🧭 Travel: How to embrace traveling with children with positivity
How can we foster the next group of travel ready explorers? Read about our extensive travels with our daughter and our learnings
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Good news, the writing and suggestions that follows, are 9 years in the making. Why 9 years? That is the age of our daughter, who has been the willing travel guinea pig for all our adventurers together. She even completely moved country with us, from Ireland to Spain, aged 3.5 years. We look forward to making many more travel memories together as a family!
Pep talk – let’s foster and support family travel and exploration
If you are reading this, you either have children, are planning to or already spend time with children during travel. Maybe you nomad with families in your orbit. Maybe you enjoy precious time with nearly (supposedly) fully humans, like me when you travel. Whichever, I encourage you to read on and keep in mind these tips so that more families start to explore and more future adults, become passionate about exploration.
When it comes to travelling with children, age and stage matter
Age of the child, not you parents and guardians! Having taken a 32 hour horror trip from Indonesia with a baby, solo, whilst still breastfeeding, I cannot emphasise enough – especially for new or soon to be parents – that the age of the child does make travel more complicated.
Why? Simply, the amount of stuff you need. From baby cots, to strollers, to feeding equipment, the smaller the child usually means the more stuff to carry.
So regardless of the length of the trip, this is something worth considering. Here are the tips we have found work for practical travel with young children:
· Travel with other families – then you can share more items and there are more people to divvy up the baggage to, who can act like sherpas!
· Join or visit family or friends on your travels – we have visited Bali multiple times, as my sister is based there and has a child the same age, that means we can pack lighter and borrow things. Our childcare play together and childcare works for the their stages and ages.
· Can you rent items in destination? – more and more accommodation suppliers in locations offer the chance to use, rent, source or borrow items. So plan this up front and don’t be afraid to ask or request.
To add, I have to say that smaller children and jet lag, can be a wicked combination, so make sure to factor in that for longer haul that you and then they may need more time to recover. When a baby is “wired” and their sleep pattern disrupted for multiple days on arrival in a new time zone, what I need to emphasise is that the parents often take the brunt of that and it can cause a lot of disruption, so make sure to factor it into your timing and plans.
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Finally, travel will inevitably throw curveballs at you – it is the nature of it all, so try (and I know that can be testing with small children) to roll with it. If it helps, on my 32 hour solo disaster trip with a small baby from Bali to Europe, I remember saying to myself
“no other future trips with my child, will ever be this bad”
and guess what, 9 years later, they haven’t been!
In transit: Get creative in your preparation and involve your child
Transit can be the biggest pain point, so consider carefully, what will amuse your children? Contemplate what stage are they at and what is their favourite type of toys, activities and also be prepared to work with what you have around you, especially if there are travel delays.
Some tricks that have worked for us for transit:
TOP TIP: Surprises: this one works for all ages, but is a special treat for younger children. Fully wrap up a few small surprises with wrapping paper, like colouring items, figurines, hair clips, sweet treats etc. in simple wrapping paper for your children to open, for long-haul trips you can drip feed the “surprises” or “your little gift” and it is a life-saver.
Before we talk about activities that involve what you pack and bring with you - Try to get creative and play games with the items around you, for example: playing eye-spy, counting road signs, games with magazines on trains, counting items on a airline food tray or counting the number of total seats in carriages, cabins or vehicles of transportation. If your child is writing and reading, as them to help you re-write or plan out your itinerary for a trip. My daughter loves to reel off the transit plans, times and stages, it also helps us to keep on track!
Drawing items, notebooks, puzzle books and sticker books – have always been favourites and are easy enough to carry
A couple of zip loc bags with small figurines and play items, like rubik cubes or small lego puzzles. Remember to involve you child in the packing list for them and encourage them to make their own choices (within reason!) to build independence
Books (or some sticker books) which also have stories. More recently, my daughter has begun to read, she has also started taking magazines with her
Can you do activities together? We have started doing word-search puzzles together (see picture below taken last week!)
Preparing to beat me at a wordsearch puzzle during transit travel A simple MP3 with podcasts, music and stories has been a regular feature for our daughter, and often a lifesaver for longer journeys
For longer trips, try to save screens to later in the journey, we preload films onto a dedicated tablet device – but to start off, we encourage drawing, puzzling etc.
Learning opportunity: choosing and organising activities and then packing them, is something we involve our daughter in and now almost give her the full responsibility for. She has a selection of 3 backpacks: small, medium and large, to choose from and she has a checklist, based on the items above, to consider, arrange and pack.
Finally, almost everything you bring for transit above, can also be used in destination, when you need to amuse your child and encourage them to play themselves or be engaged in activities. Suggest pastimes with context and to complete or extend existing pursuits, like “why not finish that puzzle you started?” or “did you want to maybe draw a picture to put up here, it would make that wall look nice!” The way we encourage our children, also matters.
I am hoping this will encourage newbie parents - and those yet to travel - to get adventurous and plan the first trip with your children. Shorter trips are the best way to ease yourself into this, maybe locally or nearer to home. Let me know if the comments how your trips with children have been and please share any tips you may have with our reader community!
Until the next #DigitalNomadStory,
take care, love n light - 💚 Ro
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A note: 🙏 Thank you for your support! I will be moving to a paid model for some of my content, by the end of April 2023. Some content, will be free, forever. Some content, will be paid subscriber only. We all deserve to be paid for our work, after all!
When my parents were traveling across Europe in a van to Romania back in the 90s with me and my little brother in tow, they created a money based game. I got something like 1 fennig for every "onion" shaped church spire I could see, 2 fennigs for every 15 minutes of silence (genius). I know there were other things we had to look out for but I can't remember them now. I do remember getting paid at the end of every day! It wasn't a lot of money but it was enough to buy a treat at the youth hostel every night, so I was happy as a 6 year old.