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Melatonin, melatonin, melatonin. Some might disagree, but my daughter's pediatrician okay'd it and it really helps. We use a small piece of a ready-melt tablet about 15 min before new bedtime.

@SweetiePie: Our trick is not to adjust our toddler (now preschooler) to the time difference all the way (I assume you're flying East?). So he'll stay awake for late-ish dinners and go to bed when we go to bed (11 or 12ish), and sleep in a little bit. The first bonus is that we get to enjoy our evenings with him, the second bonus is that he'll sleep a little later than usual (though he always misses out on some sleep, he never gets the full number of hours, but he does fine and catches naps in the stroller), and the final bonus is that it's easier to adjust back! Have a great trip.

@Beehive: I am glad to hear this has worked for sleep. I've done this before for a 2-hour time difference, but didn't know if I could make it work for a 6-7 hour difference. Did you find your LO was able to stay on "home" time for the whole trip, or did s/he drift to local time the longer you were there?

Best advice: keep expectations low. A week is definitely not enough time to fully adjust, so I would just do what you can knowing your LO is going to be sleeping at odd hours. If you want to try to get him on local time, have him nap, but wake him up after a set amount of time (no more than 2 hours) and get outside as much as possible. We had our LOs napping 2 hours twice a day last summer when we had an 8 hour difference. It took them a solid 5 days to get on local time, but we also traveled for three weeks.

My advice: If there is a play area in the airport, hang out in there as long as you can and let him run around and climb and tire himself out as much as possible. It will help him fall asleep on the red eye. With luck, he should sleep pretty much the whole way. He'll have some issues the next day but plan it to be more low key so that he can take a nap in the hotel and get to sleep relatively early as close to his regular time as he can (in our case, he goes to bed at 8, we had him going to bed around 9:30 usually). We did this with LO when we went to Paris at the same age and he had a rough first day but otherwise he did really really well!