Keeping Young Children Entertained on a Flight

Contributing Author:  Anastasia Meredith Oh

Some Easy ways for parents to keep their young children occupied whilst on a flight, with in-flight or without.

Although adults may be able to sleep through a flight many children will find it hard, and if there is no in-flight entertainment then young children may become distressed and take to mischief making. With this article I hope to give you some great ideas that my parents used with me when I was younger.

Colouring in books can be great, if you buy a cheep book and a packet of pencils or wax crayons. If you don’t want to buy a whole book you can go onlineand download some templates and you can choose them with your children and see which ones they want. These pictures can be put into a folder which will be easily fitted into a bag to take on the plane as hand luggage. If you get a complicated template it may take up to 30 mins for your child to finish the colouring, or if it’s simple it may take much less, so make sure you have quite a few of these handy so that they are occupied for quite a while.

Another, much more expensive, option is to take a portable DVD player and a range of DVDs. Many DVDs can be bought from around £3($5.5) if you go to Tesco. Show your children a range of DVDs such as ‘The Tweenies’ or ‘The Story Makers’. Other options other that Tv series include fun movies including ‘Stuart Little’, ‘Night at the Museum’ or ‘The Little Vampire’. All of which are great movies which the kids will love. The DVD player can be bought for probably around £50($90) or less if you get it second hand or off ebay or another site that shows you the best prices.


MP3 Players these days can be bought from around £10 or $ 17 and these can be loaded with great music which young children may enjoy, this can be popular music or classical music, even going all the way back to Elvis or music from the late Michael Jackson. Allow the children to pick what songs go on, and use itunes or another program to download your CDs and singles onto the Mp3 player.

Travel board games can be great fun, and especially on a plane, travel chess or checkers can keep a child busy for an hour if it is a good game, and monopoly can have a whole family busy for an hour too. These games can be bought at games stores and other stores such as WH Smith and Daniels. The games can normally be bought for around £5 or $7.

I hope this helped you and good luck with the kids and the journey.