Jet lag tips: travel to Iceland with 8 year old

The best thing to do is to have him start phasing in the change before your trip, meaning going to bed a bit earlier every day so that, in the end, the dissonance is not as great. Also, encouraging him to sleep on the plane and staying hydrated. When you get to Iceland, sunlight and staying active will help (but will be harder at night given the long days). In general, it's very hard to predict how any one person will react to jet lag, but you can't go wrong with arriving well-rested.

What time zone are you In? It is only a four hour time change from US eastern time zone.
Our grandkids adjusted to London time from eastern time(5 hr time change) in one day.

My 8 year old did the best of the entire family re: adjusting to jet lag last year (Atlanta to Barcelona). You may be pleasantly surprised.

Thank you so much for the input so far! We're traveling from Seattle, so we're on PDT and Iceland will be 7 hours ahead.

We have definitely found our kids adjust better to jet lag than we do. Everyone told us that and I never believed them, since I knew the capacity of mere Daylight Savings time changes to make them cranky and off-kilter. And yet, it turned out to be true. Do the usual things you'd do for yourself - push through that first day, stay outside as much as possible, sleep on the plane if you can, and I bet he adjusts a full day faster than you do. :) Let us know.

I agree with MH - following up on my earlier post, my 8-year old is very high maintenance and I was fully expecting him to be the drama queen of the trip, so imagine my surprise when he just snapped right into the local time and was a trooper! Now, my almost teen daughter, who is normally the easygoing one, had a tougher time, so who knows the logic of jetlag!