By Benjamin Combs

I have four children, ages 13, 5, 3, and 1. About once a year we make a trip from Utah to California to visit family. The 10 hour trip can be an adventure and so we have, out of necessity, come up with solutions to the usual car trip troubles. Here are seven tips which we use to make the trip as pleasant as possible.

1. Start early. A good trip plan starts long before you even leave. It begins with making your children active participants. We tell the children about the trip weeks in advance. We mark it on a calendar and each day help our children mark off the days on the calendar. This process helps to get the children excited about the trip instead of fighting to even get them in the car. They are the ones pushing us to get moving on the day of the trip.

2. Have the kids pack their own bags. My wife helps them, of course. Part of the reason for this is that our kids have very strong opinions. Letting them pick out their own clothes helps avoid the “I don’t want to wear that!” situations later in the trip. Letting them choose their own clothes also makes them more a part of the trip.

3. Have the kids pick out their own snacks. A few days before we leave my wife makes a trip to the grocery store with the children to have them pick out one or two snacks to take along. Some of the better options are goldfish, pretzels, and fruit snacks.

Once each of the kids has picked an item or two, we split them up at home into snack bags for each child. The individual snack bags then go into lunch bags. So with four kids, each picking an item or two, there may be up to eight items for each child. If you want to get really creative, have the kids decorate their snack bags. Then dole them out at designated times or mile markers.

Also, snacks don’t mean candy. Help the kids pick snacks that won’t be gone in five minutes, or give them a sugar high with nowhere to run it off.

4. Plan some items the kids don’t know about. Take a minute to go to the cheap toy section of a store, or find the local dollar store. Pick up a few items for the kids they don’t know about. Remember they will be in the car so something with a lot of small pieces will be a mess. We like coloring books and crayons, small toys, and dolls for the girls. The important thing is that the kids not know about them.

As the trip moves on we can bring out new items from time to time to recapture their attention. If you have a TV in your vehicle, which is perhaps one of the best car-trip-investments we ever made, stop by your local library or video rental store for some new titles, or bring some movies you already have.

5. Take advantage of any seating space you have. If you have a van remember that everyone does not have to sit in the front. Separate the kids, especially the ones that are prone to fighting. As the trip goes on having my son and daughter together can be a disaster. To stop that before it happens we put my daughter in the middle row and my son in the back row. They get upset because they are not together but it’s much better than breaking up a fight 2 hours in to the trip.

6. Put an adult in the back. Adults like to claim the front seat. That’s all fine and good until the 5-year-old in the back row starts screaming and you have no way to get to him. My wife and I take turns in the back of the car. That way an adult can easily get to all of the kids. In addition, it mixes up the interactions in the car. It can be good one-on-one time, story time, or just plain fun with the kids.

7. Pull out the diapers. All but my one year old are potty trained, but we would never make a trip without diapers on all of the younger ones. We don’t do it because they can’t tell us they need to go. It’s more of the rule “better safe than sorry.”
Even though they know how to use the potty, they still may need to go at an inconvenient time, or not give you enough lead time to get to a rest stop.

Benjamin Combs is a member of the 12th Ward Spanish Fork South Stake.