Skiing With a Toddler: How to Actually Get Turns In

The first thing to understand is that your toddler is not going skiing. Not at one, not at two, and at three only in the loosest sense of the word — an hour of sliding around a nursery slope while someone sings to them, which is wonderful and is not a ski lesson.

Once you stop planning the trip around your child skiing and start planning it around you skiing, everything gets easier. This is the trip you are actually buying: your child has a lovely time somewhere warm and supervised, and you get real turns on real snow. The Alps have been quietly running exactly this arrangement for a hundred years.

1. Crèche age and ski-school age are different numbers

This is the mistake I correct most often, and it derails whole trips.

Most Alpine ski schools start group lessons at three, and plenty start at four. Some will do a private lesson a little earlier. Meanwhile, the resort crèche in the same village will happily take a six-month-old. These are two separate businesses with two separate minimum ages, and the hotel website often lists only the second one under a heading that implies the first.

So the question is never "is this resort good for kids." It's two questions:

• Under three: what childcare exists, from what age in months, for what hours?
• Three and over: what does ski school actually consist of — how long, how many children per instructor, and in what language?

That last one matters more than people expect. A four-year-old in a class of ten being taught in a language they don't speak has a very different morning than a four-year-old in a class of four with an English-speaking instructor. Both are sold as "children's ski school."

2. Ski-in, ski-out stops being a luxury and becomes the whole trip

Without children, walking eight minutes to the lift in ski boots is a mild annoyance. With a toddler, a nap schedule and a crèche drop-off, that eight minutes each way is the difference between skiing and not skiing.

Do the arithmetic on a normal morning. Drop-off at nine. Boots on, walk over, lift queue. If you're properly ski-in, you're on snow by 9:15 and you ski until noon. If you're a shuttle ride away, you're on snow at 9:50, and you have to leave the hill at 11:30 to make pickup. Same resort, same childcare, half the skiing.

This is why I push clients toward genuine ski-in properties for these years specifically, even when it costs more than a nicer hotel further out. You're not buying prestige. You're buying ninety minutes a day, five days running, which is the entire reason you came.

3. There are five ways to cover childcare, and they are not equal

Most articles on this give you two options and imply the rest don't exist. There are five, and choosing the wrong one is how people end up skiing an hour a day.

A resort that runs its own crèche

Club Med is the obvious example, and the reason it has endured with young families is that everything is in one building: childcare, ski school, food, equipment. You book once and it's handled. What you give up is character — you are staying in a resort rather than a village — and for some people that's the whole holiday and for others it's the price of a week that actually works.

The resort village crèche

Many Alpine villages run their own nursery, independent of any hotel, staffed to national childcare standards. Val d'Isère is the one we've used, and I'd send anyone there. The advantage is that it decouples childcare from accommodation — you can stay wherever you like in the village and still have somewhere to hand over a small child in the morning. It also tends to be far cheaper than a hotel's own service. You do the drop-off and pickup yourself, which is why point two above matters so much.

A hotel whose crèche takes your child to and from ski school

The one almost nobody knows about, and the best answer for a three-year-old. At three a child can start lessons, but lessons are ninety minutes and they can't get themselves there, which leaves you shuttling a tiny skier around the village in the middle of your morning. A property whose crèche staff walk them to ski school, collect them afterwards and keep them until you come down closes that gap entirely. If you have a three-year-old, ask every hotel this specific question.

A hotel with its own nanny or babysitter service

Flexible, in your own room, and available in the evening, which the crèches generally are not. Good for partial days and for the dinner you want without a wobble. Less good as a full-time solution, because it's charged by the hour and adds up quickly across a week.

An independent, vetted nanny service

Comes to you, whether you're in a hotel with no childcare at all or in a chalet. This is what makes a catered chalet work for families with children under four — childcare in the building your child is already sleeping in, on your schedule rather than the crèche's, children's tea at five, and dinner for the adults at eight in the same room. Split between two families it becomes remarkable value. The tradeoff is that quality varies enormously and the good ones are booked a year ahead by people who go every year.

4. Plan the day around the nap, not the snow

The rhythm that works, more or less universally, for children under four:

• Morning is the ski block. Both parents on the hill, child in crèche or with the nanny. This is your real skiing, and you should treat it as sacred.
• Lunch together, on the mountain if the child naps in a carrier or pushchair, at the chalet if they don't. A long lunch at altitude with a sleeping toddler is one of the great underrated pleasures of Alpine travel.
• Afternoon is family time. Sledging, the village, the pool, the bakery. Nobody skis. One parent can steal a couple of runs if they want them.
• Five o'clock tea, bath, bed. Then dinner for the adults, in the chalet or with a sitter booked that morning.

Trying to ski all day and then have a European dinner at 8:30 with an overtired two-year-old is how people come home from ski holidays needing a holiday.

Resorts I send families to

The gear conversation, briefly

Two things are worth spending on and almost nothing else is.

A proper carrier — a structured hiking carrier, not a soft wrap — because it turns the whole village into something you can do, and because a sleeping child on your back at a mountain restaurant is the best possible outcome for everyone. And warm extremities: mittens that actually stay on, and boots a size up over thick socks. Children are miserable in the cold at their hands and feet long before they're cold anywhere else, and a miserable child at ten in the morning ends the day.

Everything else — the tiny skis, the harness, the helmet for a child who isn't skiing — can wait or be rented there.

Common questions