Air travel trick
Our family either lives too far from us or is too busy to take care of our kids for an extended period of time, so that means my wife and I do most of our business travel together, with our toddler Briani in tow. Along the way we’ve learned some tricks on how to travel by plane as efficiently and stress free as possible.

Our family’s air travel advice is what I call the leave-the-plane last trick. This means that when traveling with your kids (or alone for that matter) you should always let everyone else in the entire plane disembark first. This runs counterintuitive to human nature because most of us want to immediately flee our plane seats, but trust me, this is actually wise advice for one key reason: your luggage is not going to rush out to you.

The first perk of being last is that you will not trample or be trampled by other passengers. By the time you have safely left the plane, gone to the bathroom and reached the luggage area, 95 percent of the time your luggage will miraculously be on or about to reach the conveyor belt. You’ll be at the same exact place you would have been minus the hassle, the stress and long wait of rushing to get luggage that wouldn’t have been there for you anyway.

What air travel family traveling trick can you share with us?

Reporting home trick
We live just houses away from many of my son Jonathan’s closest neighborhood friends. Given our proximity to them and the fact that I know all of these kids and their parents, you might assume that I feel reasonably secure whenever Jonathan declares he’s going to see if his friend Trip or Max are home to play.

In order to balance my need to protect my son and his desire to be trusted, I’ve created what I call the five-minutes-to-report home rule. The rule is that whenever my son goes to check on a friend, he has exactly five minutes to report back to me what he’s doing with his friends. If my son does not get back to me within five exact minutes or less, I will go look for him and instruct him to go home at once.

What’s your trick for keeping your kids safe and ...