When we flew back to California after living in France for a couple of years, our girls struggled using the ear bud style headphones from our phones. This meant that for most of the 11 hour flight (in which neither kid slept at all of course), our kids could either:

• Watch a show/movie as quietly as they could on our tablet without (hopefully) bothering other passengers.
• Hold the ear buds to their ears while watching something on the screen attached to the seat in front of them (this made their arms rather tired at times).

Of course, there were many hours of them not watching anything and we made sure to have plenty of toys and nonscreen activities on hand as well, but with it being such a long flight, we were definitely okay with a bit more screentime than we normally allowed.

Fast forward nine months to us planning a trip from our new home in Washington to a vacation in Maui and we knew that we wanted more “kid-friendly” headphones for the 6 hour plane ride. We ended up finding Buddyphones children headphones and loved them.

They make an inflight version that’s especially for traveling by plane, but we ended up getting the standard version and still loved them. Things we loved the most included:

• The always on volume-limiter: Seriously, this put me at ease so much! Our kids used regular headphones on a roadtrip over the summer and while they fit great over their ears, they were constantly accidently turning the volume up so loud that I could hear it from my seat in the car. This had me continuously stressed out and with the Buddyphones I never had to worry about their hearing being damaged.
• The cute stickers to personalize each child’s headphones: We got two pairs of pink Buddyphones and each pair came with 6 fully colored stickers and 5 color-yourself stickers to choose from to customize and differentiate each headphone according to our girls’ taste.

• The ability to plug a second set of headphones into the first: This was perfect for when the girls wanted to watch a show together on our tablet!

• Being able to muffle outside noise: This is pretty standard for any headphone set that completely covers the ears, but it was still just nice for when our oldest fell asleep on the plane ride home.

The only complaint that we had was that we had to override our tablet’s volume control because, combined with the headphone volume control, everything was too quiet to hear otherwise. Once we got around that, we didn’t have any other issues and the girls could hear just fine. Also, I don’t recommend plugging in non-buddyphone headphones into the buddyphones when sharing a tablet or other media device, as the volume is offset between the headphones with volume control and the ones without.

The Buddyphones are available in multiple colors and versions and the inflight one even boasts 3 different volume levels that would be interesting to test. While we haven’t tried other kid headphones to compare, these Buddyphones are perfect for our family and we’re excited to continue using them in the future!