Postcards to kids: Let them see the world from home

When I was a kid, I wrote letters every day: to family, friends, even strangers I’d set up pen pal friendships with. I still have boxes of correspondence saved in our storage. Snail mail was such an important part of my childhood that I wanted the same for my kids. That’s why my entire family writes postcards to my kids.

My girls have received postcards from Hawaii, Turkey, London, the Everglades—all across the world. They’ve also received them from places that aren’t exactly tourist meccas: Columbus, OH, San Jose, CA and Chelan, WA (mostly places I’ve traveled for work). On the back, messages show my kids they’re loved from every geography.

But truly, they don’t know if the postcard my kids get is from a must-see destination or not; they’re broadening their horizons, one mail delivery at a time.

Want your kids to see the world without ever leaving home? Sending postcards to kids (and recruiting your family and friends to do the same) is one of my favorite ways of opening kids’ minds to the wealth of diversity of our beautiful planet.

Read on for why to enlist your loved ones to send postcards to your kids, how to make a postcard book and how to display postcards your kids get. When you set up this family tradition, you’ll create a keepsake—and a special bond that spans the globe.

Why send postcards to kids?

Who says snail mail is dead? It’s definitely not in our mailbox; postcards come in nearly every week, addressed to my girls.

Here are six reasons why you should enlist everyone you know to send your kids postcards.

See the world.

If you’re like 99% of families, you don’t have the money, time and opportunity to travel the globe all year ’round. But you probably know folks who travel, whether that’s internationally, nationally or just nearby. Kids can learn about different destinations—from Morocco to Minneapolis—via postcards.

Kids love mail.

Our mailbox is usually full of bills, letters trying to get us to refinance student loans and pamphlets advertising expensive skin treatments. Not. Fun. Among all that junk, postcards are a welcome, super-fun change of pace!

My kids feel so special when they get mail addressed specifically to them. They ask to reread them time and again!

Stay connected.

When your family and friends live far away or travel often, like some of ours do, it’s harder to develop a deep relationship. Sending postcards to kids increases the contact between your children and important people they might not see that often.

What’s more, it gives more “touch points” for growing that relationship. When my kids get a postcard from their Aunt Bootsie, for example, they ask about things she’s done recently. My older daughter had a ton of questions about the Parthenon after my sister recently traveled to Greece. Talk about a conversation starter!

Spark curiosity.

If your kids are like mine, they don’t get a ton of opportunities to learn about other parts of the world, other ways of life and other cultures on a daily basis. Postcards to your kids introduce easy, bite-sized introductions to new places.

For example, my kids were blown away that there’s a country in the world called Turkey. They were like, “You mean Turkey like the animal? Gobble gobble?!” That led us to open my laptop and learn a bit about the country (not the farm animal) and to discuss other countries whose names are similar to words we know, like Greece.

Sparking curiosity is one of the best ways to encourage empathy in young children. That’s why we love learning about the world through postcards.

Make the far-away familiar.

We live in a global society made stronger by multiculturalism. But not all of us live in highly diverse communities, limiting our options to make something “different,” “foreign” or “unfamiliar” into something your kids are accustomed to.

Having the world come to your mailbox, then, is a great way to “see” the world. When they got a postcard from Cambodia, we talked about different ways people worship and the different buildings where people go to pray. When they got a postcard from the UK, we talked about the real-live Queen of England. When they got a postcard from Hawaii, we talked about how they volcanoes are constantly reshaping the islands.

The next time my kids encounter something that relates to what they’ve seen on the many postcards they collect, they’ll already have a touch point to understand it. They’ve already begun to adopt that “new” thing into their view of the world.

Inspire a love of travel.

“I want to go there!” my kids say after reading nearly all the postcards they receive. Through snail mail, they discover places they’d never heard of—and can’t wait to explore.

What’s more, kids come to understand they can travel the world. After all, people who they know and love are doing just that! It makes travel seem more attainable, since they have role models who travel and examples of places they could go someday.

How to collect and store postcards for your kids

Ok, now that you’re on board with why your kids will love getting postcards from around the world, you might be wondering something else:

What do you do with all those postcards?

Here are a few ways you can collect, store and display postcards to your kids.

1. Bind them.

When you have a stack of postcards, bring it to a Kinko’s or other office supply store. Within a few minutes, they can bind the stack together into a book!

Your kids will be able to flip through the postcard book whenever they like, and it will cost you about $5.

2. Ring them.

You can DIY a postcard book, too. Simply hole punch the bottom right corner of the postcard (below where the address goes). Then use a circle ring to corral all your postcards.

This example of a postcard book is the cheapest—you can create it for mere pennies.

3. Sleeve them.

When I was a kid, my brother had binders and binders full of baseball cards, which he’d lovingly flip through. That’s what this postcard storage reminds me of, and it’s the method we use in my family.

Simply buy a binder and plastic sleeves that will fit the various sizes of postcards. (We use these postcard display sleeves – affiliate link.)

I like that it’s easy to flip through the book and that we can see multiple postcards at once. I also appreciate that you don’t lose any of the writing or pictures on the front of the card by punching holes or adding spiral binding. We can still read the entire message on the back of the postcard.

Finally, this postcard book method works the best for my family’s busy lifestyle. It takes a step out of the process, since I don’t have to DIY anything or make any trips outside my routine. I simply pop new postcards my kids receive in the sleeves as soon as we finish reading them, and we’ll get to keep them forever.

4. Hang them.

These snapshots of the world are gorgeous—so why not display postcards? All you need is a string and some mini clothespins. Hang a length of string along a curtain rod, above your mantle or anyplace you’d like to add some visual fireworks. Then pin up the postcards as you get them.

You can swap out postcards regularly, putting ones that have been in rotation a while into a binder like the above.

Postcards: A little bit of love in the mailbox

Now that receiving postcards from far-flung places is part of my family’s routine, my kids love running to the mailbox to see if anything has arrived for them. Whenever one of my relatives or friend goes out of town I remind them, “Send us a postcard!”

What’s more, collecting these treasures into a postcard book will allow us to look back on them for years to come. How special that my kids will grow up knowing their friends and family think of them from across the world!

How about you: Do your kids ever get postcards? Is this something you’d try?