Some context

2012 was a very significant year for me, I got very very lucky. During the first quarter I joined Cumplo as a cofounder, moved to an apartment by myself, and met an adventurous, beautiful, and tall Dutch woman who would eventually become my wife. When you start dating someone who had left her country at 18 years old, you know there’s going to be some traveling involved. I was not disappointed.

Fast forward to February of 2020. We had recently left our apartment in Mexico City and travelled to Chile to visit my family and apply to the visas needed for our next destination. Life had other plans, so we had to stay in Chile until things went back to normal. We found ourselves homeless, with a toddler and a baby, and some of our things still in Mexico. Luckily, we were able to leave the city and relocate to my family’s house in a rural area, which proved to be a great refuge for the kids against COVID.

It wasn’t the greatest year, we didn’t have a place to call home, and isolation took its toll on everyone, so we decided to start 2021 with a blast. I left Cumplo (to find myself) and bought tickets to spend 4 months in the Netherlands. After those 4 months we moved to a different city in Chile, had a third baby, came back to the previous house, flew to the Netherlands for 5 months, taking a 6 week break to the US in between, and then back to the rural home. I am now writing this from San Francisco, just 5 months after coming back from the Netherlands. After San Francisco, we’ll move again… Just writing about all this moving around gets me tired.

Ok, enough context, on to the content!

1. Traveling by night

Conventional wisdom or common sense dictates children will fall asleep at night. That is generally the rule, unless you’re taking a 14 hour flight to another continent. Or a 4 hour flight to another city. Or just any flight, haha (see mistake number 3). Sometimes your kids will be too excited to sleep.

We seldom let ours use electronic devices like iPads, one of the exceptions being during flights. It happens sometimes, specially after a long time without using them, that they get super excited about screens.

The worst time this happened to us was during a long intercontinental flight (14 hours), with a 6 hour difference between the places. Our flight left in the afternoon and would arrive early in the morning the next day. We hoped the kids would be sleeping by the time we arrived to our destination, alas fate had different plans. One of them slept for 2 or 3 hours, the other one for half an hour at best, having been on screens the whole flight and only collapsing on his seat 30 minutes before landing. We had 2 small suitcases, 2 backpacks, a car seat, and 2 kids that refused to walk. Not the best experience. At least we didn’t need to take a connecting flight…

Before you say “why didn’t you make him sleep?”, let me just say that sometimes kids just won’t listen to you.

2. Traveling by day

You might be thinking that traveling by day is a way to avoid mistake number 1. Ha ha. You will soon learn about mistake number 3 and rethink your guess.

Yes, traveling by day could be equally bad, the only advantage being chances of needing to physically carry your kids are lower. Truth be told, there are no good times to be taking flights with small children, specially long ones. Toddlers get bored easily, too much screen time can get them grumpy, and even new toys, specially bought for the occasion, lose their appeal very quickly.

It’s understandable, flights take their toll on everyone, and kids are just physically unable to deal with the resulting stress and emotions, their brains haven’t finished developing. Our advice is to be prepared. More about that in mistake 8.

3. Assuming your kids will be rational and understanding

Ah, the big mistake, at least for me. Nothing better than traveling with young children to remind you of the irrationalities, craziness, creativity, and plain wonder of a developing brain. It doesn’t matter how much you prepare, how much you will your children to listen, how much you try to keep the situation under control, something will happen. A simple gesture or sound, anything, could trigger something in your child that awakes an inner beast you had never seen.

As stated above, the human brain at this stage is not fully developed. Some people say that process doesn’t finish until we’re twenty something. How can we hold our children accountable knowing this? How can we get mad? No, blaming them and getting mad will only contribute to create more chaos, more stress for everyone, and just a shitty experience overall.

The only (sane) option is to breathe, count to ten, and try to be empathetic. It’s hard, one of the hardest things about having children, but if you’re able to do this while taking a long flight or inside a crowded museum (see mistake 6), it will be far easier when you’re home.

4. Assuming security people will be rational and understanding

Ah, airport security officers, or TSA officers in the US. Their brains are usually finished developing, but having to check hundreds or thousands of travelers every day must be exhausting. Specially when some of them don’t pay attention to the signs or listen to your yelling.

A tired or annoyed adult, instructed to follow very strict procedures, combined with a toddler who hasn’t slept more than an hour all night can be a powerful combination.

In most countries or occasions, officers are very understanding.

Other times or in other places (like Paris, France) they seem to forget children are not adults and demand a full body check, not allow kids to walk under the metal detector with their parents, or make small children go into the full body scan thinking they will keep their arms above their heads. Which reminds of France. After after a 12 hour flight, one of our kids just didn’t want to go alone through the metal detector to go to our connecting flight. The officers didn’t listen to arguments, so when he walked right behind me they demanded a full body search. Already upset and tired, he started yelling and kicking the officers (our attempts to calm him down were unsuccessful). They didn’t like it, nor our comments about their stupidity.

Not much to do to about this (a discussion about airport security and its irrationalities will have to wait), except trying to avoid the Paris airport.

5. Choosing the cheap option instead of the comfortable option

When you’re starting a business, not earning a salary, slowly eating away your savings, is easy to make this mistake. Every family will have their own budget and thresholds, but saving 50 dollars per ticket by traveling at a later time is an easy mistake to avoid. Even though there are no real good times of the day to travel with kids, some times are worse than others. You don’t want to take a 4 hour flight that takes off at the same time your kids are supposed to go to sleep. For short flights my preference is early in the morning, sometimes there are no other options.

Once we made the mistake of booking a flight from Boston to Chicago just a couple of hours before their bed time. It seemed ok, with the time difference it wasn’t going to be too bad. A storm delayed and then cancelled our flight, so we had to choose between waiting at the airport until we could fly or wait until the next day. The cheap option was to stay and wait, the sane option was to go to an airport hotel, sleep in a decent bed, and try again in the morning. Can you guess which one we chose?

6. Kids don’t like museums, unless it’s a kids museum

Nothing beats the experience of going to a well-thought kids museum. They have fun, they get tired, and remain excited even after the visit. If you’re in a big city, chances are there’s one of them at a reasonable distance. Go to it, it will be a fun experience. Alternatively, a kids farm where they can feed animals or a zoo.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is home to some of the best works of arts in history. We wanted to go with a friend and, knowing it was going to be tough for them, we prepared a scavenger hunt game for the kids. We made a list of things and concepts they had to find in the art pieces: dogs, horses, apples, etc. It worked well for the first 5 minutes, but at the end of the list they just weren’t having any of it. I found myself alone with two children, crying and yelling at me, demanding to see their mom, while tourists from all over the world looked at me either judging or worrying I was kidnapping them. It was a good opportunity to exercise my patience and understanding.

7. Not bringing enough diapers or a change of clothes

As easy as it is to avoid this mistake, not bringing enough diapers or change of clothes has happened to us too many times to not include it on the list. The number of times our kids have had to walk naked are too many and the time I have spent drying clothes under a hand dryer is too much.

Shit (literally) happens when you’re traveling, sometimes at the least expected times. You have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.

8. Poor preparation or not setting yourself up for success

This is a mistake parents early in their careers usually make: either being under-prepared or over-prepared. I will focus on the first mistake, because if you’re over-prepared the worst that could happen is you end up carrying too many things. Although if there’s only one lesson to learn from my experience is that anything could happen. Nothing shittier than having to carry excess weight you didn’t use and still lacking something vital.

For us, under-preparedness was usually the mistake. Or, more precisely, failing to set things up for success. Traveling with kids is like a random walk, anything can happen at any given moment, it’s just a matter of probabilities. For example, the first time we flew with a baby, he pooped 3 times in the last 10 minutes before taking off. Another time he pooped while we were landing, a nasty, very liquid, bright yellow baby poop. Before it overflowed through the neck of his onesie (it happens), I carefully changed him on my legs. The looks we got were priceless.

Some tips: preparing new surprise toys for the trips or allowing unlimited access to certain restricted devices helps a lot. But the main tip to avoid this and the other mistakes is below.

Conclusion

Anything can happen at any given time, but the probabilities of certain events go higher when you travel with young children. Chances are low, but you could travel alongside an adult that screams and complains about how motion sick he is and making pretend puking noises for minutes at a time (true story). If you have a kid with you, chances of that happening to them are at least 10x.

Thus, the only real preparation is to set your expectations accordingly. Be prepared to bravely face anything life throws at you, but not only by packing extra toys or clothes. Be prepared to be tired, for your kids to be tired and grumpier than ever. Be prepared to remember how much you love your kids, to remember their brains are literally incapable of dealing with shit yet, to have patience, to be empathetic, and to enjoy seeing their brains soak everything around them, having fun, and excited about the new things they get to see.