6 Tips for Camping with a Baby or Toddler

We recently published our first e-book all about camping with babies! The book is a comprehensive guide with 20 chapters that cover everything from choosing a tent and sleeping bag, to how to wild camp in the UK and sleeping tips for your little ones. Check out the e-book in our store here if you’d like even more tips and gear advice for camping with babies and toddlers.

Sleeping outside under a tent canvas somewhere in the wild is always such an exciting experience, and doing that with your baby makes it even more special. Camping is absolutely something you can (and should!) try with a baby. From our experience, babies love camping and as long as they have you, they are happy wherever they are. But, there are definitely some things you should know to make the experience run a little smoother.

Over the last two years, we have stayed at campsites, wild camped and planned our own multi-day hiking and camping adventures with our daughter. In this blogpost, we wanted to share 6 essential tips for camping with babies and toddlers.

Keep your sleep set up close to how you sleep at home. But be flexible. If you co-sleep at home, then go for a co-sleeping set-up with your baby in a tent. This might mean getting a double sleeping pad (opt for self-inflating for babies under 18 months) and sharing a down quilt with your little one, or simply having them close to you on their own sleeping pad. If your baby is used to a separate sleep surface, white noise machine and a dark room for sleeping, then you can replicate this to some extent in a tent. If camping at a campsite, then you could try a Deryan pop-up travel cot with baby in their own sleeping bag (we like the Morrison Outdoors — use code RAMBLEFAM for 10% off). You can even get black-out tents from Decathlon and use a portable sound machine.
Involve your little one in camp chores. From as young as 1 year old, we would involve our daughter in camp chores such as collecting water, putting up/down the tent, pulling out sleeping bags, cooking (when safe to do so). This way your little one will feel more involved in the camping experience and a useful member of the team. Little babies (under 1) usually just enjoy being in the tent and playing with random camping gear so they aren’t difficult to keep entertained.
Try to be relaxed with bed times, especially in summer when it’s lighter in the evening! We tend to make sure our toddler has a good nap in the daytime so she can go to bed later when it’s getting dark. We all go to bed together which means our toddler is way more likely to calm down and sleep if she knows there’s nothing else going on outside.
Choose a family-friendly campsite. Opt for a campsite that is welcoming to families that often have playgrounds, lots of grass for little ones to run around in and a no noise past 10 or 11pm rule, or else you might have groups playing music until the early hours of the morning!
If wild camping/backpacking, pack out all rubbish with you including nappies. Simply pack used nappies into a rubbish bag, individual disposable nappy bags or dog poo bags if you prefer and carry them back to your car. For nappies with just wee, you can air them outside your tent through the night so some of the liquid evaporates and they are less heavy to carry away. Put them into a rubbish bin as soon as you find one. Encouraging your little ones to nature wee by holding them in a squat position is a good way to reduce the number of nappies you use. You can practise this in your day to day life as well (this is called Elimination Communication or EC if you’d like to look into this technique and some people do it from birth).
Keep your tent organised. When you’re camping with young kids, keeping your tent organised is something that becomes pretty important as things can get messy in a small space very quickly and you can easily lose things amongst all the chaos. A few hacks we have for keeping an organised tent space are packing your camping gear in categories; for example sleep items can go in a soft duffel, cooking items can go in a hard plastic box, food can go in a cooler. We also like to use crates like these that pack down for storing toys and other items in the tent, pre-cutting/portioning food and storing it in small tupperwares, and distributing toiletries into these GoToobs

For even more information on camping with babies and toddlers, check out our 36-page e-book with 20 chapters where we share all our tips that we’ve learned from multiple camping, wild camping and backpacking trips over the past two years. You will be emailed a PDF copy of the guide to download immediately. The guide covers the following chapters:

Getting started

Choosing a tent

Sleeping bags

Sleeping mats

Sleeping configurations

Other camping gear

Practical camping clothing

Camping cookware and meal ideas

Full camping packing list

Sleeping tips

Tent organisation

Wild camping and backpacking