a peek inside the fishbowl

The CBC piece about DVD players and the family road trip will be airing early tomorrow morning. In Ottawa it’ll be on 91.5 FM at 7:15. Let me know what you thought. If you missed it you might eventually be able to find it here.

I can finally get my thoughts down in a proper post. I’ve been thinking about this for so long now, and have spoken to so many people about it I hardly know where to begin.

I held off commenting back at my previous post because I didn’t want to lay my arguments out in advance. You know, in case Chantal was eavesdropping and wanted to prepare and point-by-point defense. :)

I really hope, in all of this, that I haven’t come across as someone who (a) doesn’t want my kids to have any fun (if you know me even a little you know this isn’t true) or (b) a judgemental shrew who thinks I’m right and everyone else is wrong.

I really try not to judge what other parents do in their own homes. That is, unless they’re dangling their children over balconies, filling baby bottles with Pepsi, or teaching their toddlers how to use a handgun.

I operate under the assumption that the majority parents know what’s best for their kids.

So why am I writing this? Two reasons. First, I really wanted to get my thoughts down in one place. Second, I guess I’m also asking those of you out there who are are considering getting one of these things for your next family hoilday to stop and think about it a little before you take the plunge. 

It’s not my way or the highway you know, but the non-DVD path is the one we have chosen for our own family. If you’re raising a hellion with a shriek that breaks glass and kills your houseplants and you need a way to deal with it, I say hey, do whatever works. Get the DVD before your brain explodes. No one will blame you.

In our case, we’ve decided not to take the Path of Least Resistance and swing a smooth right at Easy Street. We have embarked on the Road Less Travelled, which veers sharply onto Planning Avenue and criss-crosses Plenty o’ Effort Crescent at regular intervals. Occasionally we run into the odd bump in the road. Road maintenance, sheesh! But overall I’m glad we’ve chosen this route. It’s character-building for all involved, especially our kids. And they are what’s at stake here. Not me.

We have chosen not to use a DVD player (portable/installed/or otherwise) to entertain our kids in the car on a family road trip. Mark might have something to add to my arguments, but here are my main reasons:

This is prime family time, so why give it up?
Our family vacation begins with the trip. Part of our vacation means leaving the gadgets behind.

Overall, family time is becoming a rare concept. It seems that the idea of family time is going the way of the dodo and slowly becoming quaint and old fashioned. It shouldn’t. Family time is so important. We’re all horribly overscheduled and overburdened with responsibilities: kids and adults alike. Most families have two working parents. We rush to school, rush to work, rush home to make dinner, rush to ballet/soccer/yoga class, rush to finish homework and rush to hand it in on time. When are families supposed to sit down and just be a family together?

A study that came out of Columbia University indicated that teens who eat with their families at least five times a week are more likely to get better grades in school and are less likely to develop substance abuse problems. Why? Because they’re communicating more than those other families. Logically, the same thing has to hold true for the family road trip. It forces the family into close quarters. They have to talk to one another. A lot. The conversations don’t all have to be heavy hitting or overly educational. I’m sure parents would turn their kids off if all they want to do is quiz them about their feelings about underage drinking or make them recite the scientific names for all the birds they see out the window. Mundane is good too. Great, even! For example, our kids LOVE to hear about what we did when Mark and I were young. They can’t get enough about it. And they don’t care if they’ve heard the same story 100 times. In fact, they’re at an age where the story just gets better with every retelling. (I want to cherish this before they get to an age where they’re rolling their eyes and making shoot-to-kill motions behind our backs.)

As someone pointed out earlier, kids are starved for attention. Sure parents talk to their kids, they tell them to finish their dinner and clean their rooms, but how many parents really TALK to their kids?

On the flip side, not talking is good too.

I belive it is important for kids to be able to spend time inside their own heads. 

Many parents appear to be totally underestimating the ability of their kids to do this.

Kids have to learn how to just BE.  I am alarmed that many people think they need to be entertained every single second of the day. And they do it to their kids. It starts at birth. Parents buy fancy mobiles and spinning/buzzing/light-up busy boards for the cribs, every Whoozit and Baby Einstein product that might give their offspring an intellectual head-start over the other kids. And it continues from there.

Dear Mummies and Daddies: it’s okay to let your baby just stare at out the window sometimes. Really.

Perhaps I’m different. I’ve always been a dreamer. But we all need some down time, time to turn inward and look inside ourselves. Kids need to learn how to be patient and keep themselves company. They need to find creative ways to pass the time.

Getting lost in your thoughts is healthy, and in our hectic lives I think it’s a good thing. Some of my best, most creative ideas have come to me when I’m not really doing anything: just sitting outside, staring into the treetops or something equally uneventful.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a political prisoner who’d served a lot of time (11 years I think) in jail. Some of it was in solitary confinement. I don’t know how it came about, but at one point he told me that the best thing (if there was a “best” thing) about his prison term was that he learned go inside himself, into his memory. He learned to use his brain to such an extent that even years after he was released he could pass any amount of time anywhere, and he was never bored.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a road trip with with kids is like a prison (ha, although sometimes it feels like it) but my point is about brain usage. Don’t parents want to raise kids who know how to amuse themselves? Find something to think about and keep their brains occupied no matter what kind of situation they’re in? This is a skill, one that needs to be learned, and it is borne out of unstructured play: staring at the clouds, sitting on the beach, making mud pies, and yes, staring out the window during a long drive.

They can do it. In the comments to the previous post, Liss wrote about her annual drive to Nova Scotia with her two sons (5 and 3). That’s 18 hours each way. 18! And they’ve never needed a movie. Why? 

Has the DVD player become a crutch? Why do parents need it now, but they didn’t before?

I will never forget our trip to Florida back in February. We landed at the airport in Orlando, totally excited and stoked because the weather was so nice. And what happens? Mark gets stuck in the line up for our rental car. There was nothing to do but wait. I had the girls and a pile of luggage. I had no food, no water, no toys. In all honesty if I had had a DVD player I would have probably succumbed to the temptation. But you know what? They did fine. More than fine, they were great. I can’t begin to describe the games they invented for themselves. They found pennies on the floor. They watched people. They explored our little part of the airport. We were there for the better part of two hours. Amazing creativity can arise out of amazing boredom. I think we’re too quick to forget that.
 
Do we have to invite the TV into the car too? Isn’t it enough that it’s at home (and in the food court in the mall, the bank, the dentist office, the restaurant)?

You get the picture. TV is everywhere. We don’t need more of them, do we? We don’t really need another gadget that’s eventually just going to end up in a landfill.

I don’t have a problem with TV per se. There is some good TV out there. This might surprise you, but I’m probably the heaviest TV watcher in our family.  But we are low/moderate TV watchers overall. The girls don’t watch much over the course of the week. They do camp out in front on the TV on weekend mornings. I’m fine with that.

But there is such a thing as too much.

I’ve read that 20 per cent of children under three have televisions in their bedrooms and that 40 per cent of babies age three months old watch TV. Experts are saying that TV increases the risk of attention span problems… and this is regardless of whether they’re watching something “educational” or not.  So why would parents want to increase the amount of TV they’re all watching? I’ll answer that for you, because it’s a bandaid solution for overstressed the parent in the driver’s seat.

Here’s another question… are parents rewarding misbehaving kids by popping in their favourite movie?

I think that, regardless of where people stand on this issue, many would agree that parents are a marketers dream… we are being marketed to like never before. We’re being told that we need all of this STUFF. And the concept of CONVENIENCE is what the marketers are using to sell it to us. It worked when they introduced sliced bread and it’s still working today.

For years now we’ve being told that our lives are really hard and that we deserve a break. And that makes us then question how we could have possibly lived without these things.

Someone out there is telling us we need a DVD player in our cars. It’s what you do when your kids are screaming and driving you crazy! It will make your life that much better, it really will!

But my answer to that is twofold: (1) I don’t have screaming kids.  They’re well-behaved little people, although like many kids they do have their moments. (2) When they are misbehaving we ask them to sit down and be quiet. Sometimes we have to ask them three times, sometimes we have to, yes, raise our voices, but they do sit down and they are quiet.

Perhaps this is a naïve question, but why aren’t other parents doing this too? Is it just me or do some parents lack the wherewithal to just say no?

And as Marla said earlier, parenting isn’t just about the good times, it’s also about the hard times. She said it better than that though: “bonding happens as much over hardship as bliss.” So why are we so quick to eliminate the “hardship” when it’s not really even that hard?

In the past few decades (say, since the 50s) Western society has become about amassing more stuff. We’ve become huge consumers, and we’re being consumed by the goods we’re consuming. At no point in history have we ever had such massive consumer debt. At no point in history have we had the kind of environmental problems that we’re having right now. We have to start looking criticially at the things we buy and ask ourselves whether we really and truly NEED those things or whether we can get by okay without them. For example:

- Do you really and truly need an SUV? Perhaps the answer is yes if you’re a farmer and you need it to pull heavy machinery. Perhaps the answer is not really if you’re a family of four who live in the city and do most of your driving to and from home, work, school and the grocery store.
- Do you really and truly need to buy bottled water? Perhaps the answer is yes if you don’t have reliably clean water where you live. Perhaps the answer is not really if you could probably get by refilling a reusable container with tap water.
– Do you really and truly need a television/DVD in every room of your home, including one in your car?

You see where I’m going with this, right?

No one said that parenting was supposed to be easy, but parents are taking the easy way out when they plug their kids into a DVD. Instead, parents should be willing to do the extra work, choose the route and travel times carefully, and do the extra planning that’s required for a long road trip.

Our kids are now 8 and 6. The longest road trip we’ve taken recently is from here to Toronto and we did that last summer. There are lots of things to see and do in the car. I’m not going to type out a long list of car games – you know them already because you probably played a lot of these when you were a kid – but I will say that our kids love easy car bingo.  I provide a list of things for the kids to “find” outside their windows and they happily oblige: Who can find a bird on a wire, a wooden fence, a yellow tractor, a red barn, a dead skunk? It kept us all occupied forever.

As I mentioned, planning is key. You can’t expect your kids to sit still for 2-3 hours at a time. So know where all the rest stops are, and use them. They’re part of your adventure, but you should also consider the rest stops as preventative measures, not an emergency measures. If your kids are wailing you’ve left it too long.  Pulling over at a Tim Horton’s drive-through is not enough of a break from driving. Park near some green space: a lake, a playground, anywhere the kids can really stretch their legs. Run them ragged and THEN get them back into the car. You’ll all feel much better.

Music, books on tape, stories on DVD etc. are great. Many of you mentioned that. We have a double-CD of Stuart Maclean and the kids love it.  Listening is a family-inclusive activity. Everyone is involved, including the driver down to the smallest passenger. Dad driving, mom with her iPod, and two kids in the back each with their own headphones and DVD is the opposite. Each person is isolated from the other.  Think about it this way: would you wear your iPod if you took a romantic walk on the beach with your significant other? You wouldn’t? Why not?

A lot of people I’ve spoken to said there was no harm in watching a movie or two on a long drive. And they’re right. There’s no harm. Their child’s eyeballs will not fall out, nor will they suddenly sprout horns or drop out of third grade to become a rock star. It won’t harm them to watch it but it won’t harm them to NOT watch it either. I wish more people would stop to consider that before they jumped on the bandwagon.

I think if a parent owned a DVD player they’ll just be tempted to use it. And most kids would bug their parents to use it, even on short trips, wouldn’t they? So why even go there? Isn’t it better to not have one and just avoid having to parcel it out?

You know, the world of parenting is a tough one. Issues often cannot be divided into right or wrong, black and white. There is an awful lot of grey, but we’re raising these little people, and we want them to be the best people they can be. Myself, I have a tendency to live in the moment, and I find it difficult to make decisions that affect the long term. But for me it must come down to this: what kind of people do I want my children to be? And how will I try to make it so?

I want my kids to be lots of things, but ultimately I know I want them to be happy, creative, smart, kind, and healthy… although not necessarily in that order. Now I just have to think about the how. HOW will I help them become happy, creative, smart, kind, and healthy people? This is one of those ways. And I think it’s working for us.

So, have I convinced anyone yet?

p.s.  Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment in my original post … and for reading this far! Phew. I guess I had a lot to say on the issue. And I’ve appreciated everything you all had to say too. Thank you!