How to Use a Family Camping Trip to Reconnect with Your Teenager

A family camping trip is one of the best ways to bond with your family. Camping trips combine family-building activities, beautiful scenery and solitude that help to turn your family's focus on one another instead of the distractions of your everyday lives. However, most teenagers won't see the family camping trip as anything more than a forced march where they'll be deprived of their friends, their favorite television shows or video games. They may come along reluctantly, but they decided that they weren't going to enjoy it long before the family van even left the driveway.

However, leaving your surly teenager to sulk in the car with their nose in a book or the music turned up loud is no way to spend a family vacation. After all, how can you have family bonding time when you're missing an important member? In order to drag your teen out of the car and into the family, you have to go the extra mile to make them feel included by planning your trip around them. It may change the trip you envisioned, but you'll be trading it for important family time that your teen will thank you for later.

Let Your Teenager Plan the Trip

Teenagers hate being told what to do. You may still see your teenager as your baby, but he is starting to see himself as an adult and will relish any opportunity to be treated as one. So, to get your teenager interested in this camping trip, treat him like an adult member of the family and ask him where he'd like to go. By giving him a major voice in the decision making process, he will feel more invested in the trip and may even begin to feel some excitement.

Pick out a few places for your teenager to choose from and invite him to research a few places of his own. Sit down as a family and discuss the activities that each location offers and what each member of the family would enjoy spending time doing. While you should encourage him to pick a place that the whole family will enjoy, make extra concessions for his desires. If you would like to go on a survivalist camping trip, but he would rather rely on the comfort of an RV, consider going with his choice. Maybe the compromise could be that he goes on the camping trip that other family members choose on the next camping trip.

Tailor the Family's Bonding Activities around Your Teenager

Teenagers are great at tuning out. They can lose themselves in their electronic devices and only surface at mealtimes. Encouraging them to actively bond with the family will take some coaxing and planning. The family bonding activities that you have planned may just feel like a pointless intrusion. After all, they know that you love them but you don't understand them and you probably never will.

Show your teenager that he's wrong by tailoring the family's bonding experiences around getting re-acquainted with your teenager. For example, if your teenager has posters of his favorite musicians plastered all over his bedroom walls, a great way to do this is by sharing music. Tell him to bring along his favorite CDs or mp3s and have the other family members bring theirs along as well. Bring along a portable CD or mp3 player (with lots of batteries) and spend your evenings around the campfire toasting marshmallows and learning about each other through music. Teens might not always want to talk, but you might find that your teen blossoms when you talk about something that he's interested in or feels like he's something of an expert on.

If your teenager isn't into music, have them share something else that they are interested in. If he spends a lot of his time playing a video game, ask him to spend some time around the campfire explaining it to you. Or perhaps he could share a short story, craft or painting. The key is to have each family member bring something to share that will allow the family to get to know them a little bit better. When parents share personal experiences, perhaps through a diary or high school yearbook, they can do a lot to open up a dialogue and create a rapport with their teenager.

By tailoring your next camping trip around your teenager, you can set the groundwork to build a stronger relationship during their last years at home. But this is just a start and bonding is a long process. Take the momentum of your teenager's excitement about this trip to plan more family outings where the family can grow stronger as a unit.