What to Pack When Traveling w/ Young Kids (0-5 yrs)

Every other month since my two little ones were born, we've tackled six-hour road trips and squeezed in a few fights for good measure. But it wasn't always smooth. Before I learned the power of packing right, it was screaming and squirming and me questioning why I even decided to do this in the first place. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly what to pack and what to skip for what we all want, stress-free travel with little ones. So we're going to tackle food first because a hungry kid is an angry kid. Now, the key is you want to pack a big variety of a lot of different like snacky foods. You want eating to take as long as possible. That's why snacky foods are great because it just takes forever to eat and they can kind of graze at it. So you can keep offering the lunchbox up like multiple times throughout the trip. When I say snacky foods, I don't mean candies or like treats. I do mean like a healthy variety of nutritious food that they can snack on with maybe a few treats sprinkled in there because like if you just give them a candy box then don't do that. Now, most of your prep and packing time is going to go to planning out your entertainment and activity options. Things to just keep your kid entertained. Now, the first thing you're always going to want to have with you is a pair of headphones. Now, these are kid-friendly headphones meaning that they have volume limited settings. So they only goes above I think like 85 decibels. So it's better for their little ears. They can't just like jack up the volume and you don't have to worry about their precious little ears and being too loud. One, I will put on like Spotify playlist on my phone and he can listen to his music. Another option is if you're on a flight, you can watch a show on their built-in entertainment options. This is a fun little device called the Yodoplayer. Kid activated stories and songs and music and activities and get all these little cards and your child or you just puts a card in to the player and it'll start playing and then you can play it out loud as it has a speaker or you can plug in your headphones because there's a headphone jack and then they can listen to it. A toddler would be a little young for it but for a preschooler, our little one loves it because he can kind of control the music. Like he can control the volume. He can switch to the next track. He can choose. It just gives him that kind of like autonomy. He just feels very powerful. So my next category is travel-friendly toys. Now, for these, I'm thinking more like fidget toys. Things that don't have multiple parts that are self-contained. This is a little fidget cube which is great for I would say babies and younger toddlers. You just kind of press buttons and fidget. It keeps them entertained for shocking at least long periods of time. The same with bubble poppers. These are so cheap and I don't want to say hours of entertainment but definitely solid 10, 20, 30 minutes of entertainment that just simple bubble poppers will provide. You can get a whole variety of them. I like this one because it's got like the alphabet so my preschooler will like count down all the alphabets and numbers but babies, toddlers, preschoolers, everybody loves these little fidget poppers. Another thing is like busy boards. So there's a whole variety of busy boards that you can get. Now, the one thing I would say is be aware of what are the activities contained in busy boards because like most of the you'll find on like Amazon are I feel like geared more toward the older toddler sort of like beginner preschooler like two three-year-olds because there's quite a lot of um like buttons and straps and velcro and things that would be really difficult for a younger toddler to kind of do and then they just get frustrated and then you get frustrated because they're frustrated and no one wants that. This is one that I like actually for younger toddlers. There's kind of just like little finger puppets and those come off and they just like fly around and they're pretty fun. So that's all I would say about busy boards. It's kind of like that it's age appropriate. Now, my biggest category is kind of our mess-free activities section and there's a lot of different options. Now, when I mean mess-free activities, I mean things that are not coloring or drawing because if you're on a plane they might accidentally start coloring on like a tray table or the side of the plane you know markers even crayons are just really messy. You don't want to be bringing those sort of things with you but if your kid likes to color an option that you could bring instead are one LCD tablets. Now, there is a whole variety of tablets. These are just cheap ones that you can get on Amazon. The pen is attached and they can draw and color on it and then just erase it with that button here. This is fantastic and I would say this is appropriate for toddlers and preschoolers. They'll get a lot of use out of that. Another option are water wows. So this is I mean there might be other products like this but this is the ones that I've found. They're magic drawing pads that things appear with water so it's no mess and they're reusable which is really nice because it means this will last you a few more trips although they kind of get pretty mangled. I just feel like the product could be slightly better but we do get a lot of use out of these. Now the best option is stickers. I love stickers stickers stickers because you can remove stickers if they accidentally make their way onto other surfaces that are not the sticker books and they also take like a really long time and there's just endless types of stickers and sticker books that you can get. Now a few options I like are the reusable sticker books. So we've got a lot of them. So these ones you have to put in very specific spots to make animals but also like you can do your own thing. I mean they're a preschooler they're gonna do their own thing regardless. Then there's like open scene ones where you can kind of just have like an open scene and then they can put all their stickers anything that they want there. There's another open scene one so they can kind of just put the stickers wherever. These ones are a little bit more creative. There's no need for sort of guidance. I would say these ones are suited more for like your younger toddler whereas like the ones where you want to put in specific spots those would be more suited for like a preschooler. Another one is like the sticker wows. They're basically like a sticker stamp. Now the downside is that like he plowed through this book in like I don't know 10-15 minutes. Maybe it was a little longer than that. It's not really reusable so once you've kind of stamped through the booklet the booklet's done. But they're a totally different style of play so I do recommend you get one of each. Now with your older kids so like your preschoolers there's like story sticker books that are a little bit more like you get a little bit of both. You get a story so you can read to them as well as they can put stickers on. So they last a little bit longer. We've gone through many different ones of these like story sticker books. So this one's another fun one that we have. It's like a quiz it book set. They're little quiz pads and you can ask your kid questions and then they the pen and they just kind of select the right one or wrong one. Now if you're gonna sit with your kid which you probably are like if you're in the back seat like me or if you're on a plane this is great because you're gonna be beside them so you could help them. But this is definitely a parent guided one. You have to be able to ask them the questions. But it has kept our preschooler entertained for a very long time. We've gone through all these quiz books and he loves it. Of course you can't forget books. Now depending on if you are flying or road tripping will kind of that'll kind of determine how many or what type of book you'll want to bring. Now for babies obviously you're not going to have a lot of options. You're going to want to bring those thick board books but I usually bring like two and that's sufficient. We can go through these books multiple times. He doesn't care. He doesn't really notice. For your older kids you're gonna want to bring encyclopedia books. I don't know another term for it but books that are really long. There's a lot of like other stories or various um they take a long time to go through versus like the shorter stories that don't take as long. To older kids you can get to the thinner paperback books that are not the board books. And I would say that like don't be afraid to pack a lot of activities. Sometimes as a parent it feels like you're packing so much stuff. You're like why do I need all of this stuff? Activities for kids for the drives or the flights are non-negotiable. I've just learned that they are non-negotiable. You have to bring them. You have to make space for them. Like they can wear the same shirt. Who cares? It'll look it'll be stained regardless. It just makes the journey so much more enjoyable when there are things to do. When I've actually planned and thought of the journey and not just the destination. Now a couple little like key hacks that you can do on road trips and flights are of course have new items. New sticker books, new toys, etc. Especially if you're going for a really long one. It's just that much more exciting when you have a new object with you. And for younger toddlers and I I will put asterisks here babies and younger toddlers. You could wrap the item and that's just like one extra layer of time consuming activities. I wouldn't recommend this at all for your three-year-olds plus because it's going to be like a lot of effort for like not even a minute worth of time savings. So don't bother. And of course there is always your tablets and your phones where you can pre-download all of your shows that you want to watch. Always pre-download even if you are going to have a connection or if you can use cell service. It's always choppy. Every road trip I've ever been on you never really have full service the whole time. And obviously when you're flying you're not going to have cell service most of the time. So my key here is I always save the tablets watching the show watching till the end. So it's like one of the last things that I pull out. I will pull out all the activities. I will do those with him and then I will bring out the tablets for the shows because sometimes I don't even need it. Like we've been on six seven hour drives and I've never had to pull out a show or use a tablet or phone because we've just had enough activities to keep ourselves entertained for that whole period of time. It is a bit different though when you have two kids because now that we have my youngest who is a baby still we during his naps when I need my preschooler who's right beside me to be quiet I will give him the tablet to so he can watch his shows while I put my little one to sleep or while he's sleeping so he doesn't get waking up or woken up by his brother. You do whatever screen time that you want to do if you just need to get through this flight then just get through the flight. They'll probably survive if they've watched five hours of shows one time. And my last little caveat here is that it is okay to be bored and to let your kids be bored. They are allowed to just sit there and not do anything. It is very developmentally beneficial for them to experience boredom. It actually spurs on more creativity. It allows them to look outside and actually enjoy the journey and the experience of the road trip or flying itself. I mean there's probably only so much you could look out a plane window but I didn't have any entertainment options when I was a kid on all my family road trips and vacations. All I would do is stare at a window and bug my siblings which is probably why we only did one vacation a year as a family. And also when they're bored and just staring out of the windows they start to ask you questions like what's that? It's a cloud. And now this last little section I like to call the parent essentials because you as a parent also matter. Your sanity, your comfort. These are things that are important for you. Hand sanitizer, wipes. I always bring lots of wipes. You got baby wipes, you got hand and face wipes, you got cleaning wipes so you can bring. Kids are messy. Now for our car I like to just have a bag of garbage bags in our car so because there's always garbage for then I could just like take one out because I always seem to forget a garbage bag. It's also just good for general parent car life. And then for my flights I'll always bring a few extra bags that I can put soiled items into like vomit or poop or gross food. Kids are messy. Again kids are messy. Then I always like to carry a little mini first aid which basically just consists of Tylenols, a thermometer, and some band-aids. Oh and polysporin. Your cuts, scrapes, fevers, just the more immediate things. Anything else you can deal with later but that's just kind of like my kid first aid kit. Now if you have a toilet trained child you could bring a portable potty because if your kid likes to sit on the potty for a long period of time then a portable potty seat is a very nice thing to have or if you just kind of transition into the potty training realm. And last my little secret item is earplugs for you, the parent. These are the ones I have. They're kind of like bougie expensive ones. You don't need to go bougie and expensive just dollar store earplugs would probably be fine but I use earplugs a lot because I just have problems with my ears. It's more of a me thing. Now the nice thing about these ones and why they're so bougie and expensive is because I could still hear things through them so they're not like a full sound noise canceling earplug. I get just very overwhelmed when they're when I'm like stuck in the back seat between two children and there's crying and screaming and meltdowns and they're right here and it is just very loud and it's just too much to just quiet the noise so I can just be a calm parent and I can deal with the situation at hand and not feel so frazzled because of the screaming children. So that's what my earplugs look like. That's my little parent hack for you. Keep your sanity and your hearing. Now I've left links to all of these products down below in the description so you can shop them and if you do purchase any of those items you are supporting my channel at no additional cost to you so thank you for that. Now packing essentials are just the start. If you really want to ace flying with your toddler and of course skip all the mistakes that I made, I've got a whole video dedicated to just that. Full of hacks, tips, strategies, the whole shebang. Go give it a watch. Future you will thank you.