Mom of four shares genius road trip tips for all your summer plans

When parents talk about traveling with kids, it’s usually in reference to flying. There are so many great tips out there for surviving air travel with littles, but what about road trips? Sitting in the car for hours on end with your children may not involve the general public, but it still involves your sanity!

Instagrammer @galpractical is a mom of four who’s all about making other parents’ lives easier (and we thank her for that!). In her latest viral reel, she lays out how she road trips with her family.

Abby begins the video by noting her kids’ ages (7, 5, 2 and 6 months) and the length of the road trip she’s documenting (4.5 hours) then brings viewers along for the ride. In the caption, she shares all the tips from the reel. (Spoiler alert: Less is more!)

“I am NOT a road trip expert, but I’ve done many trips with my young kids and I am here to tell you less is more!” she begins the informative caption. “IF you set your kids up with EVERYTHING you think they’ll need to be entertained the whole trip (thinking they’ll then leave you [alone] for the road trip), then you’re setting yourself up for failure. In my experience, my kids [get] through [everything] QUICK and [then] you’re stuck.”

Now, this doesn’t mean don’t pack all the activities you can possibly think of to help pass the time, it just means space them out. “I keep a ‘boredom’ bag up front that I will slowly pull activities [out] of ONE at a time AFTER we’ve been bored a bit,” Abby explains. “I try to make each activity last as long as I can. Of course we use iPads and @yotoplay_us players, music & audiobooks, but even after a while my kids are bored with those.”

Next comes the JACKPOT! Abby lists out some pretty smart activities that you might not think of off the bat (I sure didn’t):

•Melissa & Doug Water Wow books for mess-free watercolor painting.

•Stopwatches to time things like the distance from one place to another, how long it takes to go a mile, and how long you can be quiet (which is pretty genius).

•Clickers to have your kids count things like different colored cars (Abby gives the example of designating every kid with a color), cows, semi-trucks, or whatever else you can think of!

•Dry erase markers so kids can draw on the windows and clean it up easily.

•Paper chain countdown, which involves making a paper chain and removing one chain for every hour that’s passed. This is an excellent visual for younger kids that don’t quite grasp the concept of time.

Summer is right around the corner (okay, maybe not right around the corner, but close enough that it’s good to start prepping!), and this is a great list to keep in mind if you’ve got a road trip planned.

In the words of Abby: “Road trippin’ ain’t easy as a parent, but we got this!”