Domestic Flights USA – Keeping The Kids Entertained

For the uninitiated world living outside the USA, the internal transport system may have a lot more to it than may have been considered. Namely, domestic flights are just as part of the fabric of society as bus routes or cycle paths might be in other parts of the world. Why? Because the continental USA has four separate time zones, covering 48 states over 3 million square miles. In order to humanize these statistics, we could think of things in terms of car accidents per year – there are 6 million car accidents in America every year, which is roughly 16.5K per day (if you are affected, click the link to speak to a PI lawyer in Chicago). The landmass is actually roughly equivalent to the size of Australia, except America doesn’t have the barren ‘outback’ stretched across its middle (America’s a pretty full place!).  

In short, America is big and it’s not unusual for friends and family to take flights to see each other. This means a lot of travel with children and we all know that kids and planes don’t go. There’s something about the order and patience required to get through the airport, sit in a plane seat, and reach your destination at the other end, that kids find impossible. There will be tantrums. There will be tears. There will be family divisions and ruined trips. Isn’t there something we can do?

Fly the red eye

This is a sneaky trick that isn’t great for your own sleep on one hand, but on the other hand it’s useful for getting your kids from A to long distance B without the accompanying emotional breakdown. What’s the red eye? Flying the red eye simply means taking the night flight. You arrive with red eyes through lack of sleep – hence the name. However, if you’re willing to sacrifice your own sleep and sanity to travel through the night, the red eye flight is a very viable option. Let the children sleep through their crankiness. There’ll be some disruption for them throughout the night, naturally, but on balance, a sleepy or sleeping child is preferable to a child that’s awake and bored in a confined space. 

Audiobooks

Tablets and headphones are bringing up this generation of children. Nobody is going to judge you. But what you can do to steer their interaction with screens towards something more engaging is encourage them to listen to audiobooks – some audiobooks are even animated. 

Educational books with lots of pictures 

Books like the Guinness World Record series offer page after page of colourful and weird things to look at and read about. From the largest spider in the world to the biggest car ever made out of stacked soup cans, there’s a lot of interesting facts for kids to learn about and be absorbed in. Obviously, try your kids on children’s fiction if you think they have the attention span, but if not, educational books with lots of pictures are the way forwards. 

*This is a collaborative post.

Featured image source.