To help prepare your family for a stress-free trip, we’ve put together a list of a few ways that you can enjoy a safe, active holiday with your kids.

Talk to your kids about health and safety

The first step to educating and preparing your kids is to talk to them. You may want to explain the importance of staying by your side in new places and situations, and what they might do should they ever find themselves in trouble.

More specifically, it’s important to have a conversation with your kids before taking on any new activity. As adults, we tend to listen intently to health and safety advice, but rarely relay it onto our kids – assuming that our own awareness of the safety procedures will be enough to protect them. However, the chances of an incident occurring can only be reduced by teaching our kids how they can keep themselves safe.

When trying out daring activities like surfing, rock climbing or water skiing, you’ll want to check that your child has fully understood the instructor’s guidance. Similarly, when spending time at the beach, you could take a moment to explain to your kids the reason we have lifeguards, as well as how to tell which areas are safe for swimming by looking at the placement of the flags on the beach.

Purchase safety aids and inflatables

A holiday isn’t a holiday without a good dip in the sea. When it comes to swimming, parents will want to make sure that they are prepared ahead of time with all the necessary safety equipment that their kids may need to splash around safely. This could mean purchasing or borrowing arm bands for kids who aren’t strong swimmers, or life jackets for particularly adventurous kids.

With supervision, pool inflatables can make both a wonderful safety aid and a toy that will keep your kids entertained for hours – although, you should always make sure that any inflatable purchased is small and light enough for a child to manoeuvre and control with ease.

Get travel insurance

Sometimes accidents do happen, and while you’re unlikely to be faced with a particularly serious crisis on holiday, it’s important to always be prepared. Even for minor cuts and scrapes, getting your kids treated without insurance can be particularly difficult, with potentially several hour waits to get them seen in a surgery or hospital.

Luckily, when you purchase travel insurance, you’ll usually be signing up for medical cover, too. This is a wonderful way to know that you will be protected even after the fact, should anything go wrong.

Lastly

Don’t forget to have fun! While there are precautions to take, you ultimately want to make sure that your kids are staying as active as possible on their holidays. So, once you’ve got health and safety covered, there’s no reason to hold back from trying out plenty of new, outdoorsy activities that could make for the trip of a lifetime.