Preparing Kids to Fly Solo

It’s a scary moment, that first time you watch your child disappear through the gate without you. You can’t help wondering how even a well-traveled teen will react if something goes amiss, a flight is canceled, late or overbooked, or they miss a connection. But you can prepare them for those later solo trips right now, while they travel with you.

Take advantage of family trips to teach your kids how to navigate airports, find the right gates, retrieve luggage and deal with delays.

For young kids it can begin as a game as soon as they can read or count. Who can spot the sign first? Set little kids to counting gate numbers until you get to the right one. Some airports even make it fun, like Barajas Airport in Madrid with its color-coded gates and corresponding painted ceiling supports in rainbow order the length of the terminal. Our oldest still stops to click photos of the long view of the rainbow terminal every time we go through Barajas (which is often, since we travel Iberia a lot).

Barajas Airport Terminal, Spain. Photo: Stillman Rogers

Enlist kids to help you find the signs and arrows, giving them a chance to feel successful even if you’ve spotted it first. Let them be the guides through airports and find the right gates — you’ll soon discover this has another advantage: It puts them ahead of you where you can see them, not straggling behind. As they get older, let them be the ones who stand in front of the Departures board waiting for the gates to be announced. (Added bonus: You may be able find a nearby seat where you can watch them.)

Leading you through the airport maze also keeps them busy and involved, conscious of their surroundings and better able to deal with emergencies should you be accidentally separated. Sitting waiting for boarding is a good opportunity to play “what if” about airport safety. What would you do if you couldn’t see us? Who is it safe to ask for help?

Kids can be part of the process every step of the way,  spotting the shortest TSA line, determining the right passport lane, locating the baggage carousel for your flight, finding the car rental signs on arrival, using the transit ticket machines (teens have an amazing ability to do this almost instinctively in any language).

Take advantage of all their tech savvy — when we arrived at Marco Polo Airport in Venice and needed to find the landing for boats to San Marco, our 13-year-old found a YouTube video that pictured the entire route and she led us right to the boat.

By the time our oldest was 17, she was a confident flyer and on her first solo trip when she was about to be bumped from an overbooked flight she knew exactly what to do, what tone to take. She got a seat. She also made a tight connection when her return flight was delayed. But she had been leading the way in airports since she was 10.