The journey to your holiday is part of the experience
I remember being on holiday at Arba Resort on the island of Rab when a mum asked me whether it was even possible to travel with a one-year-old child from Istria to Rab, and how she should go about it.
Her question reminded me just how differently we can view travelling with children. For some, it is something to postpone until the child is older. For others, it becomes part of family life from the very beginning.
The journey itself can become part of the family experience
We have travelled with our children since they were born, so I’d like to share, both as a mum and as a professional, what can genuinely help make the journey easier.
A long car journey doesn’t have to be several hours that you simply need to “get through” before reaching your destination. With realistic expectations, enough breaks and a little preparation, the journey itself can become part of the family experience.
And the more we travel, the more children get used to it, which tends to make things easier over time.
Understanding your child is half the battle
When we think about a long drive, it helps to first consider what it actually asks of a child. Once we understand that, we tend to feel much less frustrated and much more understanding. For several hours, a child is physically restricted to a very small space and strapped into a seat. They cannot get up when they want to, run around or follow their natural impulse to move.
For a child with a strong need for movement in particular, this requires a great deal of self-control and emotional regulation. What looks to an adult like “just sitting in the car” can actually demand a lot from a young child. They have to wait, delay their needs, tolerate boredom and discomfort, control impulses and accept that they cannot do what they want at that particular moment.
And they have to do all of this with a brain in which self-regulation and self-control are still developing. Young children also do not yet understand time the same way adults do, which makes it difficult for them to stay focused on a distant goal for hours.
This is not only something we notice in everyday life. Experts from Harvard’s Centre on the Developing Child explain that self-control develops gradually over many years through experience; children are not simply born with it. Research into how children experience car journeys also suggests that a car is not merely a means of transport for them, but a space controlled by adults in which they have to adapt and find their own ways to pass the time.
Once we understand this, we can also look differently at some of the behaviours that appear during a journey. When a child asks, “Are we there yet?”, it usually does not mean, “I would like to know exactly what time we are arriving.”
For a young child, “another two hours” does not mean very much because they do not yet have the same sense of time as we do. “Are we there yet?” is more likely to mean: “I’m finding it hard to sit here now.” “I’m bored.” “I need a change.” “I need some help to keep going a little longer.”
When we see the behaviour in this way, it becomes much easier to respond to what the child actually needs.
Realistic expectations can change the whole journey
We cannot expect a child to behave like an adult, nor can we expect the same thing from a two-year-old, a five-year-old and a ten-year-old.
Young children
The younger the child, the less we can expect them to understand how long the journey will take or to entertain themselves for long periods. Simple activities can help: songs, conversation, looking out of the window and changing activities from time to time.
But a child does not need constant stimulation. I remember my three-year-old daughter once spending an hour and a half in the car playing with just three little fabric mice, precisely because we did not give her a screen. When there is no highly stimulating “dopamine hit” available, children often start finding their own ways to play. Once we introduce a screen, the next journey can suddenly feel “too boring” without one because the child is actually waiting for the screen. When we do not offer it automatically, we return to journeys where children talk, look out of the window, sleep, spend time in their own world and create something from boredom and imagination.
A five-hour drive can sometimes pass with just one stop and no major issues, although of course every child is different. This applies to children of all ages.
Preschool children
Preschoolers can usually take part in simple games for longer. You can look for red cars, lorries or animals, guess what you can see, tell stories or listen to audio stories. Instead of saying something abstract such as “three more hours”, break the journey down into parts they can understand.
For example: first we drive to the place where we are going to stop, then we have something to eat, and after that we continue towards the sea.
School-age children
Older children can be much more involved in the journey itself. They can follow the route on a map or GPS, find the next place to stop, look out for road signs and town names, calculate how many kilometres are left, estimate the remaining travel time or find out more about the place you are visiting.
That way, they are no longer simply passengers who need to be entertained. They become active participants in the journey.
A break is about much more than stretching your legs
If a child has been sitting for a long time, what they usually need during a break is not more sitting, but movement. Let them run, jump, climb, stretch or do a few laps around the place where you have stopped. Movement is not simply about using up energy. It can also help children regulate themselves again and enjoy the next part of the journey more. Research has linked physical activity with better self-regulation in children. But regulation is not only about movement.
A break is also a chance to reconnect, and that part is easy to forget. Stop for a few minutes, hug your child, sit together, look at them and have something to eat without rushing. A child who has already used up a great deal of emotional capacity can benefit enormously from a few minutes of closeness before the next part of the journey. A good break is therefore not wasted time. It can make the next part of the drive more pleasant for the whole family.
We don’t need to entertain children every minute
One of the traps of a long journey is the idea that we need to prepare so many activities that our child will not feel bored for even a minute.
We don’t. You can prepare a few simple activities:
- “I spy…” – one person says, “I spy something red”, while the others try to guess what it is
- looking for cars of a particular colour or using a travel bingo card with pictures such as a tractor, bridge or cow for the child to tick off
- guessing an animal, object or place that someone is thinking of
- creating a story together, one sentence at a time
- songs and singing together, audio stories and audiobooks
- observing the landscape: what season is it, where are the mountains and where are the plains, where does the land end and the sea begin?
- following the route on a map and talking about where you are going.
But between all those activities, there can also be something that children increasingly seem to lack today: time when nothing in particular is happening.
What about screens?
Screens do not need to be banned on a journey, nor do we need to demonise them. They can simply be one of the tools that make a long drive easier, especially when you feel that your own energy is running low. But there is a big difference between screens being one part of the journey and offering them as soon as the child gets into the car.
If a child starts the journey with highly stimulating content, it can be harder for them later to switch to looking out of the window, talking or playing a simple game. That is why it can help not to begin the journey with a screen. Use the beginning of the trip for conversation, music, games or looking out of the window, and save the screen for later, when your child has less capacity and genuinely needs a little extra help.
The aim is not to travel completely screen-free. We simply do not want the screen to become the only way a child can cope with being in the car, because they can quickly get used to that and miss out on many other experiences along the way.
When your child has had enough: regulate first, entertain second
If, after several hours, your child starts crying, arguing or can no longer engage in any of the games you suggest, it is easy to start offering even more entertainment. Another toy. Another game. Snacks. A cartoon. But that can be a sign that they do not need more entertainment at all. They may need regulation and connection with us.
Start with the basics. Are they hungry, thirsty, tired, too hot, feeling sick or in need of the toilet? Have they simply had enough of sitting still and need some connection with you? Sometimes the best response is to stop the car, get out, move the body, breathe in some fresh air, have something to eat and reconnect.
What children learn, and why boredom is not a problem
A journey is not simply the time between home and the destination. It is a small life experience in which a child, in developmentally appropriate doses, practises waiting, learns to tolerate boredom and discomfort, and develops flexibility when things do not go according to plan.
With a safe and emotionally available parent beside them, they gain an important experience:
Something can feel uncomfortable, unpredictable or boring, and I can still cope with it. That is why we do not need to aim for a journey in which everything is perfectly organised. With the support of a secure parent, a child learns to adapt, developing resilience, self-control and the ability to deal with change. Travelling does not need to become a project centred around constantly entertaining your child.
When you relax, your child will feel that too. So when we hear “I’m bored”, we do not necessarily need to treat it as a task requiring us to come up with something new. We do not have to reach for a toy, snack or screen every time. We can simply say: “Yes, we’ve been driving for a long time. You’re bored. I wonder what your imagination will come up with now.”
And then simply stay with the child in that boredom without trying to change it. This ability develops through experience, and experts point out that periods of boredom can be beneficial for children because they encourage imagination, independent play and creativity.
Boredom can lead to a conversation, an invented game or a question the child has never asked before. Along the way, children also notice the world around them: how the landscape changes, which towns lie between home and the sea, or what different road signs mean. We do not need to remove every moment of discomfort for a journey to be a positive experience. We need to help our children move through it.
In the end, the journey is already part of the holiday
Perhaps the most important change in perspective is this: a family holiday does not have to begin only when we park outside the hotel.
The whole journey can be shared time and a shared experience. With realistic expectations, we do not need a perfectly calm child or a perfectly organised trip. It is enough to leave plenty of time for the journey, adapt our expectations to the child’s age, stop from time to time, let the body move and remain emotionally available when our child’s capacity starts to run low. And most importantly, do not expect perfection.
There may be tears, frustration and difficult moments, because that is part of parenting. When that happens, instead of immediately trying to fix everything, take a breath first. Deep breathing is something I often use myself to help me respond more calmly. And I remind myself: “This is a normal part of the journey. Things will settle down again soon, and everything will be fine.”
When you adjust your expectations, everyone can begin to relax.
