LAST year it dawned on Ellen Belok that her youngest son, Gavin, 10, was often competing for her attention with his bigger and louder 15-year-old twin brothers, Todd and Bryan. In between the twins' shouting "I want to talk," "You're interrupting me" or "I need to be picked up first," Mrs. Belok realized that Gavin never had any time alone with her.
Ellen Belok with her son Gavin hiking in Costa Rica.
Inspired by this revelation, she took Gavin to Mexico last year, just the two of them, to see the migration of monarch butterflies because he loves nature. In March, the two visited the Arenal Volcano during a hiking trip to Costa Rica while the twins stayed home with their father.
Parents like Mrs. Belok, who have more than one child and hectic lives, have decided that if private time with each of their children cannot be carved out of an ordinary week at home, they will create the time by getting away from home. No ordinary family trip will do, though; for the maximum bonding experience, each child gets a separate vacation with just one parent to a destination chosen with that child in mind.
And it works, these parents say. The children feel more appreciated, and the parents feel more in touch with their children's lives.
"Gavin is more relaxed and seems much happier," said Mrs. Belok, who develops arts enrichment programs for schools and lives in Ridgefield, Conn., with her husband, Lennart, a neurologist. "When it's just the two of you, you don't need to take a vote where to go to dinner or what to do. You really get to enjoy each other's company."
Gavin agreed. "I can talk to her without anyone else talking," he said.
The twins do not seem to mind either. "It was fine with me," Bryan said. "We got to have pizza every night with Dad."
The one-on-one trek is not necessarily a substitute for the annual group vacation or a perilous march toward family fragmentation, experts say, but rather a way for parents and children to reconnect.
Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist who is an author of "The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap," has noticed that more families have been taking such vacations in recent years.
"In the past 20 years," he said, "structured sports time has doubled, unstructured children's activities have gone down 50 percent, household conversations have become less frequent, family dinners have declined 33 percent and family vacations have decreased 28 percent."
"It's these quiet times where you're sitting in the car and suddenly you hear, 'Dad, I'm having a problem,' or 'Let me tell you what is going on,' " he added.
Little information is available on how many parent-child pairs travel alone. But Emily Kaufman, a travel expert and the author of "The Travel Mom's Ultimate Book of Family Travel," said she has seen a surge of material promoting one-on-one trips, like father-and-son golf outings and mother-and-daughter spa vacations.
Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association of America, said many families with two working parents incorporated mini-vacations into business trips. Statistics from the association show that 10 percent of parents who traveled for business in 2004 took a child along, and the number of such trips with children increased to 169 million in 2004 from 164 million in 2003.
Bruce DeBoskey, a regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, who lives in Denver, has been taking his three sons — Aaron 19; Sam, 16; and David, 14 — on individual trips for years. "On family trips, three boys can be a handful." he said. "I have one kid who likes music and tattoos, the other is into hiking and nature experiences, and the other one likes historical sites."
He still thinks vacations for the entire family are important. "In these family dynamics," he said, "you learn to compromise, and each kid becomes a teacher to the other. But the one-on-one trip can be a nice alternative to the chaos of a family trip."
For some families, traveling all at once is not an option. Kim Larson, a fund-raiser for nonprofit ventures, and her husband, Gary E. Knell, the chief executive of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind "Sesame Street," have four children from 11 to 20 years old in different schools, with the oldest in college. "Outside of Christmas, none of the vacations overlap," Ms. Larson said. "At first, I thought it was a nightmare," she said. "But it turned out to be an opportunity."
Between the two parents, they have taken the children in various pairings to India, Guatemala, Japan and the Galápagos Islands.
Savannah Knell, 17, said she discovered that her mother was "really independent and strong" during their trip to Guatemala.
"She was really like travel savvy," Savannah said, "and knew where she was going all the time in a foreign country."
