I disagree, and believe it depends very much on the children and their parents. We've taken the kids on significant international trips every year for the last 4, save for a year when I was more homebound due to knee surgery.

My kids are 6 and 9, and they've traveled with us (all in Y) to Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Costa Rica (twice), plus countless trips from Calif to the east coast and Hawaii. Malaysia was the longest trip, which was 11 days, and included two nights in Singapore.

My 6 year old can enunciate the reasons for her preferences for Hong Kong Malaysia over Costa Rica and Hawaii, and my 9 year old can weigh the relative merits of the same, adding in Australia and Florida. Honestly, I'm incredibly proud of the fact that my kids go into the local dim sum joint and say "this is almost as good as the dim sum we had in Hong Kong."

Is it harder than doing it without kids? Heck yeah. Would I like to have a nice long leisurely trip in F or C with my wife to an exotic resort (e.g., some of the things we did before we had kids)? Oh...My...Yes!

That said, we have two kids now, and we don't have the luxury of someone that we can conveniently leave them with, and frankly neither of us would be comfortable flying halfway around the world with our kids (at this age) in the hands of others. As a result, we are "stuck" with them, and if we want to travel as often as we would like and not churn credit cards (again, personal choice), we're "stuck" doing it in Y.

I'm 6'3" and 230 lbs. If I can fly to Singapore with my wife and two young kids in Y, so can you. If you'd prefer not to, that's totally legit, but we do it.

That's the beauty of parenting - everybody gets to make their own choices and their own mistakes - many think taking your kids to an island off the coast of Malaysia is definitely the latter.

Greg