Why I Pull Lila Out of School for Travel — and Why You Should Stop Apologizing

Lila has missed roughly thirty days of school for travel by ninth grade. Her grades are fine. Her teachers know her name. Here is the case I make to other moms, and to myself.

By Emily Rosen·

I want to say something that took me years to say without flinching: I pull my kid out of school for travel, and I am done apologizing for it. Lila is fourteen, in ninth grade in our New Jersey public school district, and by my count she has missed somewhere around thirty school days for trips since kindergarten. Three-day Paris weekends. A full Rome week in late October. A Tuesday Bad Bunny show in Barcelona that required leaving on a Sunday and coming back on a Wednesday with a worksheet about cell mitosis half-finished in her tray table. Her grades are fine. Her teachers know her by name. Her tennis coach is the only one who really minds.

The mom-guilt narrative around school absences is one of those things that, if you scratch it, has almost nothing underneath. I have scratched it. There is nothing under there. So this is the post I wish someone had handed me when Lila was six and I was still asking permission from a school secretary like she was the Vatican.

What Lila Has Actually Missed

Let me be specific, because Em hates a vague argument. Here is what Lila has skipped, by category, over the past few years:

  • Two days of seventh-grade math to go to Paris over a Presidents Day weekend with my friend Vivi's apartment as our base. She came back understanding fractions of a baguette better than the unit on rational numbers, which I will accept as a wash.
  • A full week of October in eighth grade, Rome and Florence, Frecciarossa between them. She read all of The Agony and the Ecstasy on the train, badly, but she read it.
  • A Tuesday and Wednesday in March when Bad Bunny was in Barcelona and tickets were a third of what they would have been in the US. Her Spanish teacher gave her extra credit for the trip. Her Spanish teacher is my favorite person in that building.
  • Two days for a long weekend in Stockholm to see Astrid, the girl from her tennis camp who became one of those friendships you only get when you are fourteen and the world is bigger than you knew.

What She Has Actually Learned

I am suspicious of any parent who claims their kid "learned more on the road than in school." It is a sentimental line and it is also, in our case, true, but only because I have been keeping receipts. Lila can order in passable French and pretty good Italian. She knows how to read a Métro map and a Metropolitana map and the SEPTA map at 30th Street, which is different. She has watched Vivi's daughter Eloise run a household errand in the eleventh arrondissement and understood, viscerally, that in some places thirteen-year-olds are trusted with the bread budget.

She has eaten at Renato's no-sign place behind the Pantheon four times, and the last time she walked in, he hugged her like a niece and made her carbonara without asking. That is a thing you cannot replicate in a classroom, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make a school administrator more comfortable.

The Pushback I Get, and What I Say

The pushback is always the same. It comes from other moms more than from teachers. Three flavors:

  • "What about her grades?" — Her grades are fine. They have always been fine. If your kid is on the bubble, that is a different conversation, but most kids are not on the bubble. They are coasting, and a week in Florence is not what is going to break them.
  • "What about standardized testing prep?" — Lila will sit for the SAT in two years. She will study. The week of test prep she would have done in October is not going to materially change her score. The Uffizi will.
  • "What about the message it sends?" — The message it sends is that her family prioritizes her education, broadly defined, and that her parents trust her to make up the work. Which she does. On the plane. Mostly.

The Single-Mom Math

Here is the part nobody likes to talk about. I am divorced. Lila's dad Jayson is in the city, remarried, and Lila is with him every other weekend and most school breaks. That means the only time I get extended travel with my own daughter is when I pull her out of school. Spring break and most of summer, she is at Jayson's. If I waited for an officially sanctioned vacation week to travel with her, I would see her on a plane twice a year. That is not the relationship I am building.

The school year is long. Your kid's childhood is not.

What I Actually Do

I am not lawless about this. I have a system. I email the school the week before, I cc the relevant teachers, I keep the tone professional and unapologetic. Lila brings a folder. She does the work, eventually. We do not pull her out the week of midterms, we do not pull her out for a Pinterest reason, and we do not pretend it is a medical issue. The school has been, every single time, completely fine.

If you are reading this and your shoulders are up around your ears about the trip you are thinking of taking — the Tuesday flight, the Wednesday return, the missed math quiz — I want you to lower them. Email the school. Book the flight. Lila is in ninth grade and on track, and she has stood inside the Pantheon during a rainstorm and watched the oculus do its thing, and nobody is ever going to take that back from her. Stop apologizing. Start packing.