Travel With Kids - Bathroom Essentials Checklist

Traveling with children can be a delightful adventure or a challenge. Children and teens have the same needs adults do, plus a few extra needs, or their bathroom essentials are adapted to their size. One of the key components of travel with kids is for each of them to have a unique bathroom bag. The ingredients of a kid's bathroom bag are only as good as the lesson of that goes with it: how to always return the objects of the bathroom bag to the actual bag.

Bathroom bags aren't just for road travel. Children can find use for toiletry bags when they switch from parent to parent during visitation swaps, when they need to clean up after a sports activity, or when they go to a friend's for an overnight visit. In a pinch, a parent can use a large Ziploc in lieu of the actual bag, as long as they have the key ingredients in the bag.

Here are some key components to put into your child's bathroom bag:

• toothbrush
• toothpaste
• comb/brush
• shampoo
• lotion/sunblock
• chapstick
• nail clippers

• hair accessories
• small washcloth
• hair product: hair spray, hair gel, or hair mousse
• perfume/cologne
• floss
• mouth wash

The teen travelers has a few extra things they need that a younger child just won't have the need for:

• razors
• shaving cream
• make up
• menstrual pads/tampons

Other reasons a bathroom bag can help out a child:

• when a child travels to and from parents that are divorced
• when a child has a sports activity and needs to clean up after practice
• when a child travels with a school to an overnight and needs it
• when a child shares a bathroom with other siblings and wants their things kept separately
• when a child has a puppy that likes to chew on things, like toothbrushes!

It becomes a chore to buy the things that weren't packed or planned for, when one is on vacation. It becomes a challenge to find stores that sell the desired items, when one is in the remote countryside or in a wooded location, far from the convenience of shopping centers in big cities or nearby suburbs.

Recently, when traveling, my own children were unable to find their toothbrushes so off to the store we went to purchase more. Then, when we returned to the hotel, they couldn't find their hair brushes. It wasn't that we didn't have them. It was just that they couldn't find them. Another 45 minutes of vacation time was spent finding the hair brushes that should have been packed into a bathroom bag to begin with.

Avoid the agony. Travel prepared!