Reply to S/o : long plane ride and jet lag advice?

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[quote=Anonymous]We fly to Asia 1x/year with my DD, who is now 8. She is a champ and usually does great with managing jet lag. I do not. So when all else fails, we try to be understanding and kind because travel is hard even for adults.

The most important thing is to have a book and a tablet, and to plan our screen time in advance. My DH is great about scheduling our inflight sleep/wake time based on how far west we are going in Asia and when our layovers and final landing are.

Then we set expectations about how long she’ll need to be awake on each flight. A week or two before the flight, she will download (with our help) an amount of shows and maybe 1-2 movies that are roughly double the awake time for going there and back. She’ll also choose a new, fat chapter book for the flight.

Shows are really important for keeping her awake when we need to push her waking hours. We don’t force sleep but we do enforce rest time, even on the plane, and will make her curl up and change into different socks and even a different top if it’s a long flight. It helps her body know it’s a different part of the day.

Finally, it’s so basic but you must do it: get out into daylight as soon as you arrive. Don’t unpack, don’t turn on a TV. Get walking or go for a swim or go run an errand. And if you arrive in the dark, don’t pull the shades- shower and go to bed as usual but try to let the sun wake you (unless you are going somewhere at a high latitude in the winter).

Finally, don’t stick to a usual bedtime if you can cheat on how many time zone changes you’re making. When we go from the west coast to London in the summer, we sleep in until 8-9 am local time and enjoy the late summer light and stay out until 10 pm. It saves us 2-3 days of jet lag recovery.[/quote]

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