5 Great Things about Disney with Teens

As a native Floridian, I’ve been to Walt Disney World dozens of times in my life. My family went every few years while I was growing up, and in middle and high school, I visited once or twice a year on field trips. I’ve also taken my own children a handful of times—for the day, for a weekend, and once, for a five-day, four-park let’s-see-everything extravaganza. But last fall, I realized it had been more than six years since we’d last visited—back when Lightning McQueen and Buzz Lightyear were the biggest celebrities in my children’s lives—and I wanted to get in one more Disney trip before college tours starting taking the place of theme park visits.

I wondered though, how would it be going to Disney with teens? As it turns out, it’s just as much fun as ever. As with every stage of your child’s life, you let go of some things and embrace others, and I discovered several benefits to theme park travel with teenagers on our trip. Here are a few of them.

Teens can help you plan.

If you’ve been to Walt Disney World in the past 20 years, you’re already familiar with the FastPass+ system. For those who aren’t, FastPass+ is a ride reservation system that allows you to skip the line for popular rides during a designated window of time. FastPass+ is a vast improvement over the Disney wait times of my childhood. The olden days, we’ll call them.

In the olden days, you had no choice but to stand in line for hours in the brutal Florida heat, and you had no iPhone to entertain yourself. You’d get so tired of standing that you’d try to sit on the railings, but your mother would scold you, so you’d try to sit on the ground, which led to even more scolding. Then you’d beat up your sibling just for fun, until finally, after winding through 27 zigzagging queues, you’d get onto Thunder or Space Mountains. Mothers everywhere cheered when Disney did away with this barbarity in 1999 with its implementation of the FastPass+ system.

Over the years, Disney has had various iterations of FastPass+, with the current method giving priority booking to those with Disney resort hotel reservations (60 days out) and pre-purchased park tickets (30 days out). Resort guests and tickets holders are limited to three FastPasses in advance of their day at the park, which means you need to decide what rides and experiences are priority for your group. This is where your teens come in.

You’ll need to book FastPasses online through your My Disney Experience account, so before your booking window opens, sit down and get some input from your teens about your plan for the day. For the Magic Kingdom, most teens will probably want to reserve passes for the coasters—Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which opened in 2014, and the three mountains (Space, Thunder, and Splash). But they may just surprise you. Mine opted to use one of our passes for Peter Pan, a slow, nostalgic ride that usually has more than an hour wait, because they remembered we weren’t able to ride it during our trip six years before.

Teens don’t get upset if the plan changes.

Sometimes a Disney visit can be hard on little kids. I already mentioned the Florida heat, and even with the FastPass+ system, you’ll still end up waiting for most rides. Perhaps hardest of all, little kids can get their hearts set on something, like seeing Belle in real life or giving hugs to Lilo and Stitch, and you’re locked into making that experience happen no matter how your Disney day is shaking out.

But with big kids, their emotional investment in the theme parks and their resilience in the face of vacation adversity is about perfect. Want to go on the Astro Orbiter but your mother tells you 35 minutes is too long to wait for that ride? Shrug. No biggie. Have FastPasses for priority seating at the Rivers of Light show at Animal Kingdom, but everyone wants to go back to the hotel to take a swim instead? Yep, got it. Moving right along.

If you’re traveling with a teenager, the number of fits pitched at Walt Disney World will likely be zero. And you and I both know the number of fits pitched is always—ALWAYS—at least one with a tired toddler. So, enjoy making Disney memories with your group of almost grown-ups, although I can’t guarantee you’ll escape the parks without any eye rolls.

Teens can still act like kids.

I was worried when I started to plan our trip that my children might already be past the age of Disney. Would they feel too self-conscious to enjoy the hokey fun of a 40-year-old animatronic ride like the Jungle Cruise or to walk around a park filled with costumed characters like Phineas and Ferb and Winnie the Pooh? Then I remembered my own high school years at Disney, and my worries all but disappeared.

I knew my 13-year-old would be fine, as he was open-hearted and excited about the trip from the minute I mentioned it. But what about the 15-year-old? It turns out his reaction to Disney was the same as mine at his age. When he started walking down Main Street U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom, he turned to me and said, “I just love how everything looks and how there’s so much going on and so much to see.” In other words, he loved the ambiance.

And from there, he embraced every bit of the experience, from laughing at the monotone delivery and corny jokes of the Jungle Cruise drive (“Some people think it’s water coming out of the elephants’ trunks. It’s snot.”) to relishing his Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream bar at the end of a long day. He completely threw himself into outscoring us at Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin and making a LEGO car at the LEGO Store in Disney Springs. There was not one minute of the trip that he was too cool for Disney, which proved once and for all that my instincts were correct.

Teens can have adventures of their own.

Disney is a great place for family time, but it’s also perfect for some freedom for your teens. When I was a teen, I loved being let loose in the park with my friends. We could decide where to go, what to eat, and what to do. It was a little taste of independence in a contained, relatively safe environment. With that in mind, we encouraged the kids to break off on their own for a while during our visit to EPCOT.

My husband and I grabbed some cocktails at the World Showcase and watched Rick Springfield perform at the Garden Rocks concert, while the boys tried Coca-Cola flavors from around the world at Club Cool, bought themselves some cotton candy, and wandered around Future World. They made their way across the World Showcase Lagoon by boat and caught up with us in Japan before we all headed for dinner at Chefs de France, where we reminisced about the meals we’d had on our real trip to Paris. It was a fun evening for both kids and adults.

If your family has MagicBands for your Disney visit and you have a linked credit card for your Disney resort stay, your teens can charge food, drink, and souvenirs to your room during their outing with a wave of their MagicBand. MagicBands are bracelets with radio frequency identifications chips that allow you to unlock the door of your hotel room, enter the parks with your linked tickets, get on rides with your FastPasses, and charge items at the resort. It makes venturing around the parks even more fun and easy. Just make sure to set up a pin code for your teens’ MagicBands either online through your My Disney Experience account or at the front desk of your Disney resort hotel.

Teens can stay out late.

Maybe the best part of going to Disney with teens is the ability to stay out late. With small children, you can close down the parks if you want to, but you’re risking in-park meltdowns and residual crankiness the next day. With teens, you’ll probably miss your own bedtime before they miss theirs. And although they may snarl at you when you roust them out of bed the next morning, you’ll know it’s more bluster than bite.

This was the first Disney trip that we’ve ever had a Park Hopper pass, which allowed us to visit more than one park in the same day, so we went full-throttle, hitting Magic Kingdom when it opened at 9:00 a.m. and closing down EPCOT around 11:00 p.m. Between our two park visits, we returned to our hotel, the Grand Floridian, by monorail for some downtime and a swim. The short break in the afternoon was enough to recharge our batteries (figuratively as well as literally with respect to our phones) before heading out again.

We took in the IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth show at 9:00 and then ran over to the Soarin’ and Spaceship Earth rides while the lines were short. Afterwards, I knew despite our sore feet that the trip had been a success when both kids flung their arms around my waist and grabbed my hands and told me what a fun day it had been as we ambled out of EPCOT. No matter how old your children are, those are the moments every parent is waiting for.