We’ve been lucky enough to travel abroad with our young children. It’s not alway easy to keep them entertained during short or long flights so here are my top tips on how to survive flights with young children. All I can say is that they’ve worked for us so why not give it a go!
1) In Flight Meals
If your airline provides in flight food then I would highly recommend pre-booking a meal. This will guarantee that you get a meal on board. If you don’t pre-book then there’s no guarantee as the airlines don’t carry enough food to cater for one meal per person. Not only will your kids be happy to have food, it will keep them quiet for some time!
2) Snacks
Plenty of snacks! Make it a combo of fruit and sweets and crisps and everyone should be happy! Depending on how your kids are after sugar, it might be worth keeping the sweet stuff to a minimum. You don’t want them to be bouncing off those cabin walls! Alternatively, chocolate and sweets could potentially be used as a bribe.
3) Books
Reading books are always a good option. But activity, colouring books and sticker books are even better. Hours of fun can be had with activity books. The favourites for our two are those little A5 Peppa Pig books.
4) InFlight Magazine
We had lots of fun looking through InFlight magazine. Let your kids look through the holiday offers and let them decide on the next holiday. Let them talk through their choices – has it got a good pool? Is it a beach holiday? The girls were kept entertained choosing their next holiday.
5) Toys
Of course the favourite toy (in our case the bwnis) is packed in carry on. But also, pack a few new toys and some blind bags. For our most recent flight I was lucky enough to find some Incredibles blind bags half price in Tesco.
6) Tablets
If you have a tablet of some sort then I would highly recommend taking it on the flight. Download some activity apps to the tablets and some films/programmes and it can keep the little ones quiet long enough for you to read maybe a chapter of your book! My top apps for kids aged 3-5 are as follows:
- Sky Kids app – download some programmes from their favourite channels and some amazing games.
- CBeebies App – download their favourite programmes and let Mr Tumble keep them entertained!
- Tric a Chlic – if you’re in Wales and your child is doing Welsh language education, then let them practice with the Tric a Chlic app.
Top tip – remember to take headphones with you! Everyone doesn’t need to hear that Doc McStuffins song!
7) Travel Map
If you’re on a longhaul flight then you are likely to have a little screen at your disposal. Let them track the flight across the travel map and show them different countries of the world. Talk to them about what you would find in different continents. It doesn’t have to be anything too difficult… something as simple as “where would you find a kangaroo?” and then show them Australia on the map. (Sorry if that’s sounding very stereotypical but it’s true!)
Do you have any tips on how to survive flights with young children?
Loved this! Thank you for the tips, I will most definitely be saving some of these tips for when we go away xx
Most of these work in the car as well actually! Well except for the pre-flight meal… but lunchbox is always a good idea for car journeys. x