1

Choose flights that work with your child’s schedule

Of course, it’s tempting to book the cheapest flight available, but the lowest fare isn't always the best value when you're traveling with young children. Whenever possible, look for departure times that line up with your child's regular nap or bedtime . A sleepy child is often far more likely to relax, or even sleep, through a good portion of the journey, making the experience easier for everyone on board.

Direct flights can also be worth paying a little extra for. Every layover means another security check, another boarding process, and another opportunity for delays to throw off routines. Pediatric experts also recommend arriving at the airport with plenty of time to spare, reducing the stress of rushing through terminals with children and luggage. Starting the trip calmly often sets the tone for everything that follows.

2

Bring more snacks than you think you’ll need

If there's one piece of advice nearly every experienced parent agrees on, it's this: pack extra snacks. Delayed flights, long security lines, traffic jams, and unexpected detours have a way of stretching meal times, and hungry children rarely become more patient as the hours pass .

Choose foods that travel well and don't require refrigeration, such as crackers, granola bars, dried fruit, applesauce pouches, or pretzels. Keeping familiar snacks within easy reach can also help picky eaters adjust to new surroundings. Even if you never open every bag, having plenty available provides peace of mind—and may help avoid an expensive airport food stop.

3

Download entertainment before you leave

Modern travel has become much easier thanks to tablets and smartphones, but they're only helpful if the content is actually available when you need it. Airplane Wi-Fi isn't always reliable, mobile signals disappear in remote areas, and onboard entertainment systems occasionally malfunction.

Before leaving home, download favorite movies, television shows, audiobooks, music playlists, and age-appropriate games directly onto your devices . Packing headphones and portable chargers is just as important. Having entertainment ready to go means you'll never have to rely on an internet connection to keep little travelers happily occupied during long stretches of the journey.

4

Pack a complete change of clothes

Children have an incredible talent for finding the one puddle, juice box, or muddy patch capable of soaking an entire outfit. That's why seasoned travelers rarely leave home without packing at least one complete change of clothes in their carry-on luggage .

Include fresh socks, underwear, and a lightweight sweater in addition to a clean outfit. A plastic bag for dirty clothing is another simple addition that can make life much easier. Some parents even pack an extra shirt for themselves, since babies and toddlers have a remarkable ability to spread spills well beyond their own clothes.

5

Reserve seats together whenever possible

Sitting together isn't simply more convenient; it makes traveling significantly easier. Being close allows parents to quickly hand over snacks, help with entertainment, comfort nervous children, and manage unexpected situations without disturbing other passengers .

While many airlines try to seat families together, it's never guaranteed unless seats are selected in advance. Booking early increases your chances of staying together throughout the flight. For infants and toddlers traveling in their own seats, using an FAA-approved child restraint system provides an additional layer of safety during turbulence and takeoff.

6

Include flexibility in your plans

One of the quickest ways to create unnecessary stress is to try to pack every hour of the vacation with activities. Children naturally move at a different pace than adults, and even the most exciting attraction can become overwhelming after a long day.

Instead of scheduling four major attractions in a single afternoon, consider planning one primary activity with plenty of free time around it . Unexpected playground visits, leisurely lunches, or simply taking a break at the hotel often become some of the most enjoyable parts of a family vacation. Leaving room for spontaneity allows everyone to enjoy the trip rather than race through it.

7

Follow proper car seat and booster seat rules

Whether you're driving your own vehicle or renting one at your destination, using the correct child restraint is one of the most important safety decisions you'll make. Motor vehicle crashes remain one of the leading causes of injury and death for children, making proper car seat use essential.

Health and safety experts recommend keeping children rear-facing as long as possible before transitioning to forward-facing seats, followed by booster seats until an adult seat belt fits correctly . Children under 13 are generally safest riding in the back seat. Taking a few extra minutes to install a seat correctly can make a tremendous difference in protecting young passengers.

8

Plan regular breaks on road trips

Adults may be able to drive for hours without stopping, but children usually need regular opportunities to stretch, move around, and burn off energy. Long periods of sitting can quickly lead to boredom, frustration, and restless behavior.

Planning a break every two or three hours gives everyone a chance to use the restroom, grab a snack, or simply walk around for a few minutes . Scenic overlooks, parks, picnic areas, and playgrounds can transform routine stops into enjoyable parts of the journey while helping drivers stay refreshed as well.

9

Bring a familiar comfort item

New places can be exciting, but they can also feel overwhelming for younger travelers. A favorite stuffed animal, blanket, bedtime book, or small pillow provides a comforting reminder of home when everything else feels unfamiliar .

Psychologists often refer to these cherished belongings as "transitional objects" because they help children cope with change and unfamiliar situations. Even older children sometimes appreciate having a familiar item nearby while sleeping in hotels or staying with relatives. Small comforts can make a surprisingly big difference after a busy day of sightseeing.

10

Involve kids in the planning

Vacations become even more exciting when children feel like active participants instead of passive passengers. Depending on their age, let them help choose a restaurant, pick one attraction to visit, or learn interesting facts about the destination before leaving home .

Younger children often enjoy marking locations on a map or helping pack their own travel bag, while older kids may enjoy researching museums, hiking trails, or local foods. Giving every child one special choice during the trip encourages enthusiasm and creates memories they'll feel personally connected to.

11

Keep bedtime routines as consistent as possible

Travel naturally disrupts daily schedules, but maintaining familiar bedtime habits can help children settle down more easily in new surroundings . Reading the same bedtime story, brushing teeth in the usual order, or listening to a familiar lullaby signals that it's time to sleep, even if bedtime happens in a hotel halfway around the world.

Well-rested children generally handle busy sightseeing days, long flights, and unfamiliar environments much better than overtired ones. While vacations don't require military precision, preserving a few comforting routines often helps the entire family enjoy each day a little more.

12

Remember that perfect trips don’t exist

Perhaps the best family travel advice has nothing to do with luggage, flights, or packing lists. Even the most carefully planned vacation will probably include a delayed flight, unexpected rainstorm, forgotten toy, or missed reservation somewhere along the way .

The families who seem to enjoy traveling the most aren't necessarily the ones whose trips go perfectly; they're the ones who treat surprises as part of the adventure. Years later, it's often the unexpected moments that become the funniest stories and the happiest memories. A successful family vacation isn't measured by perfection, but by the experiences you share along the way.

1

George Wilson (1830): The man who refused his own pardon

In 1829, George Wilson and his accomplice James Porter robbed a U.S. mail carrier in Pennsylvania. Both were convicted in May 1830 on six counts, including putting the carrier's life in jeopardy, and sentenced to hang within weeks.

Porter was executed on schedule. But Wilson's influential friends petitioned President Andrew Jackson, who granted Wilson a formal pardon in June 1830, saving him from the gallows. Then Wilson did something that had never happened before in American history: he refused it.

The case was so unprecedented that it reached the Supreme Court in 1833, housed at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., as illustrated above. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the pardon couldn’t be valid without acceptance. However, Wilson was never executed. He served his prison sentence and was eventually pardoned a second time by President Martin Van Buren in 1841.

2

Richard Nixon (1974): The only president ever pardoned

On the night of June 17, 1972, five operatives were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Investigations revealed that President Richard Nixon had known about the cover-up and actively participated in it. Facing near-certain impeachment, Nixon became the only U.S. president ever to resign from office, stepping down in 1974.

Just 30 days later, his successor Gerald Ford announced from the Oval Office that he was granting Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon" for all offenses against the United States committed between 1969 and 1974. No charges had even been filed. The decision was widely condemned. Many historians believe it cost Ford the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter. Nixon accepted the pardon but never admitted criminal guilt, expressing only "regret" for how he had handled the situation.

3

Iva Toguri D'Aquino (1977): The woman they called "Tokyo Rose"

Iva Toguri D'Aquino was a Los Angeles-born 25-year-old visiting a sick relative in Japan when the attack on Pearl Harbor stranded her there in December 1941. The Japanese government declared her an enemy alien and coerced her into broadcasting on Radio Tokyo's Zero Hour program.

This was a Japanese psychological warfare strategy that utilized English-speaking women, eventually all referred to collectively as " Tokyo Rose," to broadcast demoralizing messages intended to weaken Allied troop morale. After Japan's surrender, journalists identified Toguri as one of the voices.

A jury convicted her of treason in 1949, and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She served six years. After a 1976 CBS 60 Minutes segment revealed key witnesses had lied, President Gerald Ford granted her a full and unconditional pardon in 1977, on his final day in office. It remains the only presidential pardon ever granted for a treason conviction in U.S. history.

4

Jack Johnson (2018): A champion pardoned 72 years after his death

John Arthur "Jack" Johnson was the first Black man ever to hold the world heavyweight boxing championship. In May 1913, a jury convicted him under the Mann Act (a federal law against transporting women across state lines for "immoral purposes") for traveling with his white girlfriend, whom he had since married.

Johnson skipped bail, fled to Canada, and fought two world title defenses in Paris before losing the belt in Havana in 1915. He surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1920 and served nearly a year in Kansas. He died in a car crash at age 68 in North Carolina in 1946.

After years of bipartisan lobbying and a call from actor Sylvester Stallone, President Trump signed Johnson's posthumous pardon in the Oval Office in 2018, 105 years after the conviction.

5

Samuel Mudd (1869): The doctor who set the assassin's leg

Hours after John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., one April night in 1865, Booth arrived at the Maryland farm of Dr. Samuel Mudd with a broken leg.

Mudd set the fracture and gave Booth shelter. When investigators linked Mudd to Booth, including through prior meetings in 1864, he was tried by a military commission and convicted of conspiracy. Sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, he was sent to Fort Jefferson, a remote military prison on an island 70 miles west of Key West, Florida.

In 1867, a deadly yellow fever outbreak killed the prison's doctor. Mudd stepped in, treating patients and helping contain the epidemic. A petition signed by 299 enlisted men and officers was sent to President Andrew Johnson praising Mudd's courage. Johnson granted Mudd a full and unconditional pardon in 1869. Mudd was released on March 8 and returned to his Maryland farm. His conviction was never overturned; the pardon freed him, but the guilty verdict stood.

6

Marc Rich (2001): A fugitive pardoned on the last day

Marc Rich was a billionaire commodities trader indicted in 1983 on 65 counts, including tax evasion, wire fraud, and trading oil with Iran during the 1979–1981 hostage crisis. Before facing trial, Rich fled to Switzerland, where he remained a fugitive from U.S. justice for 17 years.

On January 20, 2001, his very last day in office, President Bill Clinton granted Rich a full pardon, bypassing the standard Justice Department review process. T he pardon ignited one of the biggest controversies of Clinton's presidency. Rich's ex-wife Denise had donated more than $1 million to Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.

A federal investigation led by prosecutor Mary Jo White was launched but ultimately found no criminal wrongdoing by Clinton. Clinton's own Justice Department had recommended against the pardon. Rich died in Switzerland in June 2013 at the age of 78, never having returned to the United States.

7

Patty Hearst (2001): From kidnapped heiress to bank robber

Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, in 1974. She was taken by a radical militant group called the Symbionese Liberation Army.

After weeks in captivity, in which she was kept in a closet, blindfolded, she appeared in a bank surveillance video holding a rifle and participating in the robbery of a bank in San Francisco. She was captured in September 1975. Her defense argued she had been brainwashed and acted under duress. A jury rejected that argument, and she was convicted of bank robbery in 1976 and sentenced to 7 years.

President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979 after she had served approximately 22 months. She was released and married her former bodyguard. In January 2001, President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon in the final hours of his presidency.

8

Vietnam Draft Evaders (1977): The biggest blanket pardon in U.S. history

On his first full day as president in 1977, Jimmy Carter signed Proclamation 4483, granting an unconditional pardon to all Americans who had violated the Military Selective Service Act in the span of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The government estimated that approximately 210,000 men had been formally accused of draft violations , while hundreds of thousands more had never been charged. Many had fled to other countries, roughly 90% to Canada, where they had been welcomed as legal immigrants.

Carter had campaigned openly on the promise, calling it necessary to heal a nation still divided by the war. The pardon did not extend to military deserters. Veterans' organizations were furious. Despite the backlash, an estimated 50,000 of those eligible chose to remain in Canada permanently, never returning home.

9

Scooter Libby (2007 / 2018): The spy scandal at the heart of the White House

Lewis "Scooter" Libby served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration. In 2003, the identity of Valerie Plame (a covert CIA officer) was leaked to journalists, apparently in retaliation against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had publicly challenged the administration's case for the Iraq War.

Though Libby was not charged with the leak itself, he was convicted in 2007 of four felony counts: obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and making false statements to the FBI. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000. Later that same year, President Bush commuted Libby's prison sentence, calling it "excessive," but left the conviction, fine, and probation intact; he declined to grant a full pardon. Eleven years later, in 2018, President Donald Trump issued a full pardon, completely wiping Libby's record clean.

10

Roger Clinton (2001): The president's half-brother

Roger Clinton is the younger half-brother of President Bill Clinton. Roger was given the Secret Service code name "Headache" during his brother's administration. In 1984, Arkansas state police ran an undercover sting operation that caught Roger selling illegal drugs to an informant. He pleaded guilty in 1985 to charges of conspiracy to distribute drugs and served approximately one year in federal prison, completing his sentence in 1986.

14 years later, on his last day in office, President Clinton granted Roger a full pardon, clearing his criminal record. The pardon drew relatively little public outrage compared to the Marc Rich case.

1

Rachel Jackson: A "Bigamy" scandal (1820s)

In 1791, a young Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson. Both believed her first husband, Captain Lewis Robards, had successfully finalized their divorce. Apparently, Robards didn’t file the petition, making her marriage to Jackson technically bigamous. Once the divorce went through in 1794, they officially remarried.

During the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson’s political opponents used this legal mistake against him. They branded Rachel a loose woman and a bigamist in pamphlets scattered across the country. The intense public shaming broke her spirit and deteriorated her health. She suffered a fatal heart attack just days before Jackson’s inauguration, leaving the newly elected president heartbroken and extremely bitter toward his political rivals for the rest of his life.

2

Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child (1884)

Decades later, another personal bombshell rocked another presidential race. Republican opponents revealed that Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland, a bachelor praised for his integrity, had fathered a child out of wedlock with a widow called Maria Halpin ten years before.

Republicans paraded through the streets chanting, "Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?" Instead of denying the affair or trying to bury it, Cleveland instructed his campaign managers to do something radical: "Tell the truth." He admitted to supporting the child financially. His honesty caught his opponents off guard and won over voters who were tired of such dirty political tactics.

3

The Crédit Mobilier scandal (1872)

This particular scandal stands as one of the most shameless corporate schemes of the Gilded Age. Stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad formed a fraudulent construction company called Crédit Mobilier of America . Then, they hired themselves to build the transcontinental railroad at inflated prices, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies.

To prevent Congress from investigating their profit margins, Congressman Oakes Ames distributed discounted shares of the company’s stock to influential politicians, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax. When the press exposed the story in 1872, the revelation that lawmakers were bribing themselves tarnished the legacy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration.

4

The Whiskey Ring scandal (1875)

A few years later, another financial disaster hit the Grant administration. The Whiskey Ring was a widespread conspiracy involving distillers, distributors, and internal federal tax officials who stole millions of dollars in liquor taxes.

Using a complex web of bribes and falsified records, the ring defrauded the U.S. Treasury. The scandal reached the inner circle of power when President Grant’s own private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted as a ringleader. Grant provided a deposition in his secretary’s defense. While this saved Babcock from prison, it permanently damaged the president’s reputation.

5

The Teapot Dome scandal (1920s)

Until Watergate occurred, Teapot Dome was synonymous with political corruption. During the administration of Warren G. Harding, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took control of valuable federal oil reserves located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California.

Instead of opening these fields up for competitive bidding among energy companies, Fall secretly leased the drilling rights to private oil tycoons in exchange for more than $400,000 in bribes.

6

The Chappaquiddick incident (1969)

By the mid-20th century, the nature of political scandals shifted. Secrets began to involve personal crisis and tragic losses.

In July 1969, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy drove his car off a narrow wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. The vehicle overturned into a tidal pond, trapping and drowning his passenger, 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy managed to escape but failed to report the fatal accident to the police for ten hours. Although he eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, his delayed reaction ended his lifelong presidential ambitions.

7

The Pentagon Papers (1971)

In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg felt the moral obligation to leak a top-secret 7,000-page Department of Defense study detailing U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

Published by The New York Times , the papers exposed a disturbing truth: successive administrations had systematically lied to both Congress and the American public. The documents proved that the government had expanded the war and increased troop counts while knowing that the conflict was unwinnable. The Supreme Court eventually rejected the government’s attempts to block the leaks, making a victory for freedom of the press.

8

The Watergate scandal (1972–1974)

This is, probably, the ultimate American political scandal. In June 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The break in itself was minor compared to the illegal cover-up orchestrated by President Richard Nixon and his collaborators. From paying hush money to instructing the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation, Nixon’s complicity was exposed via his own secret White House taping system. Facing impeachment and conviction by the Senate, Nixon became the first and only U.S. president to resign from office.

9

The "Keating Five" (Late 1980s)

During the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s, five U.S. Senators—John McCain, Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, and Donald Riegle—came under intense scrutiny.

The group was accused of intervening with federal banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who had contributed to their political campaigns. Lincoln eventually collapsed, costing American taxpayers over $3 billion. Although the Senate Ethics Committee ultimately cleared the senators of corruption, they were publicly condemned.

10

The Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair (1998)

The 20th century ended with a scandal that blended personal infidelity with a constitutional crisis. In 1998, news broke that President Bill Clinton had an intimate relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern called Monica Lewinsky.

The affair turned into a legal battle when Clinton denied the relationship under oath during an unrelated sexual harassment lawsuit. The investigation led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate ultimately acquitted him, yet he couldn’t bypass the media circus.