When Your Kid Gets Car Sick
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If your kid regularly gets car sick or it runs in the family, a road trip can seem like a scary adventure. You never know when your child might feel queasy on the road, so pack a box of supplies for cleaning up so you’re prepared for car sickness.
Whether you’re just running errands or going on a Road Trip, it’s important to have a Car Sickness Kit on hand. Here’s how to put one together, including motion sickness remedies for kids, throw up bags, and cleaning supplies.
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Family road trips can be great fun and create fantastic memories for parents and children alike. While Road Trip Snacks and Travel Essentials for Family Trips are important things to plan for, so is the inevitable bout of car sickness.
Yes, you hate to think about it. But, when your child hollers, “Mom, I feel sick!” from the backseat as you tool along the Five with no place to stop, you’re going to have to think about it. So, plan ahead.
Why It Matters
Both my girls tend toward car sickness. Experience — like when both of them threw up in the car two days in a row — has taught me to be prepared for car sickness.
Trying to clean up the Rapunzel doll’s hair in the aftermath is no fun. Trust me.
You never know when your child might feel queasy on the road, so pack a Car Sickness Kit and keep it in the car. You’ll feel so thankful you’re ready to face the challenge.
FAQs
The following health information is not to replace the medical advice of a doctor.
The Mayo Clinic explains that car sickness, a type of motion sickness occurs when your child’s brain gets confusing information from the eyes, inner ear, and nervous system, such as when they feel the movement of the car, but because their vision is blocked by a large seat, the movement and their view don’t match up. The same can happen on amusement park rides.
Normally healthy people can experience motion sickness symptoms which typically go away about 4 hours after the motion has ceased. Should these persist, be sure to seek medical care.
For persistent nausea and vomiting, contact your family physicians’ office and ask the doctor or nurse for their advice.
Things to help you prevent car sickness or treat motion sickness symptoms:
They say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If you can prevent your child from getting car sickness to begin with, so much the better.
We’ve used trial and error over the last few years, and now have a complete arsenal of preventive methods.
To avoid car sickness, consider packing these items:
- child-size sea bands
- peppermint or ginger candies
- Children’s Dramamine
- peppermint or lavender essential oils – either diluted in a rollerball or drops placed on the sea bands
We use these in combination on long road trips, particularly since our daughter gets anxious about the idea of traffic and getting sick.
Some of them may have a placebo affect, but my motto is “whatever works when puke’s involved.”
Things to help you in the event of car sickness:
All the prevention methods in the world won’t clean up the mess, so it’s important to keep these items on hand for when the worst really does happen.
I keep these things on hand:
- paper towels – for wiping up
- disinfecting wipes – for sanitizing
- large plastic cups or ziptop freezer bags – these can stand in for vomit bags.
- mini can of Lysol – for fumigating and sanitizing
- squirt bottle or bottled water – for wiping off car seats, seat belts, and Rapunzel’s tangled doll hair (don’t ask)
- plastic trash bags – to contain all the trash and mucked up clothes
- hand sanitizing spray – to clean up the parents and helpers
It is now standard operating procedure to hand the boys puke bags so that they can hand them to their sisters should they get sick en route. And if they miss the vomit bag, well, we’re prepared for clean up duty, too.
More Family Travel Tips
What works for you?
Leave a comment below and let us know what works for you.
This post was originally published June 7, 2011. It has been updated for content and clarity.
I too would definitely add the change of clothes in the bag. My kids all had a stage when they were prone to car sickness.
We save the large sized Kraft butter jars for the sole purpose of acting as an emergency resevoir. It’s just always in the back seat of both vehciles. It’s come in handy before and it’s a wonderful thing to have a tight screw-on leak proof lid. Seriously. I’d recommend it for every vehicle!
Getting stuck like this has happened to me numerous times and when it does I hand over a peppermint life saver. It has saved the day I can’t tell you how many times. I buy the big bag of individually wrapped candies and they reside permanently in the glove compartment.
I get car sick and my husband found this wonderful natural oil at West Marine called Motion Ease that you put behind your ears. It works WONDERS! No more carsickness for me 🙂
@Coby, I still get car sick (& air sick, sea sick, train sick…you get the picture) and I LOVE Motion Ease!!! I always had to take Dramamine and it would totally knock me out (even the less drowsy kind). Motion Ease does work wonders!!! My oldest daughter is prone to car sickness as well and works great for her too. We also use it on all of the kids for airplane rides just as a preventive measure. Since it’s all natural I’m not concerned about using it just in case.
My son is prone to carsickness, and though he’s older we don’t always have much warning. I put 2-3 paper towels in the bottom of a gallon-sized ziploc, and put that into the seatback pocket of the seat in front of where he sits. But he’s also used the little pop-up trashcan I keep in my van (thankfully, I had a spare plastic grocery bag in the car and got it lined just. in. time).
FYI – my daughter’s allergist shared this little tidbit with me – Benadryl and Dramamine share the same active ingredient, Dramamine just has something extra in it (to keep you awake?). If you already have Benadryl on hand, you can also use it to combat motion sickness (and I don’t know anyone who minds a sleepy child if you’re spending a lot of time in the road or in the air!).
Our 6 year old gets car sick just driving around town. So, on a drive of any distance we have to be prepared.
On longer trips we usually have a bag of extra clothing for all of us. One trip I put aside extra clothes for the kids which we needed after a vomit fest which also included getting sick on Mom! Needless to say we had to unpack most of the van to get to my clothes 🙁 At least the kids were dry and clean 🙂
We also take some large bath towels. The kids use them blankets and if they get sick on them no big deal. We aren’t washing out their favorite blankie in the gas station sink!
We don’t eat big meals before we hit the road. Lots of fluids and snack along the way.
Thanks for the great tips! I need to add a spray bottle for easier clean up of car seats. And I think I also need to look into the Sea Bands.
These are excellent tips, there were a few trips that I wished I would have been so prepared. Let me tell you, stripping down a crying toddler in a rest stop during a downpour at 1 am in the morning isn’t fun 🙂
Just a note – no matter how old your kids get this is still potentially an issue not only for a car ride but also a plane ride. When my daughter was 11 we had a mess in the middle of an airport terminal and while in the air. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to think about modifying the kit for airplane rides also. Flight attendants in coach aren’t to thrilled with helping with the clean-up.
Thank goodness my kids don’t get sick!
We drove from NY to Disney World last summer and thank goodness neither of my kids got car sick. These are FANTASTIC tips and will definetly put in action for our road trips this summer. Because it would be a total disaster to have someone get sit on the road without any type of reinforcements. Thanks again!
My son was three the first time he threw up on a road trip. Now, he takes Dramamine before car and plane trips… nothing else has helped. Every once in awhile, we try to go without. We’ve figured out that he can do about 25-30 minutes in the car before he gets sick. The only way to fix it is to let him get out of the car and walk around for 20 minutes or so.