13 Things Parents Rely on to Keep Kids Safe and Healthy While Traveling

The two most obvious must-haves for safe travel are ones you know well by now: high-quality face masks and vaccinations. If your children are too young for masks and vaccines, get vaccinated and mask up yourself, because experts say COVID transmission is more common within households than during travel, so preventing your own infection definitely helps protect young children.

Beyond those, however, there are a few more items traveling families have learned to keep on-hand. They include ways to sanitize your surroundings, ways to entertain kids so they stay calm (and keep those masks on), and ways for parents to keep it all together. Will these accessories collectively prevent our kids from contracting COVID? That's hard to say, but doctors have given us some peace of mind when it comes to traveling by plane.

“[It is] interesting that planes have not been large sources of transmission because of the ventilation systems,” Karen Acker, M.D., a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, previously told Parents.com. The riskiest part of air travel is actually in the airport, so do what you can to avoid lines and crowded eating areas.

COVID-19 also isn't the only threat to our children's health and safety when we travel. Some of the suggestions below will help protect kids from other illnesses and accidents as well.