Modern vacations - modern families: new meanings and structures of family vacations

Ideally, vacations constitute special times together offering families the chance to participate in novel activities and break the routine of daily life and scheduling while concentrating on each other, having fun and experiencing new things. However, families are changing and consequently, so are family vacations. Vacations traditionally included all of the immediate nuclear family, but with busy lives and differing work schedules, vacations might now only include some members of the family or expand to include extended family members. Families also increasingly take technologies and therefore other aspects of their lives with them on vacation. The question is whether these new technology-equipped family assemblages lead to fundamentally different vacation experiences. This study is a qualitative study from accounts of 10 family groups who have gone on vacation. It explores the structure of the modern family vacation, the role it plays in the lives of families, how families enact vacations, how modern families experience time together, what role technology plays and what meanings and traditions have emerged from modern family vacations.