![]() I’ve found it imperative to have a tablet of some sort while traveling with ages 3-5. I just loved watching my son's eyes light up as he gleefully pointed out everything new he discovered. We passed through places like Little India, KL Bird Park, and the breathtaking Jamek Mosque. I’m also a stickler for consistency and directly across the street from our hotel was a restaurant called Banana Leaf Curry House, where we shared big plates of curry with potatoes and sautéed cabbage, always washed down with mango lassis.Īnother highlight? When we rode the Hop-On, Hop-Off bus stop, a double-decker bus that allowed my son to see almost every inch of the city without actually having to do anything. He was so excited to look at all of the colors, and people at Central Market liked to offer him free treats. We stayed right in the middle of it all: walking distance to the Central Market, the beautifully colorful Sri Mahamariamman Temple, and the huge outdoor shopping market Petaling Street. However, one of the most memorable trips we have taken together was to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, just before he turned 3. As a family, we prioritize cultural connectivity-our son had been to Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Egypt before he could walk or talk. I have traveled a lot as a duo with my son, who was born in Poland and has spent the first four years of his life traveling at mine and my husband’s side. ![]() The Slumber Pod can keep a new hotel room or Airbnb dark, comfortable, and hopefully a little quieter.īuy now: The Slumber Pod, $170, īut blending education and fun in an easy to navigate way doesn’t have to be limited to domestic trips for the 3 - 5 age group, either. But nothing is more important than making sure a child that young can sleep. So don’t stress that they aren’t getting to that cool thing you want to show them.” The gearĪs I learned on my son’s first flight when he was 6 months old, even when they aren’t doing much, kids need a lot of stuff. As one parent put it to me: “Kids can get interested in just running up and down a ramp. That sort of adaptability is the most important asset for parents making their first trips with infants and toddlers. Road trips were a popular choice, and they do have a lot going for them: You can run entirely on your own schedule (or, more likely, your toddler’s schedule), you’re sure to have room for everything you want to pack, and they allow for easy tangents. ![]() Several parents I talked to, though, found slightly less ambitious trips were the most successful with kids this age. On our last trip to Maui we stopped in Los Angeles for a night to break up the trip so it wasn't too hard on the kids.” Hannah Cote of Legacy Travel, a travel specialist with a focus on Hawaii, has a good tip that may seem counterintuitive if you want to take a longer trip: “I try to recommend a stop over if parents aren’t sure how their child will react to being on a plane for that long. ![]() Lots of prospective parents might write off further flung travel (“Now you’re taking trips, not going on vacations,” says Stephens), but they need not. It’s an endurance game which, like parenthood itself, requires symphonic pacing-the highs, the lows, the fasts, the slows-and an against-all-odds sense of ambition, improvisation, and patience in order to push through the tough stuff. The secret to successful family travel is, truthfully, all of the above. Did we pack their heads, hearts, and palates with enough color, texture, spice, humanity, compassion, self-reliance, and grit before sending them off into the world? Did we outfox urban ennui by dragging them to see that temple, that waterfall, or even that roadside dinosaur? Or did we default to the path of least resistance, surrendering to our fears of disrupted sleep schedules or arched-back refusal to be strapped into the stroller mutiny in the middle of the Papal Apartments and settle for the all-inclusive beach resort with human-sized cartoon characters? So when we cut to browsing the aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond to pick out XL twin sheet sets for the kid’s college dorm and we find ourselves asking: How did we get here? Or more importantly, where did those 18 summers go? We’ll want to have a good answer.
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