Born into Tourism - Children's Role in Shaping a more Sustainable Future for Tourism

Sustainability! The word that seems to mean everything and nothing all at the same time. It is so often sold to us as a way to deliver a happy and healthy future to our children, so it’s funny that we rarely listen to them when planning such futures.

Tourism, like many industries, is guilty of ignoring the voices of our youth with little consultation about how tourism development in their communities may affect them. A recent European study however is now seeking to understand how tourism is affecting children and from that, we can better understand what a more sustainable form of tourism should look like in their eyes.

Sustainability in tourism rests on three foundational pillars, environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Simplistically speaking this means there should be no negative impacts from the industry’s activity on the environment or the local community and it should contribute to society in a positive way including enhancing economic opportunity. For adults, these concepts are quite easy to grasp and the understanding of how tourism threatens these pillars is quite obvious. 

Tourism is becoming rather aware of the damage it causes from the environmental degradation of beauty spots to the negative pressure it puts on already hot rental markets. However, most of the unsatisfactory outcomes of tourism are usually overlooked by society as long as the money continues to flow in. Adult populations are acutely aware of the economic benefits tourism brings to an area and are much more likely to accept these negative side effects as long as they believe they are personally financially better off because of tourism’s presence. 

But what happens when we remove the financial aspect and obtain a more objective view of what is happening in communities with a large tourism sector? This view is visible to us through the eyes of the children who live there. They see tourism for what it is, they are particularly aware of the social issues tourism causes in their lives but do not make the trade-off between these negative social consequences and economic gain like adults who believe tourism can be a quick development tool.

Children rarely have a say in the tourism development policy of the places they live in either as they are not considered stakeholders due to them having no commercial interest in tourism, however, they are born into this system of tourism and must endure the side effects that it brings. A recent European-wide study by Marko Koščak and his team noted that children perceive tourism to have a negative effect on family life due to the working hours and the intensity of the work leaving families often separated and tired.

Furthermore, children understand that working in tourism is hard work for low money and see locals as subservient to visitors when assessing the guest-host power dynamic. This has left many children feeling marginalized in their own communities and with little desire to join the tourism industry when they become working age.

This is obviously alarming to see how tourism is affecting children's lives directly through the transformative effect tourism has on a community’s culture and quality of life and how their perception of the industry tends to be a negative one. Most concerningly, children are growing up believing themselves and their families to be inferior to tourists and that their daily lives should be changed as much as possible to avoid having an impact on a visitor's tourism experience.

This is clearly in violation of the social sustainability principle of sustainable destination development as tourism in this context is not contributing positively to the lives of these children and poses a rather interesting question of how this can be changed.

When we reintroduce the financial aspect of tourism to the equation we may well see that children's lives are in reality better with a better quality of life available to them as a result of their parents' increased earnings through involvement in the industry. However, when we look at these social problems identified by children, which are often overlooked or excused by adults, we are presented with a unique opportunity. The involvement of children in the planning process of tourism can help us to minimize these social problems that we often accept as a byproduct of tourism.

If children’s main objections to tourism development are that they will not be able to see their mother and father as frequently, we will be presented with an opportunity to reintroduce humanity into the employment practices of the industry by considering the negative effects such arduous work can have on family life. By involving children and shaping the industry into one with which they can attribute more positive feelings, tourism in tourism-reliant communities can safeguard itself by having an actively engaged future generation ready to work in an industry that they have shaped to be more socially sustainable. 

Children have proved a powerful force in pushing adults towards more sustainable choices from encouraging their parents to recycle more to wasting less water and the power they can have in pushing the tourism industry to a more socially sustainable one is certainly there. Sustainability is all about creating a future for our children to enjoy, so why don't we let them help us push positive change by including them in the discussion?