Family vacations aren't for everyone. They're hard enough when you have to deal with your own kids…but they can be pure hell when you have to deal with someone else's. For Editor at Large Hanya Yanagihara, she'd rather just avoid them altogether. She's not saying kids shouldn't travel, she's just saying they shouldn't travel near her.

Photo by: Karan Kapoor/Getty Images (Boy); STasker/Getty Images (Girl)

I don’t like children. I don’t like listening to them, I don’t like talking to them, I don’t like hearing about them. I don’t like their inability to make interesting conversation, their tinny voices, their poor taste in food and art. Give me an adult complaining about his taxes, fidelity issues, mortgage, or job any day over a child prattling on about her toys, or a newly acquired piece of information that everyone else already knows.

But if interacting with children at home, in New York, is wearisome enough, then seeing them when I’m traveling is worse. There is something about being in a new location that heightens children’s worst qualities: their rigidity, their temper, their brief attention spans, their inability to modulate the volume of their voices, their incessant questions, their fondness for proclaiming their witness of the obvious (“Sky!” “Bird!” “Rock!”).

Although to be fair to the little monsters—who I’m defining as anyone between the ages of one and 16 (when they start getting interesting)—they’re often not the ones who’re the biggest problems: It’s their parents, people whose sense of personal space and boundaries often dissipate when it comes to their own offspring. Behavior they’d never tolerate in other people, much less other people’s children, is not only tolerated but indulged in their kids.

Having said all this, I should also say that in the abstract, I am very much in favor of children traveling. My childhood travels were mostly limited to the quixotic-road-trip genre: epic, weeks-long hauls from Texas to Toronto, to Cape Cod, to southern Vermont, or from Baltimore to Irvine. After sitting in a car for 15 hours, my brother and I would be parked for the night in a motel room, where we would be instructed not to move or make a sound because my father was exhausted from the day’s driving. These “vacations”—really, they mostly coincided with moves from one place to another—may have taken us through spectacular American landscapes, but decades later, all I can remember is the depressing sameness, the soul-leaching bleakness, of those motel rooms, with their identical views of black tarmac parking lots. How I wished I could go somewhere beautiful, somewhere where I could look outside the window and see a sprawl of green, or blue, or gray: something wild and limitless, a landscape made to inspire.