How to Entertain Kids in the Car

Families love getting new ideas for what to take on a long car trip to keep the kids occupied. So we enlisted the family travel experts at Best Family Travel Advice to share their best advice about what to take on car trips with kids.

The basics for long car trips with kids

By Linda Kramer of Travels with Children

My kids are 9, 7, 6, and 4, and car trips are our specialty. When we hit the road, we always have these things in our arsenal.

• Let the kids choose a few things they want to bring. Each of our children has his own “suitcase”—a laptop-sized bag—that he can fill with whatever toys he wants to bring on the trip.
• I make a Vacation Book for each major trip we take. It can be adapted for non-readers by adding lots of coloring pages relating to your destination.
• Before our trip, I look for clearance sets of crayons, markers, paper, etc., and pack them up for the kids, but I usually don’t give them out at the beginning of the trip.
• Consider buying your kids their own digital cameras. I found some sub-$50 “real” cameras (as opposed to the Fisher-Price type) for my kids, and they’ve used them a lot. In addition to taking pictures at stops, they make movies of each other in the car and have fun changing the settings on the camera.
• Use well-timed lollipops and treats to make it through those last 50 miles before your evening stop.
• Scrabble Cheez-it crackers have proven to be good for our kids as well. They’ve created a game where they think of a non-food word that goes with their cracker, like “E: I’m eating an elephant!”
• Have plenty of CD’s (or an iPod) with kid-friendly tunes and get books on CD at the library or local bookstore to break up the monotony on a long driving stretch.
• Check to see if your destination has informational podcasts available. When we went to Philadelphia, the Once Upon a Nation stories from the visitors’ website provided some entertaining background to the historical sites.
• Take a list of quirky quick stops along your route. Roadside America is a good place to start. If you need a bathroom break or a few minutes to run around, you might as well do it somewhere memorable like the Eiffel Tower with a Cowboy Hat or the World’s Largest Twine Ball.

Above all, enjoy your trip—the time spent together, the high points and low points, the journey as well as the destination. Happy travels!

Road trip distractions

By Amy Whitley of Pit Stops for Kids

The younger age set needs a variety of distractions while in the car, which is why you need plenty in your road trip bag. What we carry:

• iPhone apps designed for the preschool and kindergarten set, such as Tales2Go
• A DVD player cued up with plenty of movies. (Trade titles with friends and neighbors before leaving to save money on buying and renting!)
• A new treat such as My Busy Kit
• Plenty of fun, easy to eat snacks. Our top picks are Jelly Bellys, dried fruit, and Babybel cheese.

Above all, make sure to plan on pit stops every few hours, but follow our golden rule: no one stops the car when a child is either napping or contentedly watching a movie.

Free or cheap travel toys to keep the kids entertained

By Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby

The nice thing about very young kids is that they are fascinated by real-world objects that you might have around your house or that would be inexpensive to pick up.

• Post it notes can be written on and stuck on car windows.
• Colorforms would be a great way for your child to complete their window artwork.
• Cheerios are a tried and true snack, but why not include a (new) shoelace in your snack bag and let your child make edible bracelets in the car.
• Your digital camera is great for looking at shots of the trip so far (kids never seem to tire of this) and adding their own strangely-angled photos of the open road.
• Books on CD (or on your iPhone) make great entertainment, and you can pick them up at the local library. Try something a step more complex than you would normally read at home, and you might be surprised at how well your kids quiet down and focus.

If those fail, you can also check out this list of travel toys my own kids (age 3 and 5) have enjoyed.

Two slam dunks for making long road trips with kids seem short

By Mara Gorman of The Mother of All Trips