Traveling with Kids and Keeping Your Sanity

Family vacations are a great opportunity for parents and children to grow closer and take a break from the stress of each day life. However, traveling with children comes with a whole new list of stressors that must be taken into consideration and adequately planned for in order to have the ideal traveling experience possible. Even though traveling with children might be difficult at times, if you plan for these difficulties you will be healthy to have an enjoyable trip while keeping your sanity.

Long automobile rides are tough on children, as anyone who has endured the infinitely repeated question “Are we there yet?” knows. Many variables can be blamed for the impatience children experience on long automobile trips, and two of the most favourite ones are boredom and discomfort. Active children naturally want to move around, to be doing something, rather than to be sitting in the backseat for hours on end.

To cure the boredom of children when going on a long automobile trip, make sure that you bring a selection of games and other activities that are appropriate for the car. Card games, dice games, and some board games are great ways to keep your children entertained while traveling. With technology becoming more and more advanced, and less and less expensive, you can also bring movies and video games to keep your children occupied while you drive.

Portable DVD players and individualized game consoles will grant them to watch their favorite movies and play the newest games while you sing along to your favorite broadcasting station. However, when planning what activities to bring, make sure you set the ground rules; even though baseball or basketball might be a favorite activity among the children, it is not appropriate to play either while in the car. The activities that you wage should be entertaining, but must be safe.

Discomfort, the second of the two most common culprits responsible for endless “Are we there yet?” pleas, can also be easily fixed. First, make sure that you have packed your automobile in such a way that grants the children plenty of room to stretch out.

This might entail the buy of a luggage rack, but it will be worth it. If the children have enough room, they will not fight over who is taking up more of the seat. Also make sure that there are enough pillows and blankets to go around. One of the ideal activities a child can indulge in while on the road is sleep, and pillows and blankets are crucial to achieving the comfort level necessary for rest. When packing the automobile and getting the children situated, make sure that there are enough seatbelts to go around and that these seatbelts are easily accessible. Even though you want the children to be as comfortable as possible, country is your number one priority as a parent and you must ensure that they wear their seatbelts at all times.

When traveling with children, the three main priorities are safety, comfort, and activity. If you have a safely packed automobile with accessible seatbelts, plenty of pillows and blankets, and an abundance of movies and games, your children will be healthy to keep themselves entertained and you will be healthy to actually enjoy time with your children while on a long automobile trip.

Traveling with Children and Keeping Your Sanity

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Travelling With Kids in the Car

Pack enough snacks, sandwiches and water to last the entire trip. It is astonishing how the time flies when children are eating.

Pack a roll of toilet paper or enough wipes just in case a side of the road stop is necessary.

Bring garment bags just in case you find out if your child/ren get automobile sickness.

Pack a bag of your child’s favourite toys. Preferably not hard objects just in case they throw them (speaking from experience here).

Baby Automobile Organisesr are great so you don’t have to keep reaching behind you to get things. Like this one or this one.

Portable DVD player is essential (remembering spare batteries). Multiple units if there is more than one child or you can get the ones with multiple screens.

Portable game consoles for older children.

Selection of your child’s favourite music to sign along too. Either on the car’s audio system or an individual audio system with headphones.

Arrange the automobile trip around the child’s kip time.

Break up the automobile travel in a day. Don’t try to do a 10 hour stint with child/ren in the car.

Everyone’s favourite driving game – Eye Spy with my tiny eye, something beginning with…

Apply sun-cream to your children’s faces, arms & legs. Sunshades on the windows if you have them.

And most of all – begin the day happy and open minded because you don’t know what that automobile trip will finish up like when you have children in the car.

Travelling With Children in the Car

Traveling With Kids – Too Much Dvd?

A long automobile trip with children can be miserable so like many people, I bring along the item that grants us to arrive at our destination with our sanity intact. This, of course, is the miraculous portable DVD player. How did our parents do without such a device when we were kids? Quite well. In the era before automobile seats, we played on the large back bench of our full size Chrysler New Yorker. We had ALL of our toys with us for hours of uninterrupted play. Most of the time the question “Are we there yet?” just didn’t matter.

Now, children are encased into automobile seats so tightly that if the head moves, it means that you didn’t duct tape the bubble wrap tightly enough. Kudos to the emphasis on safety, it’s just that current innocuous practices have come at the expense of our kid’s comfort and of their enjoyment of the family trip. And we all know that when the children aren’t happy, nobody is happy. Thus our reliance on the Domestic Volatility Defuser, the ever present DVD.

While I’m strapping in the DVD player, I inevitably begin worrying about what I call DVD head: the condition caused by watching too many DVDs over a prolonged period of time. The most noticeable symptom of DVD head is the blank stare on your kid’s grappling when you first shut off the player. Interactivity with humans requires effort compared to the low-bar exigencies asked of DVD watching.

In addition, the latest brain science tells us about pathways and connections in the brain. The more we do something, the more neural pathways are created in the brain that assist in that task: practice does makes perfect. Just as violinists can physically modify their brains with repetition, so can a child repetitively watching the same DVD. When I was a child, I watched far too much television but at least I rarely saw the same thing twice, re-runs notwithstanding. Today’s child will watch the same DVD dozens, if not hundreds of times. Regardless of how benign the content might be, it doesn’t seem wise to be imprinting images of Barney to such a degree on such plastic and developing minds, not unlike the phantom images that get burned onto your personal monitor when you don’t use a screen saver.

So during your next trip, there are certain strategies you can employ to limit the use of DVDs. These do require discipline on your part, particularly if your children are accustomed to their DVD fix whenever they set foot in the car:

1 – Set a finite length of time they can watch and stick to it e.g. apiece child can pick one DVD.
2 – Set a milestone where they can begin watching e.g. pick a town on a map halfway to Grandma’s and no DVD before then.
3 – Provide alternate games/toys. There are many great travel toys out there. Small Etch-A-Sketch, Doodle Pro and attractable signpost Bingo are just a few that come to mind.
4 – Play guessing games like I Spy or Pick a number.
5 – Sing songs.

One other new piece of technology that could help is a portable, speaker based MP3 player. These devices designed specifically for children play music through a speaker, not headphones, so you don’t need to worry about your child developing hearing problems. In addition to music, you can load up the player with stories to keep your child entertained throughout the trip.

Why is an audio player superior for your child’s brain than a DVD player? Humans have been listening to music since the dawn of time. Contrast this with the fast moving images of a DVD where there is no equivalent in the “natural” world. Also, listening to stories on an audio player, from the brain’s point of view, is like being read to. Listening requires imagination, attentiveness and concentration therefore, effort. Many studies are showing that reading to young children promotes language acquisition and is linked with overall success in school.

The next time you are covering a long automobile ride with kids, place the DVD on pause and try some alternatives!

Traveling With Children – Too Much Dvd?

Important Holiday Driving Travel Tips

Wondering how to make this year’s automobile trip to Grandma’s a innocuous and happy experience?  A tiny extra time and planning can save you hassle, money, even your life.

Rest up.  Before you even get in your car, try to get a good night’s sleep, don’t stay up all night packing or baking those extra cookies.  Driver fatigue is a major cause of automobile wrecks, and filling up on coffee or energy drinks won’t take the place of being well rested.  In fact, once the alkaloid wears off, you’re at risk for a larger crash, in more ways than one!  Try not to leave right after a heavy meal, when most of us get sleepy, especially if you’ve been drinking alcoholic beverages.

Plan well.  There are many resources out there that will wage you with information on the ideal routes to take, the ideal times to refrain commuter traffic, and weather related road conditions.  Check out the Federal Highway Administration’s web site for links to information on weather and road conditions and the availability of travel web sites and 511 telephone services.  If at all possible, try to drive during daylight hours when visibility is at its best.

Check up.  Make sure your car is safe.  Check the oil, tire pressure, coolant, etc. a day or two before you travel.  Don’t leave it until the last minute when you might forget something important.  Make sure you have a good spare tire, jumper cables and an emergency kit.  If you’re traveling in cold weather, a blanket or two in the trunk could be a lifesaver.

Bring activities.  If traveling with children (or adults who act like them) bring along plenty of activities to occupy their time.  You might want to stick with quieter games and books; do you really want to listen to that Gameboy chirping at you for 8 hours?  But remember, this is a great time for family interaction, don’t just set them up with a motion picture and ignore them the whole trip.

Wear your seat belt.  (Do we really have to go over this?)

Take breaks!!  It’s suggested you take a break each 2 hours or 100 miles.  This is particularly essential when traveling with children or pets.  It’s also a good time to switch off drivers to further refrain fatigue.  Stop for food instead of grabbing drive-through and intake on the go.  Eating while driving is just as huge a distraction as phoning, texting, or arguing with the back seat.

Don’t text.  Let a passenger answer your cell phone or move to return calls and texts when you are at a rest stop.  Many says have outlawed phoning and texting while driving, so it isn’t just unsafe, it’s illegal.  Drivers who use cell phones are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.

It doesn’t take much to prepare for a holiday driving trip.  If you follow these simple steps you’ll find your drive will go much smoother.  Envision arriving at Grandma’s with a smile on your grappling because of a smooth, safe, fun experience instead of a frown of frustration, or worse, not arriving at all.

Important Holiday Driving Travel Tips

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