How do you Prepare Kids for a Traveling Lifestyle?

On one hand kids are amazingly resilient. We can throw traumatic events at them and they can keep living on.

On the other hand we have no idea the mental baggage we’re creating for our kids as they grow up.

A lot of it depends on the child. We can look at extremes like a gregarious extrovert that is taking to strangers and making friends with them at age 6, or the other side of the spectrum a child with Autism who needs routines such as what time in the day we’re brushing teeth and if that routine is off by a mere minute all hell could break loose. (Not all kids with Autism are this way, but the truth is, that some are).

However, for the majority of us, our children land somewhere in between. Kids who have their favorite toys, favorite foods, or favorite ways to be tucked into bed. We as parents also develop routines that are flexible but for the most part the house runs smoother if we follow the routine.

What happens to all that when you travel as a family?

Do routines get tweaked? Or trashed?

Do kids acquire a ton of mental baggage?

I’m no expert on this matter, in fact very few parents are experts on any aspect of raising kids. But I am married to an incredibly smart woman who intuitively knew how to prepare our kids and instill a desire for travel in them. I’d like to share with you what I observed her doing and hopefully it can help you as you prepare for a traveling lifestyle.

Setting the Stage

Outside of owning a house (or the debt on a house) we were technically location independent for years before we adopted a traveling lifestyle. However, even though we were almost location independent, we had lived in the same house since our firstborn was a year old. By the time we decided to leave that house for a traveling lifestyle we had lived in one place for over 6 years.

At that time our kids were 7, 6, 3 and 1.

One of our kids (still) struggles with separation anxiety. He has an overwhelming sense of fear when apart from my wife or I. This extends to nervousness in situations where he believes we ‘might’ be separated.

Another one of our kids has an impulse control disorder. This just means that if she feels like doing something she does it with no ability to hold back. Almost like having tourettes of the hands and feet.

Oh and we had all four wearing diapers at night/rest time and two wearing diapers all day.

I’m not looking for your pity, I’m just trying to explain that we didn’t have everything together. We’re a normal family with normal kid struggles.

Preparing the Kids for Flying

My Wife is a Genius.

At least a year before we left, maybe even more, she started to talk with the kids at their level about what we were planning to do. It started off with a single short domestic flight. Their first ever. We used it as a testing ground for the kids on airplanes, the theories we had read about and how our kids took to it.

My wife spent hours explaining to kids how airplanes work, they even studied lift and drag in homeschool. They watched YouTube videos about flying and she set up a mock airplane in our house.

Many meals were spent discussing what it was like to fly on an airplane, about the food, snacks, rules, behaviors.

And we addressed the fears, we talked about how many airplanes are in the sky at one time. Videos like this, and this helped. We then had fun blowing their minds! After understanding what a yellow dot represents over the US we showed them something like this pay particular attention to the traffic between the US and Europe how it flows all in one direction first and then in the other direction later.

Showing them how many planes were in the air at the same time, how many people were flying and how this is normal helped them overcome any fears of “falling out of the sky.”

She also got them excited.

Really Excited!

She talked about taxiing and when a flight is cleared for take off how we get pushed back into our seats. She talked about flight attendants, their job and what life is like for them. She talked about ear pressure and pain, popping ears and chewing gum (or lollipops which we found better for the kiddos, the sucking seems to help better than chewing).

She also talked about security screening. What to expect and what they’re looking for etc. We prepped them for full inspections with wands and the full body scans. We explained how they need to be obedient and polite. And we practiced the security screening. To the point that the kids set up their own airport, airplane and check-in using chairs and totes and boxes. All this on their own time playing with their own toys.

After that initial (direct) flight from Michigan to Las Vegas, my wife started preparing them for airport transfers and running from one gate to another, we talked about how huge airports can be and how we’ll have some free time in some airports to explore, but in other airports we’ll need to run.

Other flying topics to talk with your kids about:

• Reasons for both checked and carried on luggage
• Functions and practices of the ground crew
• Air Traffic Control (toured an air traffic control tower)
• Taxis and busses and other forms of transportation to/from the airport
• Motion sickness

Preparing Kids for New Places

As mentioned before kids can be resilient, however, when it comes to sleeping in new beds there is a natural sense of fear of the unknown.

Whether my wife knew and was purposeful or just intuited how to prepare the kids for this I’m not sure. Either way, we gave them some local hotel experiences, and then a trial trip to an airbnb house in Utah. We had great fortune in this first Airbnb which just set the kids up for excitement over the next apartment/house/airbnb location.

We showed them pictures of places we were staying before we left. Each leg of the journey we only knew where we were staying at the next place, so there was a constant thread of “What’s next?”. This helped when we were in places the kids didn’t appreciate and also made leaving places they enjoyed easier by looking forward to future experiences.

Give them something to look forward to!