Reply to 11 yr old boy-is there any point in doing anything?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How sad.

My 10 year old had the opposite reaction when we went to visit family in Japan, and he didn't want to come home!

We visited really cool high-tech museums, stayed at a traditional inn (where you sleep in tatami floors in futons), went on hikes in the mountains, and ate the most delicious food.

Maybe the difference with your situation is that we live a very frugal life usually: he doesn't have a lot of toys, we don't go out, there is very little screen time. In that sense, our trip was a REAL luxury and he appreciated it.
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No. We were actually very poor (a step above food pantries).

Puberty makes kids difficult. I know I was a royal PITA from around age ten or eleven until maybe 15 or 16.

We did temples. A lot of temples. And gardens. So many gardens.

None of those places were interactive in a way a hi tech museum like you took your kid to. I am sure we would have loved that.

Look at it this way. Imaging taking your kid on a two week immersion of historic colonial homes, without the docents entertsining you and without the enrichment activities, interactive displays, treasure hunts, etc that our museums and historic homes provide. Then imagine none of the signs or written explainations being in a language you can understand. And you have to be quiet. Very quiet. Maybe you walk through a few gardens too, rose gardens and historical buildings, for two weeks straight.

I don't know what kind of perfect stepford children you all are raising, or how perfectly well behaved you were as a preteen-young teen, but I know that my kids (very well behaved) and all of my friend's kids (also well behaved) would be groaning and eye rolling a few days into a trip like that.

As an adult, I love looking at old buildings and beautiful gardens. As an eleven year old? That kind of intense immersion was just an awful lot of really boring stuff.[/quote]

PP you were responding to - not sure what to make of your post. 
If you paid for a trip this expensive comparative to your income, wouldn't you want to include something for everyone? If you couldn't do something marginally interesting for your kid, then your son's disappointment shouldn't come as a surprise.

Our trip to Japan was close to 15K for 2 weeks. I literally spent months creating an itinerary and pre-selecting activities for nearly every day of our stay. There were quiet temples and gardens, too, which the kids didn't hate but didn't love either. They would have loved to go to Tokyo Disneyland, but we were warned not to go during high season (2hr wait for everything). 
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