Mom lets kids dive with sharks on trip, people judge her parenting

• Monet Hambrick, an avid traveler, documents her family vacations on her blog, The Traveler Child.
• Her children, Jordyn, 10, and Kennedy, 8, have done activities like hang-gliding, which she is afraid of.
• She has been criticized online for the activities she has let them do, but believes the fear is learned.

This essay, as stated, is based on conversations with Monet Hambrick, a 36-year-old. travel blogger based in Florida, who shares itineraries and tips for traveling with kids on her blog, The Traveling Child. Monet has two daughters with her husband James Hambrick: Jordyn, who is 10, and Kennedy, who is 8. So far, Monet has been to 50 countries in her life., while her daughters were over 35 years old. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was in high school, I got a scholarship to a program called The Experiment in International Living.

In the summer, I lived in Botswana with a host family in a village who treated me like their own daughter.

Learning about their culture, their food, their language – and then being able to explore and go camping in the Okavango Delta and go to Chobe National Park – has really impacted how I choose to travel with my family now .

My husband and I met in college at the University of Florida. Since the beginning of our meeting, we have traveled together.

When I had kids, everyone said, “Oh, you’ll never be able to travel again now that you have kids.” And we were like, “Have you met us?”

The journey is instilled in us, in who we are.

I let my kids do adventurous activities that I wouldn’t dare try

I am definitely the person who plans our trips.

Adventure stuff? This is my husband.

I don’t do crazy things. I don’t like roller coasters. I don’t like heights.

I went ziplining in Costa Rica a few years ago. Halfway down the zipline, there was this Tarzan swing where they hooked you up and then let you go. I was almost crying during the zipline, so I was definitely not doing the Tarzan swing.

Our oldest daughter said, “I want to do it.”

We let her do it. When he finished, he said, “My stomach hurt a bit, but I’m glad I got to do it.”

When I was in Cape Town in 2022, my husband and daughters went shark diving. It was six past eight.

I stayed on the boat — took photos and videos from the safety of the boat.

They were five and seven years old when they went hang-gliding in Orlando.

Usually, with hang gliding, you run up and down a mountain. There are no mountains in Florida.

How they go hang gliding there is they literally attach the hang glider to those single propeller planes. The plane takes off and the hang glider takes off. Then, when you reach a certain height, the guide peels the hang glider from the plane and then they begin their free fall descent.

I didn’t do that, but they liked it. When my youngest daughter came down she said, “I want to go again.”

People can judge, but I don’t want my children to share my fears

In certain situations, my fear has prevented me from having amazing experiences because I am terrified.

If something is considered safe and my kids want to do it, we’ll let them.

Sometimes I get chatter online about it.

But if it’s something they can do safely, we want to let them have those experiences. That was our philosophy.

If we keep saying no just because we’re afraid, eventually, in the future, they’ll be afraid to do whatever they once weren’t afraid to do.

I am a firm believer that fear is learned. The last thing I wanted to do was instill fear in my children just because I’m afraid of something.