Save Your Sanity: Holiday Travel with Preschoolers

This guest post is by Tara E. Nusz , D.Ed., a school psychologist who blogs at Do These Kids Make Me Look Crazy?

I decided to do some research during my Thanksgiving holiday.  Well, “research” may be too strong a word.

I tried to pretend that I wasn’t a mother wrangling two kids under the age of six through three airports on a quest to make it halfway across the country on the busiest flying day of the year.  Instead, I visualized myself as an investigative reporter who is doing a self-reflective piece on how a young, beautiful, highly-intelligent mother can make such a task look effortless.

I thought about carrying a Starbucks cup to make myself look extra casual and relaxed, but I decided that would be overkill.  Plus, I needed to push our stroller with the bum wheel, which takes two hands.  I’m pretty sure asking my three-year-old to hold a steaming cup of chai tea would make me look like a bad mother in the eyes of my fellow passengers.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but by the time I dragged my frazzled, sweaty, snack-stained carcass into my husband’s waiting car four days later, I ordered him to drive me immediately to the nearest insane asylum.

You’re probably thinking that I was so fatigued because I was poorly planned for our trip.  Maybe I spent a little too much time pretending to be a glamorous investigative reporter and not enough time examining the reality of one adult, two kids, 1700 things to pack, and the hazards of bad weather, airport security, flight delays, and the inordinate cost of airport bribes, I mean, snacks.

That may very well be true, but you’re in luck.  You get to benefit from all of my top-notch investigative reporting. Here’s what I learned.

Bring snacks

Lots of them.  Not just regular, run-of-the mill snacks that you  might have lying around the house on a typical day.  No, bring out the big guns.  The stuff that the young’uns always pester you about in the grocery store but you won’t buy because they were terribly behaved in the produce section.

Pop-tarts anyone?  Yogurt covered pretzels?  Expensive cheese sticks that you bought without a coupon?  Bring it.  But don’t tell them what you brought.  Keep the suspense alive, and just allude to the awesomeness of the snack.  Make statements like, “Sit down and buckle your seat belt.  As soon as the plane takes off, I’m going to give you a snack that has sprinkles on it!”

Of course space is limited.  But if you have to chose between an extra pair of big boy underwear and those fruit snacks that squirt a little bit of juice in your mouth when you bite them, toss the young’un in a pull-up and leave the undies behind.  If he wets the pull-up, you can always have him go commando.  It’s not creepy when a preschooler does it.

Tip: Pack snacks that don’t melt or smear excessively.  Do they pass the “brush off” test?  Can you brush the remnants off your clothes, or will they smear and leave streaks?  Goldfish = pass;  M&Ms = fail.  Skittles can go either way, depending on whether your young’un is a drooler.

Fact:  There is no empirical evidence to suggest that sugar causes hyperactivity in children.  I learned this in my doctoral program in school psychology, and if you research it, you’ll find that I’m right.  Caffeine will make them hyperactive, however, so consider limiting snacks containing chocolate.  Sugar will make them fat, of course, but so will the 2 pounds of mashed potatoes drizzled with butter that they will eat for Christmas dinner.

Pack a stroller

Any stroller.  Your young’un can walk?  Fantastic.  But if you bring a stroller, you automatically get to go through the “family” line at the security checkpoint.  This line is about 1/20 the length of the regular line.   I told the security guard that I’m prepared to shove my son in a stroller until he’s fifteen if it means I can keep going through that line.  She told me I am very wise.  And because she had a badge, I believed her.

Tip: Pack your young’un in the stroller for the purpose of getting through airport security, but then insist that he get out and burn off some energy before boarding the plane.  The stroller can then be used to carry around all the snacks.

Keep the young’uns informed

Prior to your trip, spend a little time each day describing the expectations of the trip.  Tell them the schedule.  “We’re going to get up really early on Wednesday, eat a waffle in the car, and drive to the airport.  Your job will be to carrying the backpack with the coloring books.  We’re going to go on two airplanes before we get to Grandma’s.  We will be on one plane for just a little while, and one plane for a long time.  You have to stay with me all the time, because we’re a team.”

Warning: Apparently young’uns get really mad when they find out that a horribly long plane ride does not conclude with arrival at the destination as promised.

Bring activities for the plane ride

This seems really obvious, right?  Well, it was absolute torture for me to watch a young’un who was about five years old get scolded 146 times by his mother during a two and a half hour plane ride because he was fidgeting in his seat and asking for snacks.  Um, he’s five.  You have a book.  You brought something for yourself, why did you not pack something for him?

But because I brought enough snacks to feed all of the passengers on the entire plane if we were to crash on an island, Lost-style, we were able to pass him a couple of Oreos (Note:  Oreos don’t really pass the “brush off” test, but they’re really good so it might be worth it.  Plus, his stained clothes were his unprepared mother’s problem, not mine).

Tip#1: Bring low-tech activities as well as electronic toys.  Remaining dependent on a DVD player or a hand-held video game can haunt you later if they banish all electronics and then you sit on the runway for 45 minutes while they de-ice the plane for the third time.

Mini-tip: Consider packing some extra batteries, first checking that this doesn’t violate any airport security rules.

Tip #2: Stay engaged with your children.  Play a mean game of Go Fish.  Color together.  Play “I Spy”.  Plan out what you’re going to do when you arrive at your destination.  Sure, maybe they’ll veg out in front of the portable DVD player.  But if you notice they are getting naughty or over-active, head it off at the pass by engaging them in a parent-directed activity.  Sometimes the word “naughty” is synonymous with “needs attention”.

Tip #3: Space out and rotate self-directed activities with activities that require parent direction.  For example, you may let them play with the Itouch for a while independently.  But consider playing Hang-Man with them for 15 minutes prior to letting them pop in a movie.

If you bring out all the super-fun activities at once, what are you going to do when you are only half-way to your destination and they have dropped all the crayons, accidentally deleted all the games off your Itouch, and resorted to entertaining themselves by kicking the seat in from of them 4,000 times?   Oh, wait.  Refer back to #1, which is only effective if they don’t get so full they vomit.

Prioritize going to the bathroom on layovers.

One adult and two kids in an airplane bathroom.  Do I really need to say more?  I’m sure the passengers seated directly outside of the bathroom suspected that I was giving the young’uns a beating, what with all the bumping, banging, and muffled curse words.

Warning: Avoid snacks that are extremely salty, as they may induce the desire for a beverage.  More beverages = more pee. More pee = more time in the airplane bathroom.  The more time you spend with your flailing young’uns in the airplane bathroom = less time for that honeymooning couple to attempt to join the Mile-High Club.

Never underestimate the power of a rousing sing-along.

I’m kidding.  A sing-along would be akin to suicide.  Do you really want your young’uns to see you bludgeoned with a Sky Mall magazine? With that image in mind, you may also want to avoid bringing DVD’s of Dora the Explorer (“We did it, we did it, we did it, did it, did it!”).  No one wants to have their mid-flight nap interrupted by Dora and that crazy fox Swiper.

I’d like to conclude this article by apologizing to all of you who now have the Dora Explorer theme song running through your head.   At least it’s not the theme song from Yo Gabba Gabba.  If you think it would make you feel better, I can give you some dried fruit and switch on your overhead light.

Tara E. Nusz , D.Ed., is a school psychologist who works in a public school outside of Charlotte, NC. She also blogs at Do These Kids Make Me Look Crazy?. Although Tara has to be very serious-minded at work, her blog completely disregards this in favor of “finding the funny” in her roles as mother, wife, and friend.