cup of coffee at least. And he said, Don's like, I'm done. I'm giving you a hard time making listen to this. And he and he said, Well, no, not just I'll do this after my first year of law school. No, Don, it'll never happen. And so I desperately, I pine for the experience of doing exactly what you're describing and never having got the chance to do that. So

Blake Bole:

I think that that is a great illustrative example of why often it pays not to wait. And if you're right on the edge of saying, like, I'm not sure if my kid is ready for this kind of independent travel experience, wouldn't it just be a bit safer if they finished undergrad first, or make sure they go straight from undergrad into grad school and but you don't want to, like, miss the opportunity go from grad school straight into your first job. You can take some time, no, no, run straight into the next cool international travel opportunity, even if it's a month, even if it's just a few weeks, even that is fine. That can be transformative in itself. It doesn't have to be multi month travel. You know, the European young adults who I meet out here for them, six months is standard. One year is standard. They take their gap years really seriously. They almost never pay for an organized program. They just, they just do it. One of my favorite examples, I was on a personal bike trip through Europe in 2021 standing with a couch surfing host in the south of France. And this host was also hosting two other couch surfers who were both 19 year old girls from Germany, from the north of Germany. So they were on bikes. Also they told me that they had started in Hamburg in the north of Germany, and traveled through Germany and then through France to get to where we were now, essentially just spending 10 euros a day for food. Wow, had not paid anything for housing. Sometimes they would use couch surfing or the website warm showers, which is like couch surfing, but just for cyclists. But more often than not, they would just go up to a random house that seemed like it's in a friendly neighborhood. And they would knock on the door and they would say, Hi, we're on a long bike trip. Can we camp in your backyard? Wow. And they said, every single time, with maybe one exception, they were warmly invited to camp in the yard. And then oftentimes they say, actually, we have a spare room, or there's a couch in here. And these would be, you know, usually families or, you know, people with with kids, or their kids have grown up and moved out. And so yes, they were fed, and they were, you know, had interesting people to meet, and really, all they had to do was buy food to get themselves from the north of Germany. And this was multiple weeks later at the. They had made it to the south of France, so that's a pretty hardcore example. Yeah. And there's many ways in which European young adults have more of a foundation of free range childhood than Americans or kids from the UK, Australia, New Zealand. It's kind of a different role. They also have fewer alternative schools. Homeschooling is completely illegal in Germany, and not that easy in many other countries in Europe. And so it's a mixed bag. But even if you know you don't have to do something like that, just have some money. Go to some hostels, take some trains to different parts of Europe. If you're deciding to do it in the Americas instead central to South America, you'll be on busses instead of trains. If you know how to read reviews online. You can weed out like the worst places that are going to give you the most trouble. And you will learn to make these travel partnerships. You will learn to deal with these little, weird, difficult, frustrating situations, busses being canceled, language barriers, and you will become stronger for it. Really, you can. You can skin this cat in many different ways. I'm sold. Are you convinced? Sign

Ned Johnson:

me up. I'm I'll be there in June. Oh, man, I don't think I can top that. I think we should leave it right there. Blake, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. What a

Blake Bole:

Can I tell you about the the program

Ned Johnson:

really quickly before you do. You know what jumps to mind in our books, we talk a lot about the research of Steve Mayer, who he, along with Martin Seligman, did the work on learned helplessness. And I've mentioned it before, but it's worth for listeners to take a look at a paradigm paper called learned helplessness at 50 kind of what we got right and what we got wrong. And he said the key mistake that we made it was not that these animals learned to be helpless, rather, it was that they failed to ever learn a sense of control. While we all crave autonomy, feeling a sense of control is something. It's acquired. It's brain development gets wired into our brains. And what Mayor points out is that at least in animal studies, researching, doing research with that an adverse experience, a challenging experience, something that was intense, but not, you know, life altering, but something that was intense, where these animals felt a sense of control, where they were able to do something to affect a better or good enough outcome, seemed to inoculate their brains against stress and anxiety for the rest of their lives. And so to your point, Blake, about let's do this earlier than later, because, among other things, we know so many young people who start college and really struggle in ways that you know, change the arc of their lives, or they even don't, don't persist in college and in that that's a disappointment to them and probably to their parents, and this idea of using international travel to just, you know, change your location and change your brain, and then go off to college with a with resilient, adventurous, curious brain. Boy, that's a that's a pretty good ROI. So tell us about your program. How, what can this look like? Because I know you have broad experience doing this on high impact, low cost travel for young people. Yeah,

Blake Bole:

like I said earlier, there are many ways to do a gap year, and I am definitely biased towards the more DIY, do it yourself, low budget, long term travel type of gap year. But I also recognize that that is a big leap for a lot of young people, and maybe they would prefer to go on an organized program, but those organized programs are really expensive, or maybe they just don't fit into your year the way you want it to. And so a friend of mine, who's a gap year consultant, Ivy Patton, we came up with this idea for something called the gap year launch pad, in which we bring together a group of young adults, ages 18 to 23 for just 10 days. It'll be in Brussels, Belgium, right in, you know, hub in the middle of northern Europe. And we'll stay in a youth hostel, just rent out a bunch of rooms just for our group, and Ivy and I will essentially upload all of our combined, you know, four decades worth of independent travel, knowledge and experience and advising young people to do the same through a series of workshops. And I will be running these, you know, hands on mini adventures, the micro adventure type challenges. It's like, okay, this afternoon, no more lectures. You know, go out and make three friends from three different countries, and you have to bring back evidence to show me that they're actually your friends. Now, something like that. I just made that up. Right now, ways you can do this. And the idea is to bring together young people who want to start a long term independent travel, whether it's a full gap year or gap semester, or just a summer of traveling in Europe. And they get to experience this like intensive training together, and then go off and begin their adventure together. So it's kind of like training plus community built in. And at the end of the program, we hand you a your rail pass, you know, which is good for multiple days of unlimited train travel across Europe, and say, All right, go begin your adventure, spread your wings and fly. And so that's why it's a launch pad. And so for me. It's a delightful hybrid of structure and unstructure of a bit of like lecture, but also adventures. And most importantly, it's the community aspect. I think there are so many young people who are like, I would love to do something like this that I don't want to start by myself, and I'm intimidated by the idea of just making friends along the way. And so we'll bring people together will make it really easy to make friends and to get started. And where you take it from there is up to you. And it's a very affordably priced it

Ned Johnson:

feels like they could be that could be a holiday gift for the holidays. Folks, come back. Come on. Folks, hi. I love it. I'm sold.

Blake Bole:

I'm sold. Thanks. NAT Blake,

Ned Johnson:

thanks for this conversation in times when going into the season of darkness, right? And we know the equinox coming up. It's lovely to have things to look forward to that bring us sense of optimism and hope. And boy, this is wonderful, a wonderful opportunity you've described. And it may not be right for everyone, but it sure could. It sure could. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hey folks, Ned here, over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill sticks root reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together. Please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person. If so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350 you.