Toddler Travel Entertainment

When thinking of a strategy for entertaining my toddler on trips, I created a hierarchy of activities. My first options are the most educational and often require the most participation/cooperation. It’s also important to note that if you jump to the later activities, the earlier options will likely be much less entertaining or attractive to a toddler. I mean, who doesn’t want to watch a video on a tablet, right?

1. Books– my son absolutely loves to be read to and we love reading to him. This becomes a bit trickier when you have a weight limit for luggage and limited space. I chose to bring just a few important books with us. One book we brought was an interactive Usborne book about airplanes. It was lift the flap and allows you to see the interparts of airplanes and the process of flying. We had been using a few different books to prepare him for the flight, but this was a great one that we chose to bring to reference incase any panic ensued. We also downloaded books from our local library via the “Cloudlibrary” app that we could read to him digitally. 
2. Melissa and Doug Puffy Sticker Activity Book: Puffy stickers are 100% the way to go with toddlers. Their tiny fingers can actually peel them off themselves which gives you a break. Also, they’re reusable which allows for endless play. One thing I appreciate the most is its open ended play in the sense that the activity book has backgrounds of different places and kids get to use the stickers to create their own imaginary world. We bought the “pet place” book for our trip. It’s slim, lightweight, and has thick pages so they aren’t easily bent. Farm, Wild Adventures set, Pet palace, Princess, Pirate
3. Bravokids LCD Writing tablet– This tablet was inexpensive, light, and easy to pack. The writing pen is attached which reduced a lot of headache. Nothing quite like dropping crayons during turbulence and trying to locate them from passengers around you. It was still something my son could do creatively that occupied his hands, held his focus, and gave us something to chat about. This item is also wonderful for restaurants. I personally love coloring with the crayons and kids menus but every single time they drop on the ground and we have to track them down before a meltdown happens. An LCD tablet is just easier when traveling.
4. Yoto Mini Player– the Yoto mini is a  screen free audio player for children. Finding an option that my child enjoys where he can listen to audiobooks that don’t require a wifi connection is wonderful. It’s much better than having them downloaded on my phone, especially when traveling and needing a phone for other purposes. They also have kid designed podcasts and radio stations. It’s technically designed for children 3-12+ years , however my son started using it slightly before then with adult participation. It’s easy to use, allows children to pick their own stories by putting in the card associated with that book, and then they can navigate to certain chapters themselves. The Yoto player also has sleep sounds like “brown noise”, “white noise”, “rainy car ride”, etc. These are fantastic. My favorite function of the Yoto player is that you can create your own audio recordings and add them to a playlist as well as create a custom Yoto card to associate with that playlist. It’s truly the best. I record stories that we can’t find on audiobook as well as some that aren’t *quite* age appropriate but my son loves. I just record a version that I slightly edited and my son still gets to enjoy it and in Mama’s voice. We also checkout books from the library and record our favorites so we can listen to them anytime. Needless to say, we love our Yoto player and highly recommend it. Feel free to reference my Yoto vs Toni Box post for more information and recommended accessories.
5. Amazon Fire 7 Kids Tablet– This was my son’s first tablet and I was quite impressed. I’m used to using apple products and iPads but we got this tablet for a killer deal on amazon and I’m glad we did. It comes with a seriously protective case and they advertise “if it beaks, we will replace it.” Pretty awesome, right? It has a stand built in and was easy to use, even for a newly 3 year old. I designed a whole profile for him before our trip and learned how to use it myself. It was one of the most time consuming things to prepare because I did vet a lot of the free content before adding it to his profile for easy access. He mainly used Daniel tiger videos and games as well as digital books we downloaded. We didn’t use it much, but when we did it was a lifesaver. Think boarding an airplane at 10 pm when you’ve traveled to the airport and have been on the move for the previous few hours. While it’s small, it’s still bulkier than some of the other items so we often left it at the apartment during the day. If you anticipate long wait times- think museums in Italy, France, etc, then I’d consider packing it with you. 

Key additional items:

*Headphones: It’s super important to have a good set of headphones for your trip if planning for any type of tablet videos or audiobooks. I did extensive research on the best headphones for toddlers. I kept finding headphones with fantastic reviews, but the lowest decibel range was 85. As a nurse, this was alarming to me. The World Health Organization recommends that the sound not be higher than 75 decibels in order to prevent hearing damage. Why would most headphones on the market not use this as a basis for design? Thankfully, here comes in ONANOFF, the makers of BuddyPhones. It’s not surprising to me that they are an award-winning Icelandic brand that has advanced kid’s audio products and have the world’s leading kids headphones. For this reason, I chose to purchase “Buddy Phone travel.” They have a patented Safeaudio 3 volume technology that has three settings to limit volume. They have a Toddler mode (75 dB), Kid mode (85 dB), and Inflight mode (94 dB). It has a built-in “Buddy Jack” for sharing, hypo-allergenic cushion, and are light, durable, and foldable. Such a win! Sometimes it’s tough to look past all the flashy marketing of other companies, but I’m thankful I didn’t settle without digging deeper. Also, the headphones we chose are wired. There’s definitely still controversy on the safety of bluetooth headphones, especially in young developing brains so I opted to keep ours wired. It also means that’s one less charger to travel with which is an added bonus.

*Hearing Protection: WHAT A LIFE SAVER! I have the Dr. Meter Hearing Protection Ear Muffs for my son and they were crucial to our survival with traveling. In general my son doesn’t express sensitivity to sound, but we also don’t live in a bustling city that has endless audio input. I originally purchased them when we went to Disney and my son would ask to wear them when things got loud. Our trip to London was no different. When we took the underground trains there were constant loud announcements. The buses had loud dinging. The road noise was especially loud. Ambulances were much closer than we are used to. They rarely had paper towels in restrooms but instead had multiple air dryers which are obnoxiously loud. Have I made my point? They were PRICELESS. They didn’t block out his hearing entirely, but clearly made it more comfortable. Also, pro tip, if your child is sleeping in the car and you want them to continue to sleep through whatever errand you have, try putting on the ear muffs. We gave this a try when we went into a restaurant once and my son slept through almost the entire meal. We were seriously questioning how we hadn’t tried this earlier, but ultimately I think as an infant he wanted to pull them off, but as a toddler he was totally fine with it.