I have a confession to make. For years I have been telling people that one of my parenting philosophies is Less Things & More Experiences, and after spending a week on Martha’s Vineyard watching other people’s children, I have discovered there is a slight possibility that I have been wrong.

Not completely wrong. Let’s not get carried away.

But perhaps wrong enough that I owe my children an apology and several repeat visits to Pretend City.

This all started years ago when OC Black Moms was still relatively small and I was trying to figure out social media. The community was actually meeting in person a couple of times a month, which I foolishly thought should be enough evidence that we were, in fact, a community. Instagram disagreed. Instagram wanted content. Constant content. Apparently hundreds of Black mothers gathering in Orange County was less important to the algorithm than whether I had posted a Reel everyday by 10 a.m.

So I started sharing more of my family.

People loved it.

A Black family living in Orange County? Interesting. A Black family exploring Orange County? Even better. A reasonably photogenic Black family willing to stand inside your new play center and make your marketing materials look diverse? Now we have a business model.

The invitations started arriving in my DMs. Come here. Try this. Bring the kids. Post about it. We lived close enough to Los Angeles that I probably could have leaned into the whole family-influencer thing, but I have never wanted to be famous. I enjoy leaving my house without makeup far too much. Also, the possibility that a stranger could recognize me while I am arguing with my child in a parking lot has always seemed like an unnecessary level of accountability.

But I did love exploring with my family, so I started sharing something I called Less Things & More Experiences. Instead of buying our children more plastic nonsense that would eventually migrate underneath a bed, I wanted to spend our money actually doing things together. We went skiing and camping. We went to the zoo’s and museums and beaches and pumpkin patches. I found playgrounds in cities we had never visited and restaurants we absolutely needed to try. Southern California is basically one enormous playground if you’re willing to sit in traffic long enough to reach the other side of it, and I became very good at finding things for us to do.

There was only one small issue.

My children did not share my commitment to new experiences.

I would spend an evening researching some fabulous new place and announce it over breakfast like I had personally arranged a private audience with the Pope, only for one of them to ask, Can we just go to Pretend City?

Pretend City? Again?

I found you an entirely new children’s museum.

They wanted Pretend City.

I discovered a new beach.

They wanted to swim at the gym.

I planned an adventure.

They wanted to do the exact thing we had done two Saturdays ago.

I remember thinking, Children, there is an entire world out there.

What I did not think was, Perhaps your children are trying to tell you something.

Naturally, we went to the new place anyway. I was the mother. I had already bought tickets and packed snacks. Democracy has limits.

Fast-forward a few years and I am on Martha’s Vineyard without my children. I missed them terribly, which meant I spent a perfectly reasonable amount of time watching everyone else’s children and wondering what mine would be doing if they were there.

And one of the first things I noticed was that these children were not doing very much.

I say that lovingly.

They were at the beach. They rode bikes. They walked down Circuit Avenue. They played football. They got ice cream. They ran around with other children. Then they apparently woke up the next morning and did some version of it all over again.

I kept thinking, Don’t they get bored?

Because let’s be honest, Martha’s Vineyard is beautiful, historic and culturally fascinating, but nobody is confusing it with Disneyland. There isn’t a new attraction opening every six weeks. Nobody is handing you a color-coded itinerary at the ferry.

And yet the children looked completely happy.

Not impressed.

Not entertained.

Not enriched.

Comfortable.

And suddenly I thought about Pretend City.

Oh.

Maybe my children weren’t asking for less because they lacked curiosity.

Maybe they were asking for familiarity.

And perhaps their mother, who thought she was creating an adventurous childhood, was actually running a small unpaid travel agency they had never requested.

That sent me down yet another rabbit hole, because apparently I am incapable of simply going on vacation.

There is a reason children love repetition. Their world is constantly changing and, more importantly, largely controlled by adults. We tell them when to wake up, where they’re going, what they’re eating, what school they attend, when they have to leave and why apparently wearing shoes is required even though they were perfectly happy without them.

Familiarity gives their brains and bodies a break.

When a child returns somewhere, they already know what happens there. They know which door to use. They know where the bathroom is. They know which swing they want. They know Grandma will pull out the good dishes for Thanksgiving and set the table almost exactly the way she did last year. They know Uncle So-and-So will wake up late. They know which cousin they want to sit beside. They know what the house smells like when they walk through the door.

Nobody needs to announce, Children, this predictable environment is helping regulate your nervous system.

Thank God, because that would really ruin Thanksgiving.

Their bodies simply learn:

I know this place. I know these people. I know what happens here. I belong here.

And the repetition does something else that I hadn’t really considered. It gives children a constant against which they can see themselves changing.

Last year you were afraid of the ocean.

This year you aren’t.

Last year Dad carried you home from the beach.

This year you’re carrying your own chair.

Last year your legs dangled beneath Grandma’s Thanksgiving table.

One year, without anybody noticing exactly when it happened, your feet touch the floor.

The table stayed the same.

You changed.

And maybe that is why childhood traditions become so emotional once we’re adults. We aren’t remembering one extraordinary Thanksgiving dinner. We’re remembering twenty ordinary ones layered on top of each other until Grandma’s table became part of our understanding of home.

That is very different from collecting experiences.

And suddenly my beloved Less Things & More Experiences started making me slightly uncomfortable.

Because what if I had rejected the consumption of things only to become a consumer of experiences?

New museum. New restaurant. New beach. New city. New vacation.

Have you been here? Have you tried this? Have you seen that?

Look at us not buying toys while aggressively collecting destinations.

Very evolved.

Standing on Martha’s Vineyard, I started wondering whether childhood richness has less to do with how many places a child has been and more to do with whether there are a few places they know by heart.

And once I saw that, I started noticing it everywhere on the island.

Families weren’t necessarily returning to Martha’s Vineyard because there was something new waiting for them every August.

They were returning because there wasn’t.

They already knew which beach they liked. They had their restaurant. Their children knew where to get ice cream. They knew who would be on the island that week. Friends returned at the same time. The children found each other again. Nobody needed to manufacture an experience because they were returning to a life already in progress.

And after enough summers, you stop being a visitor.

You have a relationship with a place.

Eventually your children grow up and return with children of their own. They walk into the same restaurant and say something completely ordinary like, We always come here.

And I think there is something incredibly powerful about we always.

We always spend Thanksgiving at Grandma’s.

We always take this picture.

We always go to this beach.

We always come here in July.

Those words tell a child, This existed before you. There is a place for you inside it. And we expect you to be here again.

That is belonging.

But I also don’t want us Californians reading this and deciding the solution is that everybody needs to fly across the country every August and start bidding against each other for cottages in Oak Bluffs. First of all, please don’t. I have looked at the rental prices and there are already enough of us participating in this madness.

More importantly, Martha’s Vineyard is not magical simply because it is Martha’s Vineyard.

People made it meaningful by returning.

Someone had to invite the other family the first time. Someone had to organize the picnic. Someone had to say, Let’s come back next year. Someone kept hosting the dinner. Someone kept choosing the same week. Eventually we should do this again became we always do this.

We can build that in California.

It doesn’t need to involve fifty families, matching outfits or a nonprofit organization. It could be four families you genuinely enjoy renting houses near the same beach in Pismo Beach every July. Maybe you camp at the same place on the Central Coast every summer. Maybe it’s Big Bear every winter. Maybe three families decide that the first Saturday in December belongs to them and protect it from the seventy-four other holiday invitations that will inevitably appear.

The location almost matters less than the return.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized we have already been doing some of this.

Our community has an annual MLK Picnic. We have family nights. There are children who have been seeing each other at these gatherings for years now. When you’re the person organizing community, these things don’t always feel particularly profound. You’re thinking about RSVPs and food and whether someone brought the folding table and why twelve people who did not respond to the invitation have suddenly arrived.

But perhaps something much quieter is happening underneath all that logistics.

The children are remembering.

We do this every year.

And that matters.

It also made me think about how often we wait for someone else to create traditions for us. We wait for the organization to host something. We wait for the perfect event. We wait until enough people are interested.

But if you see something missing, you can start it.

Invite the families.

Pick the beach.

Book the campsite.

Host the dinner.

Tell everybody you’re doing it again next year.

It doesn’t have to be large to matter. In fact, some of the traditions your children treasure most may involve five people and absolutely no Instagram content.

Someone always has to be the first person to say, Let’s do this every year.

We look at established communities and see the finished version. We see generations returning to Martha’s Vineyard and think, Look at this incredible tradition.

But at some point there was a first summer.

A first picnic.

A first invitation.

A first group of people who decided to come back.

And perhaps that’s the biggest thing Martha’s Vineyard has made me reconsider.

Maybe the richest things we can give our children aren’t actually things at all.

They are time, people and place.

Enough time to linger.

People they expect to see again.

Places they return to often enough that those places begin holding their memories.

And if you repeat those three things long enough, eventually you create something that cannot be ordered, upgraded or delivered overnight.

Belonging.

So I am not giving up Less Things & More Experiences.

I am simply revising it.

Less Things. More Experiences. And a Few Worth Repeating.

I still plan to show my children the world. I am still going to find museums nobody asked to visit. We will still travel. I will still make restaurant reservations. And one day I absolutely intend to drag these poor children through Oxford while explaining medieval architecture because their mother has interests and they unfortunately have passports.

But I also want to give them somewhere to return to.

Maybe we create our own version of Martha’s Vineyard right here in California. Not literally. California does not need another place where someone decides a two-bedroom cottage should rent for $14,000 a week.

But we can create the feeling.

A few families.

A familiar beach.

The same week.

Children growing up beside each other.

A picture we take every year until they begin complaining about it.

Something simple that we repeat long enough for our children to eventually bring their children and say:

We always come here.

And yes, I recognize that I have somehow taken a thoughtful lesson about children needing predictability, community and nervous-system regulation and turned it into an argument for an annual summer rental on the California coast.

This was probably not the intended conclusion of the developmental research.

But I am willing to make sacrifices for my children.

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie