Reply to Have you ever gone on vacation with another family and left feeling deflated and inferior?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why the hell would adult children with their own fiancés want to spend vacation time with their parents’ friends and their children? I thought you were going to be telling a story about ten year olds and tweens not being into it. Your children are adults and surely would prefer to pick who they vacation with. I would have been surly too, if I was being asked to spend all my meals with other random adults I was not friends with. What were the circumstances of your kids coming? Did you ask as them to do you a favor where you would pay for it? And they didn’t realize how much of it would be spending time as a big group with the other families?

The whole thing just seems utterly bizarre that 31 year old children would be part of a “families” vacation organized by the parent generation[/quote]

This is harsh but was my reaction as well.  Families traveling with kids in their 20s and late 20s at that it sounds like?

Your adult children apparently don’t like the other adults.  So as adults they should feel free to politely decline and not spend time with them.  As long a they weren't rude I don’t see what the problem is.  That doesn’t sound dysfunctional.[/quote]

I agree with this. I think it's nice when families with adult kids still vacation together, but what OP describes sounds weird to me. Most people in their 20s are not eager to spend a week skiing with their parents friends and their parents' friends' adult kids. They have their own friends and generally can (and would prefer to) do something like that with them. Even if they know the parents' friends' kids.

I wonder if maybe the other kids had something in common (similar colleges, professions, hobbies, etc.) and OP's kids didn't have this in common and therefore were less interested in hanging out? Or I also wonder if there was something else going on, like maybe some actual bad blood between OP's kids and some of the other kids there, and the other kids were the sort to be very good at pretending everything is fine and OP's kids are more the kind to show their emotions. [/quote]

what is "weird" exactly?  We know so many who do this, we moved to NY 12 years ago and this is common in our area.  We have done it with other families as well, this was the first time with this particular group however. The commonality, there might have been a smidgeon with the other two families' kids but not a lot. 
My kids thought some of those kids were phonies, they thought they laughed at every joke, were overly polite (not a bad thing in my book) but my judgmental kids felt it was not genuine and thought the whole thing was just phony. No bad blood but different types of kids. My kids good or not, are not one to pretend or placate. So I guess I chalk this up to lesson learned and different strokes for different folks![/quote]

No, OP, you're wrong here.  It's not normal to plan a multi-families vacation where all the younger generation are adults, and where they aren't already regular-see-the-families-all-the-time friends.

Sure, it is very normal for families who have been very close for 20 years to do annual vacations like this, where the families have been vacationing together for 20 years - so it is seamless for the adult kids to continue vacationing with their parents and the other adult children.

But you're describing adult children who have never had this relationship with the other kids. They know them for years, but aren't hanging out with them in this kind of setting for years.  It is totally bizarre to expect those adult kids to spend their vacation, and be happy about it, with these other random families.

Growing up, my parents had tons of good friends who were like aunts and uncles to us, and their kids like cousins. So many good memories of summer bbqs, sleepovers, ski trips etc, and spending lots of time with those other kids when I was a kid.  But by the time I was 20? No thanks! I met my husband and started my own life.  I still am happy to see my parents or my sister on vacation. But if would be weird as hell to be asked to spend my vacation with those kids from my childhood. [/quote]

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