At 12-18 months, your child will be very used to his or her own room at your accommodation. If you choose to share a room while traveling, there may be some light sleeping or sleep refusal.

When traveling to different time zones, keep jet lag and time differences in mind for toddlers with rigid sleep schedules that they thrive on. Here are a few ways to manage sleep at 12-18 months while away from home.

Get your child their own space (if you can)

We found vacation to go a lot more smoothly when we got accommodations with two rooms after our child turned 1. Of course, it costs more and it’s not always possible, but it’s one of our priorities for managing sleep as a family while traveling.

Seek out accommodation with 2 bedrooms

Starting at 12 months, we sought out accommodation with 2 rooms for our trips. We nearly made it into a dealbreaker. As we see it, getting our child her own room while we travel is as close to we can get as our setup at home, where she has been sleeping in a crib in her own room since 4 months old.

Here’s what to do: Filter your Airbnb or vacation rental search by “bedrooms” if you’re aiming for getting your child their own room. Or, seek out hotel suites. If neither works, due to budget or availability, keep reading.

For a two-night stay at our friends’ home in Florida, we had our child sleep in a travel crib in a walk-in closet that had no door because the house only had one guest room. This was as close as we could get to having “two rooms.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was not forever!

Try a toddler sleeping tent if room-sharing

We talk a lot about the SlumberPod blackout tent, mostly because we have friends who swear by it. It’s a product to use if you WILL be sharing a hotel room with your child, and it gives them their own space, their own darkness and even some closure to having their own sound machine, with a fan option in the model we got.

Don’t worry, it’s vented and your child will breathe easy. So many families are traveling with products like this in order to make room-sharing possible when toddlers are very used to their own spaces. The only downside is that it’s a little big to fly with: kind of like the size of a big quilt, rolled-up.

Bring bedtime routine essentials from home

Starting even earlier than 12 months, we decided to nail the checklist of having all our child’s sleep things with us when we traveled. Head to the 12-18 month travel packing checklist after reading this chapter.

Bring comforting books

For reading at bedtime, even if you’ve read them 100 times, bring a familiar book from home for mimicking a beloved bedtime routine. It brings a touch of home to your vacation.

Bring a travel sound machine

The sounds of home creates familiarity with new environments that may seem scary. We always travel with a travel sound machine, whether it’s one night at the grandparents’ house, or 12 nights away from home on another continent.

While a sound machine doesn’t drown out every noise (it certainly didn’t drown out the 5:30am rooster caw-ing in the Colombian countryside…), it helps create consistency and it’s a travel “must” for us and our toddler.

Pack those crib stuffies/animals

At this age, your toddler may be VERY attached to a crib stuffy. Ours was!

Some families even bring a spare of the “favorite” crib lovey, in case the first one gets lost, dirty, misplaced or damaged during the trip. We were very careful with our child’s #1 stuffed animal, and luckily her preferred lovey was travel-sized to begin with.

While no one will talk about it when your child hits the age of falling in love with a crib buddy, having a travel-sized one is VERY important if you plan to travel while they’re still young!

Bring your baby monitor

If your toddler will be sleeping in another room, be sure to have your baby monitor. With our baby monitor in tote, we were able to see when our toddler fell asleep, and also view the approximate room temperature when we were downstairs in our friends’ villa in Colombia.

Plan for different temperatures in sleep environments

Your child may be sensitive to overnight changes in temperatures, especially while traveling, if their senses are heightened to a brand new sleep environment at this age.

What to do: Bring our favorite hack: a mini room thermometer, to determine the best sleepwear for the night. And, come prepared with an assortment of sleepwear options, from PJs to sleep sacks.

Plan for some wakeups

This is probably the least glamorous part of traveling with a toddler who doesn’t understand the new sleep environment. Even at an age where toddlers tend to sleep nicely through the night, new sounds like roosters, loud garbage trucks, noisy neighbors heard through thin walls or simply, sounds from A/C units or heating coming on, may have your toddler yelp in the night asking for you.

Here’s what to do during your trip.

Go to bed early to compensate

While not romantic nor exciting, going to bed early (for parents!) can help compensate for a night of unknowns. In Colombia, I went to bed at 9pm because after a few nights, I learned that our child might wake up in the middle of the night, realizing she was not home, and then again at 5:30am when the rooster woke up to sing.

Check for signs of being sick

If your child is waking up repeatedly, check your child for any signs of illness that may have been contracted during travel. In our child’s case, it wasn’t always obvious that she was sick, as she often gets fevers and no other symptoms.

To our surprise, during traveling when she was in the 12-18 month phase, she popped a fever that lasted five days and affected sleep for all of us, unfortunately. Tylenol or Motrin can really help, if you put your child down for the night with a dose.