Taking the Kids : Indelible Inklings of Trips Past

They skipped the ghost stories and old camp songs. Instead, the 8-year-old Girl Scouts opted for tales about their families as they sat in the deepening twilight around the campfire.

“Me next!” they begged for another turn. The stories came tumbling out: the one about the soggy camping trip, the way a brother always hid under restaurant tables when he was a baby and the little sister who never failed to get carsick. They talked about amusement parks in Texas and visiting cousins in Florida and commiserated about being dragged around to “boring” museums.

Mundane, certainly. But to the giggling Scouts on a weekend camping trip, the memories were as clear and funny as if they had happened yesterday. Many of the stories, I realized as I sat listening with my daughter Reggie beside me, stemmed from trips that the girls had taken with their families.

“Vacations and holidays are tops for creating memories. The whole aspect of special time and special space outside daily life makes it stand out,” said New York family therapist Evan Imber-Black, co-author, along with Janine Roberts, of “Rituals for These Times” (HarperCollins, $12). “It’s like a movie running in your head.”

Such mental movies are more important than we might think. Don Wertlieb, a child psychologist and chairman of Tufts University’s child study department, explains that memories “provide an internal map for who you are and how you want to live your life.”

“The kids might lose the souvenirs,” Wertlieb said. “They’ll always have the memories.”

“They sustain us in hard times,” said Sharon Berry, a child psychologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “It’s a connection to the part of ourself that’s good and happy.

Vacations are also a way to have shared memories with the family--and they need not mean spending a lot of money or even heading far from home, Berry said.

Chicago professor Barbara Shwom, for one, treasures the memories of the once-a-year fishing date she and her dad shared when she was growing up. “I hated fishing,” Shwom said. “But they were the best times.”

Likewise, Boston consultant Deborah Swiss remembers her mom getting up at 5 a.m. on one trip to a New Hampshire lake to get the family freshly baked jelly doughnuts. “Between work and the kids, everything goes by so fast,” says Swiss, an expert on work and family issues. “You want to be able to relish the moment. The best times for kids are when Mom and Dad are calm and relaxed.”

Blended families, meanwhile, must be helped to maintain old memories while forging new ones in different settings with a new group of people. “Don’t go back to the same place as before,” said author Roberts, who also directs the family therapy program at the University of Massachusetts and is part of a blended family. Find new locations that will create new experiences and memories.

So how can parents set out to create more happy memories for their kids? Don Wertlieb suggests being deliberate about it.

* Pick up regional recipes or foods from the place you’re visiting and have a special meal a few weeks after the trip, Roberts said.

* Make a storyboard of trip photos and ask each family member to contribute a few lines so each photo has an appropriate caption.

And if you send me your idea for creating the best family memory--on vacation, the holidays or at home--I’ll share some in a future column.