Travelling Abroad And Children -  A Parent Writes...

All travellers may be subjected to various forms of stress such as over crowded transport, long waiting times and changes in time zones but nothing is as stressful as travelling to Spain with three young children. I thought everything could be made easier by planning ahead……. the ages of my children would determine how their needs could be met.

I thought it best to think ahead and find out about the place we were travelling to beforehand. There were websites to look at and we went to the book shop and the library and read up on the local areas together. These days it is much easier to gain information on where you are going and makes the trip much more interesting especially if (like two of mine) your children are school age they will enjoy this pre-planning stage of the adventure.

Each child has their own passport in our family but we still needed to shop around for the best travel insurance and we checked that we were all up to date with our travel vaccinations, diphtheria, tetanus and hepatitis A in our case.

Babies under one year old need regular feeds and I was breast feeding which made life easier, although nowadays you can buy everything pre-prepared including milk feeds. Depending on the length of your journey and mode of transport you must keep these close to hand along with the essentials nappies, wipes, change of clothes, dummy if necessary and water as babies dehydrate very quickly.

Luckily there were no long delays at the airports because not everywhere is child friendly. We carried plenty of the essentials in our hand luggage in case of emergencies.

You'll be glad to hear that we did eventually reach our destination and enjoy a lovely week in the sun relatively uneventfully. That of course is another story!