The simplest objects in your bag can do more for your toddler's development, and your family's enjoyment, than any device on the market.
Holidays with a toddler present a tempting bargain: hand over a tablet, and the journey becomes quieter. Yet the research is consistent and rather encouraging, because it tells us that the alternative, hands-on play with simple, open-ended objects, is not a hardship for children but a genuine delight. Compact wooden toys, small puzzles, and portable traditional games offer something a screen cannot: they invite your child to reach, sort, imagine, and talk, all while sitting on your lap at 30,000 feet or on a blanket outside a village café. The good news for parents is that "screen-free" does not mean "bag-heavy" or "expensive." A handful of well-chosen pieces can sustain a toddler through an entire holiday week.
The short answer to the question of what to pack is this: choose toys that transform, that can be used in more than one way, that encourage conversation, and that fit inside a zip-lock bag. A set of small wooden stacking pieces, a travel puzzle, a compact game with simple rules. These are the things that researchers, from Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff to Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI project, consistently identify as the kinds of objects that stretch toddler cognition furthest. Open-ended, manipulable, and social: those three qualities are your packing criteria.
Routine is both the friend and the enemy of screen habits. At home, a device often fills a specific slot: the commute, the cooking hour, the tired afternoon. On holiday, those slots dissolve. Nap times shift, mealtimes move outdoors, and the whole day becomes less structured. This disruption, which can feel alarming at first, is actually an opening. Your toddler is already in a novel environment, already curious, already alert to new textures, voices, and smells. That heightened curiosity is precisely the state in which play-based learning flourishes most readily.
The World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two, and no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for children aged three to four. A holiday is not an opportunity to relax those guidelines; it is an opportunity to discover that relaxing them was never necessary in the first place.
What the research tells us
Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's work on playful learning demonstrates that toddlers acquire language, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving skills most efficiently through object play guided by a responsive adult. A toy that prompts a child to ask "what does this do?" and prompts a parent to answer is worth more, developmentally, than passive screen consumption of equivalent duration.
The evidence base for play-based development in the early years is remarkably deep. Piaget identified manipulable objects as the primary vehicle through which toddlers build schemas, those internal maps of how the world works. Vygotsky showed that play with a more capable partner, a parent or an older sibling, stretches a child into what he called the zone of proximal development, the productive edge just beyond current ability. More recently, Adele Diamond's research on executive function confirms that play requiring attention, rule-following, and turn-taking builds the very cognitive skills that predict school readiness.
Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study, which rated toys against developmental outcomes for toddlers and pre-schoolers, found that the highest-scoring items were almost always simple, open-ended, and social. Small construction sets, puzzles, and games with pieces that children could manipulate outperformed electronic toys on every developmental measure assessed. The most valuable toys were those that required children to think, problem-solve, and interact with others. That is a description that fits a travel puzzle or a set of stacking cups rather more neatly than a touchscreen.
A note on language
Hart and Risley's landmark research on early language acquisition found that the quality of conversational turns between parent and child is the most powerful predictor of vocabulary at age three. Every time a toddler reaches for a wooden piece and you name it, describe it, or ask a question about it, you are building that conversational turn count. A screen, by contrast, offers words to a child without inviting a response.
There is something particularly well-suited about traditional wooden toys to the holiday context. They are not contingent on batteries, Wi-Fi, or a charged device. They do not overheat in a beach bag or freeze on a mountain. They respond to a child's actions rather than generating actions for the child to observe. Montessori observed that the hand is the instrument of the mind, and a wooden toy places that instrument at the centre of the experience. The child turns it, stacks it, fits it, tips it, and in doing so builds the neural pathways that underpin fine motor control, spatial awareness, and cause-and-effect reasoning.
Away from home, the familiar weight and texture of a beloved wooden toy also provides comfort. Gopnik's research on early childhood learning emphasises that toddlers are extraordinarily sensitive to novelty, and that a safe, known object in an unfamiliar environment allows them to explore that environment from a secure base. Packing a small wooden toy your child already loves is not mere sentimentality; it is sound developmental strategy.
Browse Jaques London's collection of wooden toys, crafted for toddlers and designed to travel.The ideal travel toy for a toddler is small enough to fit in a shoulder bag, robust enough to survive a checked suitcase, and open-ended enough to be played with in at least three different ways. Stacking and sorting toys meet all three criteria: the pieces nest together for packing, they can be stacked, sorted by colour, lined up, or used in imaginative play, and wooden construction means they withstand the rigours of transit. Small threading toys, compact shape-sorters, and simple nesting cups similarly pack flat or small and offer considerable developmental range.
For children closer to three and four, a travel puzzle with chunky pieces and a frame that keeps everything contained is an excellent choice. Puzzles develop spatial reasoning, persistence, and the satisfying sense of completion that toddlers find genuinely motivating. Kept in a zip-lock bag or a small fabric pouch, a six-to-twelve piece wooden puzzle takes up almost no space and can occupy a child through a long meal or a delayed departure.
The category of travel games has expanded considerably in recent years, but the principles of what works for under-fives remain constant. Games should be short, should require no reading, should involve physical handling of pieces, and should accommodate the reality that a toddler may not finish a game or follow all the rules on every occasion. That imperfect play is not failure. Panksepp and Pellis both identify the emotional and social benefits of flexible, rule-light play in early childhood, and the same logic applies at a table.
Skittles in miniature form travel surprisingly well and can be set up on a hotel room floor or a garden path. Simple card-matching games with bold images are excellent for two-year-olds beginning to develop memory and categorisation. Traditional games that have been played for generations, and therefore refined over time to be intuitive and engaging, tend to outperform novelty designs in holding a toddler's attention across multiple sittings.
Explore Jaques London's travel games, designed for families on the move since 1795.Suskind's work on language development reinforces what Hart and Risley established: the conversational environment parents create around play is as important as the toy itself. On holiday, with the ordinary pressures of work and routine lifted, parents are often more present and more playful than at home. That quality of attention, directed through a simple game or a handful of wooden pieces, is enormously productive. Berk's research on private speech in early childhood shows that toddlers playing with objects talk to themselves and to their toys, rehearsing language, narrating action, and building vocabulary in ways that screen viewing does not support.
Play as connection
Ginsburg, writing for the American Academy of Pediatrics, describes play as "the work of childhood" and identifies parent-child play specifically as a vehicle for secure attachment. A holiday, with its slower pace and shared novelty, is one of the richest opportunities in a year for that kind of connected, attentive play. A simple game played together on a sun-warmed terrace will likely be remembered long after the details of any destination fade.
The transition away from screen reliance on journeys is best managed gradually and with realistic expectations. Introduce a new, small toy at home a few days before travel so it carries some familiarity when it reappears on the plane or in the car. On the journey itself, the most effective non-screen strategy is sustained parental engagement: narrating what you see, singing, playing simple finger games, or working through a small puzzle together. Radesky's research on mobile device use during family interactions notes that even brief, attentive parent engagement dramatically reduces a toddler's agitation. A twenty-minute window of active play with a wooden toy, followed by rest, tends to work better than expecting sustained independent occupation for the whole journey.
High-quality wooden toys are among the most durable objects you can pack. Unlike plastic, well-made wood does not crack or splinter under ordinary handling, and unlike electronic toys it carries no battery risk in hold or cabin. For hand luggage, the considerations are size and piece count: small, self-contained sets with no loose parts smaller than a toddler's fist are straightforward to pack and pass through security without issue. Jaques London's wooden toys are finished to smooth, rounded standards specifically appropriate for young children. It is worth checking individual airline guidelines on toy pieces, though in practice a small wooden puzzle or stacking toy presents no difficulty at any security checkpoint.
Less than you think, and more strategically than you might expect. Research on toddler attention and play complexity suggests that a very small number of open-ended toys, used flexibly and rotated, sustains engagement more effectively than a large selection. For a week's holiday with a two-year-old, three to four items is a sound total: one familiar comfort toy, one open-ended manipulative such as a stacking or sorting set, one simple game or puzzle, and one item that can be used outdoors, a ball or a set of travel skittles. Rotate access to them across the week rather than presenting all at once. Novelty, even with familiar objects, resets attention effectively in children this age.
Rapid boredom in toddlers is almost always a signal that a toy lacks sufficient challenge or flexibility rather than that the child has a short attention span. Dauch's research found that toddlers play longer and more creatively with fewer, more open-ended toys than with a large selection of single-purpose items. The practical implication is to choose toys with multiple modes of use: something that can be stacked, sorted, nested, and incorporated into pretend play will hold a two-year-old's attention across far more sittings than a toy with a single, fixed outcome. Your presence also matters considerably. Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI data consistently showed that the same toy produced dramatically different engagement depending on whether an adult played alongside the child. Even five minutes of shared, attentive play at the start of a session often sustains a toddler through a much longer period of independent exploration afterwards.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.