Best Airplane Activities for Babies and Toddlers

Traveling with small children can be so rewarding, yet many parents get nervous about the prospect of flying with a baby or toddler. I get it… I was also nervous before many flights with our small kids. I didn’t want us to be “those parents” with a crying baby on the flight or having our toddler run up and down the aisles. Given this natural fear, I get a lot of questions from my readers about how to entertain a baby on a plane and the best airplane activities for a 1 year old or toddler.

You’ve come to the right place. The following suggestions for entertaining a baby on a plane or plane activities for 1 year old, come from my real-life experience flying with our babies and toddlers. Whether it was a short-haul flight to visit San Diego with a baby, a long haul flight to Barcelona with a baby or a very long flight to Tokyo with a toddler, I’ve been in your shoes before and I am here to help.

In this post, I share my favorite airplane activities for all ages, starting with flying with an infant, working my way up to flying with a toddler and preschooler. I will share with you my favorite baby travel toys, plane activities for a 1 year old, airplane activities for 18 month old and beyond.

This post contains compensated links.

Flying with a baby or toddler can be stressful. Before you go on your family trip, be sure to read my tips for flying with a baby and surviving air travel with toddlers.

How to Entertain a Baby on a Plane

In this section, I begin with how to entertain a baby on a plane, starting with simple recommendations for flying with an infant, all the way up to activities for a 1 year old on a plane.

Best Infant Travel Toys (0 to 3 Months Old)

In my experience, the best time to start traveling with your children is when they are infants. Traveling with an infant is so easy since they spend most of their time eating and sleeping. Flying with an infant is likely to be one of the easiest flights you’ll take with your baby.

When you fly with an infant who is between 0 to 3 months old, you really don’t need to worry about bringing any infant travel toys or books. Chances are good that your time flying with an infant will be spent cycling between feeding and watching them sleep on the plane.

Best Travel Toys for Infants (3 to 6 Months Old)

At 3 to 6 months old, flying with your baby may still mean a lot of sleeping (hopefully), but your baby may start taking more of an interest in a few simple travel toys as well. Due to their rapidly expanding curiosity, your baby will likely be entertained enough by everything around her on the plane – the seatbelt, the window, fellow passengers, empty plastic cups, etc. But, just in case, it never hurts to have a few baby plane activities in your carry-on.

Best Plane Activities for Babies (6 Months to 1 Year Old)

If you are worried about how to how to entertain 1 year old on a plane, you can relax as this age is pretty easy. I found when traveling with a baby between 6 months and up to 1 year old, they were mostly interested in playing with the stuff on the plane.

In all likelihood, your baby will be similar and will be most interested in their surroundings on the plane, like the safety card, the seat buckle and the window shade. Throw in the empty plastic airplane beverage cup and spoon and you’ve just found the best plane activities for your 9 month old without having to pack them!

At this age, other passengers can be pretty exciting too. Most people love babies (yes, even on airplanes), so finding fellow passenger to play peek-a-boo through the seats is a great way to entertain your baby on a plane. When the novelty of this airplane game wears off, take your child for several “walks” down the aisle.

Air travel with a baby doesn’t have to be complicated.

Snacks are also a great way to entertain a baby on a plane and is also one of my best tips for traveling with a baby. I always bring airplane snacks that work on fine motor skills, thus taking a long time to eat, like Cheerios or Gerber Puffs. Spill-proof toddler snack containers are a lifesaver when flying with a baby!

One of my most successful airplane activities for a 1 year old was an activity ball. I loved how this baby toy could hold my baby’s attention on the plane for a long time. It would also make a great travel toy for road trips with a baby. If you have the room in your travel diaper backpack, this is an activity ball is a great travel toy to entertain you baby on the plane.

How to Entertain a Toddler on a Plane

It should come as no surprise that traveling with a toddler on a plane is completely different than traveling with a baby on a plane. The more mobile your little one gets, the more time you’ll spend entertaining your toddler on the plane. In this section, I cover the two main stages of flying with a toddler: Activities for a 1 year old on a plane as well as plane activities for an 18 month old.

Hoping your toddler will sleep on the flight? Check out these inflatable airplane travel beds for toddlers or read my full Fly Tot Review and Flyaway Kids Bed Review.

The key to ‘surviving’ a flight with a toddler is to have enough airplane activities for your toddler to cycle through. This doesn’t mean you need to fill your carry-on bags with toys, but just make sure you are able to have the airplane activities for your toddler easily accessible.

Pro Tip: The majority of these airplane activities for toddlers also great road trip activities for younger kids.

Best Toddler Airplane Activities (1 Year to 18 Months Old)

In my experience, the most intimidating age to fly with a toddler is between 1 year old and 18 months old, especially if it’s a long haul flight. At 12-18 months old, their attention span is still pretty short, yet they are very active. My Flying with a Toddler post, mentioned above, has all my best tips for flying with a toddler, including getting your toddler to sleep on the plane.

There’s a great illustration from the book Happiest Toddler on the Block that shows a 7 minute time span of an 18 month old in a nursery moving from station to station. This helps to explain why the 1 year old toddler travel toys you packed for your 18 month old will only entertain your toddler for such a short time!

So how do you keep an 18 month old entertained on a plane? Thankfully, the plane and all the passengers on it are still going to be quite a novelty and will definitely entertain your toddler on the plane. Taking many trips up and down the aisle and playing with everything around are great airplane activities for 18 month olds.

In my experience, the best travel toys for toddlers on airplanes are simple toys that are going to be easy to put away and take back out because you’ll be doing a lot of that.

1. Snacks which take longer to eat

Plenty of toddler airplane snacks that will provide some distraction are always a winner when flying with small children. The best snacks for toddlers on the plane are ones that take require simple motor skills and longer to eat, like Cheerios served in a spill-proof snack container.

2. Reading to your Toddler

Reading to our children has always been a big part of our family time and we like to make sure it continues when we travel. Books with plenty of pictures that you can talk about are an excellent way to entertain a toddler on a long flight. I especially like the board books in the First 100 Box Set for this.

3. Travel Activity Packs

4. Simple Apps

5. A Good Selection of Small Travel Toys

6. Mess-free, Reusable Activity Books

Best Airplane Activities for Toddlers (18 Months to 2 Years Old)

When traveling with toddlers between 18 months and 2 years, you’ll find their attention span for watching short cartoons will start to appear. This is good news for flying with a 2-year old as you can get a break every now and then! Don’t forget to pack your best toddler headphones for flying!

To keep your toddler entertained on the flight, here are the best toys for toddlers on planes which helped us get through many long-haul flights. As a bonus, these travel toys also make great road trip activities for toddlers:

1. Books For Toddlers

The benefits of reading to your children are countless. The big benefit of reading to your toddler on the flight is that a good book will engage them and keep them occupied for a longer period of time. A good trick is to bring a selection of their current favorites along with some new toddler books.

As mentioned above, a great alternative to packing lots of heavy toddler books in your carry-on is to get the Epic! Digital Library. I used Epic! extensively while traveling with our small kids – it was a real game change!

Now that your toddler has an attention span for short shows, you can take advantage of the Read to Me stories on Epic!. The Epic! app reads these special stories aloud to your child (using airplane safe headphones of course), while highlighting the words. This is an excellent alternative to mindless Netflix cartoons. Our young kids would ‘read’ these Read to Me stories for hours on end if we’d let them. This feature frees you up to watch a movie or listen to an audio book.

Your upcoming flight is a perfect time to try a free 7 day trial of Epic!. If you don’t like it, simply cancel when you get home from your trip. Worst case is that you have some free toddler entertainment for the flight and for bedtimes during your family holiday.

Airplane Activities for Kids over 2 Years

As your little toddler begins to transition into a preschooler, they will get much easier to entertain on the plane. Flying with a 3 year old is easier than flying with a 2 year old, as their attention span allows them to watch a movie (or chunks of it at a time). 

Kids over 2 can also spend more time focused on a task like coloring or playing with stickers, which makes them excellent 2 year old travel toys.

The Melissa & Doug On the Go Water Wow! Activity Books are still a great mess-free & screen-free airplane activity to bring along. Of course, snacks are always a good way to keep an older toddler happy and busy on the plane.

Epic! – My Favorite Travel App

Ok, so you probably noticed I mentioned the Epic digital library a lot. There’s a reason for that – we used it a ton while traveling with our kids. It was the biggest game changer for us when traveling with babies and toddlers.

Before Epic, we’d lug a bag full of heavy kids books with us on our family trips, but the kids would get bored of them almost right away. With Epic, we could leave the big, heavy books at home and bring a nearly limitless library of baby and toddler books with us on our travels.

As the “Netflix of Children’s Books”, the Epic! reading app is the one travel app I can’t live without. Having a huge selection of children’s books to travel with is a big benefit for parents. We love using the Epic reading app with our kids both for in-flight entertainment and for bedtimes at the hotel.

I hope my personal recommendations for the best airplane activities for babies and toddlers helps make your upcoming flight a lot smoother. You’ve got this!

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