Screen-free and Kid-friendly travel tips for family adventures

Traveling with children isn’t easy, but to go on mission as a family has been a huge gift! We’ve been going on the road for this mission of beauty for two years with our son. We get to see the world through his eyes, screen-free, and ready for new experiences. He’s actually been to more states than the average person has gotten to in their entire lives!

The world likes to tell us mama’s and dad’s that you can’t do much with kiddos, and it isn’t worth it to try traveling until they’re older. My life proves otherwise! Has our life changed? Does travel look different? Absolutely. But if you’re called to something, there’s always ways it’ll work out. God will bless it. He will make a way.

Grace makes it possible… and these helpful tools!

All that being said, there are definitely choices to keep in mind to make the journey easier! We started traveling with our son when he was only 3 months old. We’ve added more tools to our toolkit along the way to help with the long drives and create lasting family memories.

Ten Choices We Make for Peace + Fun

1. From one no-screen-mama to another… it’s worth it!

We are a dedicated no-screen family, whether at home or on the road. Ipads are never an option to occupy our son’s attention, so we get creative and flexible! As he has grown and developed, it takes a little more effort sometimes to be screen-free – we get to watch him light up in other ways, use his budding imagination, and figure out how things work.

I highly recommend these screen free toys to have ready to rock!

Traveler’s Tip:

Avoid giving these to your child on a daily bases at home to make them fun and special travel toys. Someone shared this a while back and it’s been super helpful so he has something to look forward to.

2. Look for Any Way to Ease Transitions

Traveling takes a lot of flexibility, patience, and openness to change. This is hard for adults, let alone developing minds and bodies! From the very beginning, we looked for what would help provide stability for our whole family. The key has been to plan our drives during his nap schedule, and provide what he needs for best sleeping!

As a nursing mama, I have been able to feed him wherever we went, whether we were on the road or at home. When I had any nursing troubles and needed to pump on the go, these pumps were a great help! Easy to wash and take with us, plus I didn’t feel like I had to hide away to pump. In fact, I often could do it in the middle of many tasks, which is key with my lifestyle.

3. Bring Lots of Nourishing Snacks

4. Make Music a Family Activity!

While we don’t do screens, we do play lots of fun music! We create special Playlists on Spotify to listen to together during the drive. As our son gets older, we still aim to do our longest stretch of driving during his nap time. Morning tends to be a good time to drive because he’s in better spirits and we can have him be excited about a park break before nap time.

5. Breaks = Opportunities for Together Time!

Make lots of fun pit stops! Using apps like playground buddy or simply searching along the way for parks and green spaces can be been a big help. My husband and I joke that we could build our own epic playground! We’ve been to so many, we know what makes a great playground!

6. Be intentional in Timing

Being flexible doesn’t mean you need to let go of structure. Most kids get more irritable as the evening comes up so aim to stop at your lodging before they hit that restless point makes for the best travel days! Plus, it gives them some time to wiggle before bedtime and get a better night sleep!

7. Try to be Faithful to Bedtime

Keeping his bedtime routine the same as home has made nights really great, even on the road. We bring our sound machine for bedtime, which has been a life saver to keep things familiar for him.

Traveler’s Tip:

Sometimes, a hotel will throw you for a loop and suddenly you’re in a room without a bathtub! Tough for a needed baby bath. We found this blowup bathtub to be an easy solution that our little guy loves!

8. Remember, Life happens – It’ll be okay!

For those outlier moments, like when your kid picks up poop at a playground (yes, it’ll happen!) be sure to have a stash of the essentials tucked in the car. Extra wipes like these gentle saline wipes, key medicines, and sanitizer is helpful to keep in stock. Depending where we’re headed, packing fun rain boots can give you peace of mind and turn a dreary day into an adventure.

To organize all these things in your car, we’ve found these seat organizers to be super great. They enable us to simply grab the items at any time, to intercept a meltdown, get the driver a snack, or hold extra water to stay hydrated.

9. Planning for Peace, Allowing for Grace

There are times we are on the road for an entire months stretch! It sounds crazy, but here we are still doing this mission in a way that makes it possible for our family! My biggest advice I’ll leave you with is give yourself plenty of cushion time. Learn to enjoy the journey and stop as needed. This makes traveling with kids way more manageable then rushing them from place to place.

10. Entrust Your Journey to Prayer

And as a family who leans on the Lord, prayer every day keeps us safe and grants us grace to manage those moments that where curve balls get thrown at us. Truthfully, it’s all a part of the beautiful journey of we come at it with open hearts to receive!

How can you weave prayer into your road trip? Maybe it’s listening to the Rosary, or Consecrating your family to the Holy Family.

I hope these 10 ideas help to encourage you to take on any adventure with your family, ready to make memories screen-free and in the grace of God!

Curious about our mission? Check out our events page to learn exactly what we do and our upcoming tour schedule to see if we’re coming near you!