If you’ve ever changed time zones with kiddos, you know that jet lag can really make you re-think travel with little ones. I have now tackled the 9 hour time difference between California and Amsterdam nine times with kids (NINE TIMES. Can you ever say that without thinking of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Definitely not.)

Getting kids over jet lag is not an exact science by any means, but my kids tend to sleep through the night by night four when we’ve changed time zones, thanks in part to a few tried-and-true tricks. After beating the jet lag beast these nine times, here’s what works for us:

1. One direction tends to be more difficult than the other. For us, the jet lag is always worse coming back to Amsterdam from California. In California the girls have trouble sleeping past 6am, which while annoying, is something we can deal with when they go to bed at 7:30pm without issue and sleep all night. Coming back to Amsterdam, they tend to be awake for hours in the middle of the night — TORTURE.
2. Try to stick to their schedule as much as possible. The girls are on a strict schedule at home — nap at noon, bedtime at 7:30pm — so whenever we land, we treat the rest of the day like it’s a normal day for them. If it’s 9:30am when the plane touches down, we do everything we can to keep them up until naptime at noon and then bedtime at 7:30pm.
3. Don’t extend naptime for the first week (or at least until they’re sleeping their normal amount at night without waking up). Jet lag inevitably makes you want to sleep and sleep hard in the middle of the day. If your kids normally nap during the day, keep them on their regular nap schedule, but expect that you’ll have to wake them up at their “normal” wake up time. For my kids, this means that they don’t get to nap for longer than 2 hours until they’re sleeping through the night consistently. That said, expect to do a little tinkering with their schedule at first. On the first night we were back in Amsterdam, the girls were up from 11pm to 3am, which was just pure insanity. I knew they wouldn’t be up at their normal time the next morning and I was so exhausted that I opted to let them sleep in (I finally woke them up at 11am!) Because they slept so late, I decided to skip naps to try and tire them out for bedtime, which actually did work, as they were only up for an hour and a half the next night and not nearly as crazy. Which leads to the next point…
4. Expect to be up in the night and/or up early for the day. In California the girls would wake up around 4 or 5am and I would work to get them back to bed until their normal wake up time around 7am. A few mornings though, I just gave up and we have started the day at 5am. If they wake in the night and are clearly not going to be going back to sleep soon, I will stay in their room with the lights really low and will read them stories before nursing Lark and trying to get them back down (I basically do most of our bedtime routine until they seem like they might be getting tired again). Prim is old enough to understand that “it’s nighttime, you need to be sleeping,” so I try to repeat this to her at various points. When I put her to bed I’ll tell her “If you wake up and it’s dark outside, you need to be quiet and go back to sleep. Sometimes it’s completely wishful thinking that she’ll follow this, but I’m still hopeful that the message might get through.
5. Sometimes kids need to cry. I know this is controversial, but I believe that it’s ok for kids to cry a bit. This means that if they’re up in the middle of the night and I have been in with them for an hour and a half and done everything I can to get them back to sleep, they may just need to tire themselves out on their own. Some crying I think is actually healthy for kids. Children aren’t equipped to manage their emotions the way adults are, and crying is actually a good outlet for any stress or frustration they might be feeling. During our trip to California I knew that both Prim and Lark were simultaneously having a great time seeing family but also feeling stressed out and a little overwhelmed by the trip. Lark didn’t understand why we weren’t at home and why KC wasn’t there (he was working in Dublin for the first 2.5 weeks we were in California) and Prim understood we were there visiting family, but was clearly missing home and didn’t understand a lot of the American norms. (She kept telling me, “I miss my Amsterdam” and asking “Why we have to take the car? Where’s our bikes?”) Tantrums happened, as did some crying at night, but it was something we worked through. It’s important to explain feelings to your kids when they are having a hard time (I made sure to verbalize all of those big feelings to Prim and Lark at different points during the day), but I felt like it was also important to let them have their feelings and work out their frustration. It’s ok for them to feel frustrated and have some “negative” feelings — they’re human. Let them cry a little, it will all be ok.
6. Don’t feed the animals. One of the things I’ll hear about parents doing with their jet lagged kids is feeding them when they’re up in the middle of the night. If you have a baby who’s nursing, I think that’s fine, but if it’s a toddler, I’m a firm believer in making them wait until morning for their meal. Maybe you think I’m being mean on this one, but I honestly think that one of the reasons my kids tend to get through their jet lag relatively quickly is because they stick to a strict meal schedule when we’re in a new time zone. Food and mealtimes are tied to circadian rhythms, so it’s important to try and get kids onto the new schedule as soon as possible to help them get good sleep at night.
7. Get some sun! In addition to food, sun helps your body register that it’s daytime and reset your internal clock; so get your kids out in the sun as much as possible during that first week.
8. Recreate your bedtime routine from home, as much as you can. At home in Amsterdam, Prim and Lark share a room, so whenever we travel we make sure that they share a room as well. While this sometimes makes jet lag feel infinitely harder since they often wake each other up, ultimately it ends up working out (if they were in different rooms, I don’t know how I would have tackled putting them both back to bed in the middle of the night while KC was traveling). We also stick to our regular routine, no matter where we are — the girls take a bath, put on jammies, we read two stories and then I nurse Lark while I sing a song to Prim. We also travel with their sound machine and any special lovey that they sleep with to try and make the new situation feel like home as much as we can.
9. If you’re traveling with a newborn, rejoice! The easiest experience I ever had with jet lag was when I traveled to California with just Lark when she was 3 months old. She was still up intermittently during the night and I was still in the mode of sleeping for short stretches whenever I could grab an hour or two. I let her take the lead on setting her own bedtime (she wanted to go to bed every night at 6pm) and rolled with whenever she wanted to nap. My sleep schedule was already so out of whack from having just had a baby that I had zero jet lag on either end, which is way out of character for me (we have been back in Amsterdam for over a week now and I’m still struggling to fully get onto European time). So really, if you have a newborn — count yourself lucky! (Because even though they’re a lot of work otherwise, they sure are portable and easy to fly with at that age!)
10. This too shall pass. Jet lag can feel impossible at times with kids, but like everything else, you will get through it. I dealt with the jet lag solo on both ends this time because KC was working when we flew out to California and then he headed to Austria on a ski trip after just one night at home. By the third night I felt like tearing my hair out because I was so tired and the kids were being monsters at 1am, but like a miracle, they slept through the night on night four — so yes, it does end.

The sleep-related items we use for travel:

Travel crib
Travel bed rail
Sound machine
Travel night light
Lark’s all season sleep sack (she still fits the 0-6 month size)
Lark’s lovey
Prim’s lovey