Keeping Some Routines on Holiday

Keep some routines, not all of them. The routines that carry a child are usually the bookends: the order of waking, washing and breakfast at the start of the day, and the order of wash, story and lights at the end. Hold those two steady, in the same sequence as home even if the clock times shift, add one shared meal where you can, and then let the middle of the day be as holiday-like as you like. Anchors work because sequence is what children read: the order of events tells them where they are in the day and what comes next, which is most of what routine provides at home. This is the daily half of the wider plan in holidays and travel with a child who needs routine, and it starts from the base you build in setting up a base.

At home, routine is a mixture of times and sequences, and on holiday the times are usually the first casualty - later nights, slower mornings, meals when the restaurant opens. Sequences survive travel much better because they do not depend on the clock: teeth, pyjamas, story, lights is the same anchor at eight in a tent as at seven at home. Protecting the sequence rather than the schedule also protects the adults: nobody has to police a timetable on holiday, only keep a short order of events intact twice a day. Sleep guidance for families makes the same broad point in reverse - regular wind-down steps help children settle wherever they are - and the sources below are a useful read before a trip that crosses bedtimes or time zones.

Before the trip, list your child's day at home and mark the parts that visibly steady them. Most families land on a similar short list:

• The morning order: wake, toilet, dress, breakfast, in the usual sequence.
• One familiar breakfast: bring or buy the closest match to home for the first days.
• The bedtime order: wash, pyjamas, story or chat, lights, in the usual sequence.
• A daily check-in moment: a few minutes to preview tomorrow together.
• One shared meal, at whatever time the day allows.

Write the anchors on the trip plan and tell anyone travelling with you why they matter, so a grandparent or partner is not unknowingly dismantling them. For stays with relatives, agree these anchors in advance using agreeing the ground rules ahead.

Some days an anchor genuinely cannot hold: a late return, a special evening event, a journey that eats the bedtime slot. One missed anchor is weather, not failure. The repair is to restore the next anchor in full rather than apologising through a compressed version of all of them: if bedtime was scrambled, make the morning order complete and unhurried. If several anchors slip several days running, expect the wobble to show up as friction and tiredness, and treat it as a signal to schedule a quiet day rather than to add rules. Children are rarely troubled by a late night they chose as a treat; they are troubled by days with no recognisable shape at all. Shape, restored quickly, is the whole remedy.

Illustration only: on a camping trip with no fixed mealtimes and days spent outdoors, one family kept exactly two things from home. In the morning, their child washed, dressed and ate in the home order, with the same cereal from a box brought along. At night, the torch-lit version of the bedtime sequence ran in the tent, story included, at whatever time the light faded. Everything between those bookends was improvised. The parents described it afterwards as their easiest trip yet, not because nothing went wrong, but because the day always started and ended in a place their child recognised.

Choose two or three anchors, write them down, tell your travelling companions, and hold the sequences even when the times move. Let everything else be holiday. That balance - steady bookends, flexible middles - is what lets a child enjoy the newness of a trip instead of spending the whole stay bracing against it.