Real parenting tips for a 21-hour road trip with a 21-month-old, 4-year-old, and 6-year-old
The first sippy cup hit the back of my passenger seat headrest an hour and 47 minutes into our 21-hour drive to my sister’s house. It was full of warm apple juice, so it left a sticky brown splotch I couldn’t reach to wipe. The 21-month-old in the backseat, Lila, babbled her demand noise: “DA! DA! DA!” while our 4-year-old, Jax, screamed that our 6-year-old, Mia, had “stolen his favorite dinosaur window clings” even though she’d just borrowed one to put on her side of the minivan. My husband was driving, and I turned around to fix the fight, already wondering why we’d decided to drive instead of flying, even with the three-kid ticket prices.
I’d spent two weeks before the trip scrolling Pinterest for educational road trip activities, convinced I needed to keep all three kids engaged and learning to avoid endless meltdowns. I put together three labeled busy boxes: for Mia, a set of vocabulary flash cards and a word search book; for Jax, a color sorting game with pom poms and a paper plate; for Lila, a set of sensory fabric squares. By hour three, all the pom poms were dumped in the floorboard, Lila was trying to stuff a fabric square in her mouth, and Mia announced the word searches were “just school work, I don’t want to do that on vacation.” I stuffed all the boxes back in the trunk and resigned myself to 18 more hours of yelling.
We stopped for gas an hour later, and I decided to let everyone run around the grass next to the station for 15 minutes instead of herding everyone straight back to the car. Jax climbed a low tree, Mia chased a butterfly, Lila crawled around pulling dandelions. When we got back on the road, Mia leaned forward from her booster seat and said, “I spy something blue.” Jax yelled “TRUCK!” and that’s how it started.
Ten minutes turned into an hour of counting semi trucks. Mia kept a running tally on a napkin, multiplying the number of trucks by the minutes we’d been driving to see how many we’d see by the end of the trip. Jax called out the color of every truck that passed, proud he could tell red from blue even when the truck was moving fast. Lila pointed at every truck and yelled “CK! CK!” which was her version, and clapped when we cheered for her. No one asked for a tablet. No one fought. It was so quiet for 20 minutes my husband and I got to have a whole conversation about something that wasn’t kid related.
That’s when I started connecting what was happening to all the stuff I’d read about child development, but never really put into practice on trips. I’d always thought that if I wasn’t actively giving my kids something educational to do, they were just wasting time misbehaving. But here, Mia was practicing addition and multiplication on her own, because she was curious about how many trucks we’d pass. Jax was practicing his color recognition and turn taking, no worksheet required. Lila was working on her speech just by pointing and repeating words. None of it was planned. It just happened because we had empty, unstructured time to fill.
After that, I pulled out the only prepped thing that ended up working: three small $1 toys I’d wrapped in birthday wrapping paper on a whim. I’d read once that the unwrapping is as fun as the toy for little kids, so I stuffed them in my bag to pull out every six hours when meltdowns usually hit. The first one was a set of mini rubber farm animals, which Jax carried around for the rest of the trip and made roar at every cow we passed. The second was a pack of glow sticks, which we cracked open when it got dark and Lila shook hers for 45 minutes straight. The third was a mini notepad Mia used to draw pictures of all the different license plates we saw.
A few concrete things that worked, that I’ll definitely do again next time: Stop every two hours, minimum, for at least 15 minutes of unstructured running around. I used to rush stops to get to our destination faster, but adding an extra two hours to the total trip time was worth it to avoid backseat meltdowns. Keep three wrapped cheap new toys, pull one out every 5-6 hours – you don’t need fancy activities, just something new to hold their attention. Let the kids make up their own games instead of pushing pre-planned learning. If they want to count trucks instead of doing your alphabet game, let them. The learning will happen anyway. For toddlers, a clean empty water bottle with 5 pennies taped inside works better than any $15 sensory toy – Lila played with hers for more than an hour, no cleanup needed.
It wasn’t all perfect. At hour 18, Lila had a 15-minute meltdown because we wouldn’t let her keep the dirty rock she found at a rest stop. Jax had an accident on the side of the highway when we couldn’t get to a bathroom fast enough, and we had to change him into the only spare clothes we had, which were a pair of Mia’s pink rain boots and a too-small t-shirt. I pulled over at one point and ate a cold candy bar by myself while everyone cried in the backseat for five minutes.
We pulled into my sister’s driveway right at 9 pm, 22 hours after we left, all of us covered in crumbs and goldfish cracker dust. Lila was asleep in her car seat, and Jax and Mia were already begging to play with my sister’s kids. I still don’t love long road trips with three little kids, and I’m still dreading the drive back next week. But I’m leaving the fancy busy boxes at home this time. I’ll pack extra snacks, the wrapped dollar toys, and leave an extra 15 minutes at every stop. The kids don’t need me to plan every second of learning. They just need space to find it themselves.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Real parenting tips for a 21-hour road trip with a 21-month-old, 4-year-old, and 6-year-old