Getting kids involved in the planning

Sulster

Earning My Ears
Joined
Jan 9, 2018
We're planning our first trip with our DDs aged 5 and 9. I have been doing most of the planning myself but would like to get them involved.

So far I have made a list of all of the characters they could meet and asked them to give a yay or nay. Of course they disagreed on a lot of them. lol

What else can I do? I have some planning books that we could look through. Watching YouTube videos is also an option, but don't want to make everything anti-climatic.

Any suggestions?
 
i think the planning books are a good idea, especially ones geared toward kids. My kids loved looking at park maps at those ages too.

When my kids were younger, we talked a lot about priorities, how we won’t have time to do EVERYTHING, but we’ll try to do everyone’s FAVORITE things. So instead of saying yes or no to each character, I’d have them tell me the three characters that are most important, and then three more they kind of want to see if we have time. Same for rides at each park. Then you can schedule character meals/FPs or rope drop strategies to hit those priorities.
 
I bought DD7 Kids Guide to the Magic. If you haven't heard of it, it's a kids guidebook on Disney with pictures and descriptions of all the rides and shows, a spot for notes/ journals after going to the parks, spots for you to write your thoughts about each ride, pages for autographs, spots for Epcot WS stamps, stickers, etc. It's a very informative and interactive book for kids and DD loved being able to look through it and get an idea of what she might like to do, then of course filling it out each night of our trip.
 
I'm planning a trip for my son and husband. I made up some lists where they were asked to choose their "3 must-do's" in each park. I also made one for restaurants, where I chose 3 for each park and asked them to order them by preference, 1, 2 or 3. Then I chose the restaurants that we all rated the highest for our 1 TS meal.

Since your kids are younger, I'd suggest a simple list, where you pick the parameters (people can get overwhelmed with too many choices) and then have them choose from those. Something like, "pick your favorite character you'd like to meet." Then you have them choose one out of a list of 3 choices, and do this for each park.

This worked for me because it helped get my husband and son involved, so they felt like they had some say, while still leaving the bulk of the planning (which they don't care about) to me.
 
Mine have been before, and they are totally helping me plan our upcoming trip. To begin with I mentioned the rides, showed them pictures of them and then went to youtube to pull up ride videos. They compared the rides and came up with a list of what FP+ they wanted me to get.

If we were doing more than 1 meal I would have asked all of them for a list of their top 3 or 5 restaurants and worked to get a decent list for our trip. Since this trip is last minute and I really didn't have time to plan meals, they ended up with the ADR I could find for a character meal, but they all approved of it afterwards which was nice.

I seriously debated making this a surprise trip for my kids and then decided I'd rather have their suggestions to make sure it was what they wanted it to be rather than surprising them. I like planning, my two younger kids like planning, my elder likes throwing in an suggestion or two and leaving the rest of the planning to us.
 
I did what pp did, ask them for their top picks that they would really want to do and then made sure to plan for those to happen. I am The Planner for the whole family so I asked this of the adults too.
 


We like this kids guide to Disney https://www.amazon.com/Birnbaums-2018-Walt-Disney-World/dp/1484773799
IMO, it gives a good overview but still leaves room for surprises. Maybe you could focus on a couple of things that your kids like. My little one was a train lover, so we found out about the train at MK. We also love animals, so looked at some specifics about AK. Then we looked at everything we could find out about our hotel, so we would know where to watch a movie, get an ice cream, and what the pool was like....
We were not into characters at all, so when we ran into one it was fun, but we didn't ever wait in line.
My guidelines were one treat everyday, and you can pick any shirt and hat you see on the trip as a souvenir.
There is so much to do and enjoy- have fun!
 

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