On Magazine
Family Matters
How to get - and stay - ahead when it comes to life with kids

By Jeremy Gerard

B.K. - "Before Kids" - the phrase family planning meant something very different from what it would come to mean A.K. It meant working out feelings about contraception and thinking ahead to that distant time when we'd be ready to contribute to the gene pool. Those were the days when we'd find ourselves a week from vacation and begin thinking, "Where would we like to go?" We'd choose some inviting place, pack a duffel and off we'd go. Remember?

As any parent knows, the arrival of offspring means being locked into a schedule dictated as much by the school calendar as by the boss. Traveling with kids requires planning. Wait until you're ready to go before booking your holiday, and you're likely to find yourself whiling away those precious days in the living room. And as the kids grow, the list of things that must be planned in advance also grows, from summer camp to college tuition.

Once we became parents, it didn't take us long to realize that everyone (that is, everyone lucky enough to be able to include vacations and summer camp and college in their planning) wants the same things we want for our kids. The time for getting organized is now. So: leaving estate planning to the estate managers, let's talk futures on these three issues.

- The kids think they will be ready to graduate from day camp and go away next summer, and the idea of sleeping past 6 a.m. seven weeks running has definite appeal to Mom and Dad. Start at the American Camping Associations official site, which lists every ACA-accredited camp in the country, according to such things as activities, size and location. One caveat: this site is run by the camp officials themselves, so it is useful but not as opinionated as it might be. For a more independent view, KidsCamps.com, a superbly designed site that every gung ho camp director referred to when we visited sleep-aways in New England for my son Nick. It's a resource, not a referral service, with links to every kind of camp - sleep-away, day, sports, arts, weight-loss, special-needs, you name it - anywhere in the country. "Families need to start looking the summer before," advises Nancy LaPook Diamond, cofounder of the site. "When we began seven years ago, camps started filling up in December. Now the top camps are filled by October - and have waiting lists."

- Then there's vacation, those vast stretches of time yawning ahead, with kids ricocheting around the house like unguided missiles. For the East Coast in winter try Ski Vermont (www.skivermont.com), whose ingenious marketing team is anxious to ply you with videos and online reservations to make escape planning effortless. But don't miss Travel With Kids at About.com. (Full disclosure: About.com is a subsidiary of Primedia, which publishes New York magazine, my primary employer.) This exhaustive site will link you to everything from dude ranches in Montana to castles in the U.K., along with city guides and tips for a hundred things you probably never thought about. Under "Keeping Sane During Travel with Kids":eat a good meal before you arrive at a theme park.

-Parents obsess over very few issues more than they do about being able to pay for their kids' college educations. This subject is undergoing enormous change, though. The first thing you should know about is 529 Plans, the latest setups to allow you and everyone who adores your children to set aside vast sums of pretax money for education beyond high school. Each state has its own 529 Plan, and these are now the ne plus ultra of saving for school. You can give a gift of up to $50,000 per child at once, instead of over five years, to take advantage of investment possibilities. Go to Savingforcollege.com; Nasdaq is also a great site for college planning, as is Kid Capital.

At this point, you're probably wondering, Who has time for this? Make the time. The dividends will come in the form of kids who know you figured things out when it really mattered - before the crises.