How do you drive with kids fighting in the backseat?
Posted April 09, 2017 by Bob Kiesow
This article was written by Martyn V. Halm – and originally posted on Quora; a place to share knowledge and better understand the world.
How do you drive with kids fighting in the backseat?
You don’t.
You might have an accident. So you take the next exit or petrol station, park and shut off the engine. Then you pull a book from your bag (you do carry a book or an e-reader don’t you?) and start to read.
Your kids will realize that you’re stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting,” you say. “Until you stop your bickering. I cannot concentrate on traffic with you fighting in the backseat, so until you can behave like normal people, we’re going to sit here.”
“But I’ll be late for X!”
“You’ll never make it there if I lose control of the car and plow into another car. Because I was distracted. By your bickering.”
Then you get your smartphone and find this youtube movie on the dangers of allowing yourself to be distracted, even for a moment:
Close to Home | AT&T It Can Wait.
Yes, I know it’s about the dangers of glancing away from the road to check your FB status, but on a deeper level it shows that our complacency can kill us if we allow ourselves to be distracted from the task at hand.
And the task at hand is about driving your children somewhere. And their bickering is interfering with your task. So stop doing what you were doing for them until you are sure you can do that without risking your life and the lives of your children, not to mention the lives of the strangers you might hit with your car.
Let your children watch this movie, so you can refer to it, again and again, each time they are doing something in the car that might distract you from driving them to their destination.
They’ll thank you for it later.