Good Inside with Dr. Becky · Good Inside

Revisit: Surviving Holiday Travel with Kids

December 23, 2025·22 min·2 clips

Dr. Becky reveals why asking 'How can I travel without stress?' sets parents up for failure and offers a simple mindset shift.

Dr. Becky opens by recalling her own first flight with two children under four, acknowledging it was difficult despite careful preparation including snack boxes, coloring books, and removable stickers. She uses this to introduce her core idea for the episode: that much parental stress comes from asking impossible questions structured as 'how do I do X without Y,' which she calls the wrong question format. She demonstrates upgrading these questions to versions that acknowledge unavoidable challenges while focusing on what the parent can actually control. For airplane travel, she argues children melt down partly because they have no context for what is happening to them, and recommends telling children exactly what to expect before any trip. She acknowledges that in-flight meltdowns cannot be 'ended' by parents and reframes the parental job as staying calm and keeping the child physically safe, not ending the emotional experience. She encourages parents to imagine the strangers on the plane as understanding members of the Good Inside community rather than as judges. On the question of children sleeping poorly in new places, Dr. Becky reframes the problem as separation anxiety rather than a sleep problem. She explains that nighttime sleep is the longest, darkest, and most solitary separation a child experiences, and that children express this anxiety through delay tactics like requesting extra books or food. Her solution is showing children photos of the sleeping space before arrival and turning it into a guessing game so the room feels familiar when they arrive. On sibling conflict in cars, she acknowledges that once children are actively hitting each other in a moving car, there is limited immediate intervention available, and encourages parents not to catastrophize this as a parenting failure. Her recommended approach is a pre-trip conversation that frames the family as a team, brainstorms what might make the ride fun, and sets expectations clearly. She also recommends pulling to the side of the road silently at the first sign of conflict, before it escalates, so children do not learn to escalate to get parental attention. The episode closes with a reminder about reasonable expectations, generous interpretation of children's behavior, and early intervention.

As heard by us

A steady reframing of travel sleep battles that makes the stalling feel less mysterious.

The episode treats travel sleep troubles as something closer to separation and anxiety than plain stubbornness. That framing gives the bedtime stalling more shape: another book, another snack, another request can look like resistance, but it often follows the harder fact of a…

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Why you'd press play

For when bedtime in a new place turns into a separation standoff.

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