First Overseas Family Trip With Kids: Why I’m Stressed Before We Even Leave (And What I’m Doing About It)
It’s 9:17 pm at my kitchen table, and half a peanut butter cracker is melting into my open passport. My 4-year-old dumped my neatly sorted pile of extra socks across the floor an hour ago, and I haven’t bent over to pick them up yet. Two browser windows are open to entry requirements for Scotland, another to car seat safety regulations, and a fourth sits paused on a YouTube video explaining how to fold a stroller to fit in an overhead bin. My oldest son, 7-year-old Milo, has had a runny nose since recess yesterday, and I just got the email reminding us we need a negative COVID test to board the plane. This is our first family trip overseas, and I’m already so stressed I can barely taste the tea I made 20 minutes ago.
I’ve been planning this trip for six months. We’re going to visit my sister, who moved to Edinburgh two years ago and hasn’t met my younger daughter Lila yet. All my friends keep saying “You camp with the kids all the time, you’re so laid-back, you’ve got this” but that’s the lie I tell people to get them to stop asking about my parenting choices. Day to day, I’ve got a rhythm for Milo’s sensory needs – he hates unexpected loud noises, gets overwhelmed by crowded spaces, and will only eat about 10 different foods that are all pale beige. At home and at school, that’s easy enough to manage. But on an overseas trip? I’ve spent weeks scrolling travel blogs, saving every “sensory-friendly cafe” within a 10-mile radius of my sister’s flat, mapping quiet exit routes for every tourist spot we might visit, and building a 12-stop daily itinerary that I thought would prevent any meltdowns, any bad moments, any ruined days.
The turning point was two nights ago, when I spread the printed itinerary out on the dinner table to show Milo. I pointed out all the cool things: the castle, the boat trip on the loch, the chocolate factory tour. He stared at it for a full minute, then pushed it away and said, “What if I just want to stay at Aunt Lulu’s and play with her cat? Do I have to do all of this?”
I snapped at Lila 10 minutes later when she spilled her milk, and that’s when I realized what I’d done. I’d been so focused on fixing every possible problem before it happened that I’d already turned the trip into a chore for all of us, just to satisfy my need to control everything. I called a friend of mine who works as an occupational therapist at Milo’s school, and she pointed out something obvious that I’d completely missed: my job isn’t to eliminate all hard or overwhelming moments on the trip. It’s to give Milo the tools to handle them, and let the rest be what it is. She gave me a few small, concrete changes to make that have already cut my stress in half, and I’ve been surprised how much they make sense, even for kids without sensory needs.
First, I cut the 12-stop daily itinerary down to one must-do per day, plus one pre-planned low-key backup. No more 30-minute time blocks, no more pressure to fit in 5 extra tourist spots just because they’re “famous.” If our must-do is Edinburgh Castle, the backup is the Royal Botanic Garden, which I already know has wide, empty paths and a glass house full of plants Milo can look at as slowly as he wants. If he’s done after an hour at the castle, we leave, get ice cream, and head to the backup, no guilt, no arguing. That alone freed up hours of my planning time and took a huge weight off.
Second, we made a kid-led calm down kit instead of me packing a giant duffel of every possible thing he might need. Milo carries it in his own small dinosaur fanny pack, so he’s in control of it. It has just 5 things: his pair of kids’ noise-canceling headphones, a pack of his favorite spearmint gum, a small notebook and his favorite pen, three fruit snacks, and a printed photo of our dog at home. No extra stuff, no extra weight for me to haul, and Milo knows he can pull anything out of it whenever he wants, no asking permission. Giving him that control cuts his anxiety way more than me planning every possible scenario ever could.
Third, we borrowed the break card system his OT uses at school. When Milo is already overstimulated, he can’t always explain what he needs, so we made a small red index card that he keeps in his fanny pack. All he has to do is hand it to me or my husband, and we drop whatever we’re doing and leave. No “just five more minutes,” no “but we drove all this way,” no questions asked. I was worried this would mean we miss out on everything, but his OT told me that having a guaranteed exit actually makes kids more willing to try new things, because they don’t have to worry about getting stuck somewhere that feels bad. That’s already held true at home, when we tried it for grocery store trips last week.
I also did one last small thing: I uninstalled the travel app I was scrolling every night that was full of perfectly edited photos of other people’s perfect family trips. Comparing my messy, sock-strewn prep to their highlight reels was just adding extra stress for no reason.
We leave the day after tomorrow. I still haven’t ordered the adapter plugs for our phone chargers. We have to do Milo’s test first thing tomorrow morning, and if it’s positive, we have to cancel the whole thing, which I’m trying not to think about. The socks are still on the kitchen floor, honestly. I’m still a little stressed – that doesn’t just go away overnight. But yesterday, Milo sat on the couch next to me and drew a picture of all of us on a boat looking for the Loch Ness Monster, and he stuck it to the fridge. The monster has three heads, Lila colored half the boat purple, and none of the lines are straight. That’s the picture I’m going to remember, no matter what happens on the trip. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be ours.
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