It’s no secret that traveling with children comes with a unique set of challenges, the amount of gear required being one of them. In this post, we’ll share our top family travel pack tips to help you organize, optimize, and maximize your little one’s luggage on your next family vacation.
6 Family Packing Tips For Traveling With Your Kids
Tip 1: Use Google Sheets To Create A List Of Essential Items
Traveling as a family can be daunting, especially when packing everyone’s necessities efficiently while conforming to travel regulations and safety guidelines. The key to making this task less overwhelming lies in careful planning, knowledge about organized packing techniques, and understanding each family member’s needs.
For instance, infants will require various items, from diapers and formula to strollers and toys. Older children will likely need more entertainment options like books or electronic devices.
Younger children’s needs change frequently; one day, it’s diapers + wipes + poopy diaper bags, and the next, pull-ups. If you’re traveling with a younger child, chances are you’ll need to re-create the list each time you travel to keep up with the milestone changes.
However, many of the travel necessities will remain constant for older children and remain the same for each vacation you take with your child. What I like to do these days is to keep a simple Google sheet for each of my children for each type of trip we take with a list of what must be packed.
Now when we’re getting ready to go, I can quickly review the listed items to make sure nothing has changed or needs to be added, print it, and off a gathering we go! This has been an absolute lifesaver for me in keeping the pre-travel packing for my kids a stress-free experience, and it allows my older child to take responsibility for his gear while I focus on his younger brother’s and my own.
Tip 2: Buy The Right Travel Gear In Advance
First, it’s essential to understand that organized packing for family travel is not just about stuffing your clothes and essentials in your suitcase. It’s more about strategizing your packing space, using techniques to maximize space, and maintaining organization throughout your journey.
One of my biggest family travel packing tips is ensuring everyone has the right gear to stay organized. For my family, this boils down to three essential items: a toiletries bag, a carry-on backpack, and a high-quality piece of luggage.
Sometimes you can get away with a single xl piece of luggage for the whole family, and sometimes you can’t. Having a piece per person on hand will give you the most flexibility for your trip. When my family went to St. Thomas last year for 5 days, 1 xl Samsonite was enough for 3 us because the weather is warm and shorts and t-shirts take up much less space than jeans and hoodies.
When we went on our cruise, we had cold-weather clothes, warm-weather clothes, and formal clothes to deal with, so my oldest brought his suitcase, I brought my xl, and my youngest split his clothes between our bags. Each child brought their kids travel backpack and had a toiletries bag with their name on it.
I advise ordering these essentials long before you travel because it gives you time to shop and look for deals. Great luggage is expensive, but I’ve seen 30% or more off sales in weird seasons from top-brand providers. I’ve had bad luck with some of the cheaper Amazon deals and probably spent more replacing our first few pieces than I did when I upgraded to leaders in the space.
Family Travel Packing Tips #3: Use Packing Cubes
Packing cubes have been having a moment the last couple of years; for good reason, they’re amazing, especially if you’re traveling with kids. If you’ve never seen them, they’re essentially stackable mesh/canvas bags that allow you to pack your things into your luggage in separate, organized containers.
This set from Amazon is super cheap and comes with a laundry bag. My biggest family travel packing tips for using cubes is to use the smallest one for socks (oh, those little kids’ socks), the next for underwear, and then one for shirts and another for pants or shorts.
We’ll talk about how your little ones can get involved in the packing process for family vacations in a bit, but the final thought I’ll leave you with here is – if you use packing cubes in the way that I’ve described then your child will be able to quickly put away their clothing once you’ve reached your destination and you’ve shown them which drawers are to be used for what. They can open the drawer, unzip, dump, and move on to the next one, helping everyone get into the fun sooner. The empty packs can then go in a suitcase in a closet until it’s time to go home again.
Tip 4: Create A Staging Area For Items 1 Week Before Your Trip
Another one of my family travel packing tips to create stress-free family travel experiences is to start staging items the week before. I started this practice a couple of years ago when my kids started to go to summer sleepaway camps. The thing about sleepaway camps is there’s a clear packing list that includes clothes and gear, and it’s the same list for each child, minus medications.
After fumbling around and feeling overwhelmed by a list of things I needed to buy and feeling very anxious that I was somehow missing something for one or both of the boys, I cleaned off my laundry room countertop, put a line of painter’s tape down the center line, and put a label, one on each side for each boy.
When I got home from the store or received something needed in the mail, I immediately unpacked it, divvied it up, and put it on each boy’s side. When packing day arrived, it was easy to pack one boy at a time and check the items off the packing list – 2 bug sprays for E, check. 2 100 SPF sunscreens? Check. It was so quick and easy that I now do it for every trip because it allows me to gather things together a week or more in advance without getting my house all disorganized or having to dump a partially packed bag on packing day.
Family Travel Packing Tips #5: Pack One Child At A Time
Children are wonderful creatures, and their enthusiasm for life is one of the things that I love most about them, but that enthusiasm is also a double-edged sword for family vacations. They want to be a part of packing their gear for your family vacation, but if you have multiple children trying to pack at once, all asking you different questions, chances are good you’re going to miss something or be pretty grumpy trying to keep it all together.
Packing one child at a time is on my top family travel packing tips list. Not only do you get to organize the chaos monkeys, but it’s also a great opportunity for 1-1 time with your child and a fun game for smaller children learning to count and identify objects.
Here’s what we do, I write what goes in each packing cube on a piece of Johson and Johnson’s thick medical tape with a sharpie, and I print out my packing list for each child. On packing day, I bring out 1 child’s luggage, 1 child’s travel backpack, their toiletries kit, and their packing checklist. I open everything up on the living room floor and begin our treasure hunt.
First, we start with clothes. I give one instruction at a time, “Go find me 1 rain jacket.” Or “Go find me 10 pairs of socks.” My children then get that item in the quantity needed and bring it back down. When they return with the item, I ask them, “Where is this item’s home?” They will read over the cubes’ labels and say “This is where my socks go,” when they’ve found the right cube.
When I confirm they’ve found the correct home, I ask them to put the items in 1 by 1 and count each that goes in the cube. This helps my youngest practice his counting and reading skills, and it gives me enough time to do two things at once: check the item off the packing list and examine the things they’re packing because you all know kids will have mismatched socks with some short, some tall, or occasionally pull the old ratty shirt you let them keep for bedtime out as one of their “core” pieces of clothing.
If they’ve miss counted or we need to adjust an item that just isn’t appropriate, I send them back for that one thing, and then we move on to the next thing on our list. It turns packing for our trips into a fun game and gives me enough focus and confidence to know we’re not forgetting something important. It also allows each child to ask me questions about our trip, share any fears or anxieties, and connect without spying eyeballs from their sibling.
Maximizing Available Space When Packing For Family Travel: Family Travel Tip #6
My family uses two techniques that I think should be on everyone’s family travel packing tips lists: the rolling and layering methods. We’ll start with the rolling method. The rolling method can be a game-changer and is especially good when you want to avoid wrinkles. The idea is to fold your clothes in half and then roll them tightly from top to bottom. Not only does this method save space, but it also makes identifying your clothes quicker and easier.
The rolling method is the only thing that allowed all 3 of us to travel to St. Thomas together without an extra bag of luggage; it’s that good. It’s also very compatible with packing cubes, so you get the initial benefit of them shrinking out the air between layers and the extra capacity that comes with rolls.
The next technique we use is the layering technique. This technique involves layering your clothes and other items in a suitcase to maximize the space. Start with a layer of shoes at the bottom, create a layer of heavier, more rigid items, like jackets, and then finally put your softer clothes on the top.
The befit to doing this is that you give separation between your shoes, which can have grits of dirt, sand, mud, and water, and a waterproof layer between your shirts, shorts, underwear, and daily wear, but placing your jackets, which are also exposed to the elements in between.
The layering method also aligns with how we tend to organize our clothing at home and will likely organize our clothing in drawers on vacation: socks, underwear, shirts, pants, and shoes on the floor. This is one of those intuitive family packing tips that create consistency in our mental models, whether at home or on the road with our kiddos.
Family Travel Packing Tips Conclusion
Whether your family is new to traveling or traveling with children, these family travel packing tips will relieve the stress of preparing for your vacations. You’ll have a list of essential items you need to pack for any vacation you could take, appropriate gear for everyone in your family, a built-in packing organization framework that keeps it simple so that your children can participate in this part of the journey, and a process that you can build on and flex over time to meet the changing needs of your family.