Screen-Free Road Trips
Resist handing over a tablet to kids in the car.
I was fortunate to grow up in Muskoka, Ontario’s stunning cottage country north of Toronto. Now I live in a small town to the west, on the edge of Lake Huron, which is also a beautiful place and popular tourist destination. It’s a 3.5-hour drive between my house and my parents’ home in Muskoka, and this is a trip that I have made more times than I can count.
In summer, I travel nearly biweekly between the two places, hauling my kids across the province because I want them to experience summer in Muskoka, which is, in my opinion, the closest you can get to heaven on earth. I drive less during the school year, but still make that trip every 4-6 weeks. In fact, we just got back late last night from spending the weekend there, squeezing out a few last summery days before the leaves change colour and the lake temperature drops.
Despite these many hours in the car, we have never used screens to entertain our kids, even when they were small. We have avoided them on multi-week road trips to the southern U.S. and around Western Canada and Europe. (The only exception is on airplanes, which happens maybe once every year or two.) It helps not owning any tablets, which means we have nothing to give them even if we wanted to, but I do believe there are real benefits to drawing a hard line when it comes to screen use during car trips.
The biggest and most obvious benefit is that it creates opportunities for engagement and conversation. Some of our best family discussions take place in the car, where we’re all stuck together. No one has anywhere else to be, so we can go deep into any topic. If it’s one of those tough yet necessary “formative” conversations, it helps to be sitting side by side, not making eye contact. I’ve noticed, too, how younger kids in particular revel in having the family’s full attention and take advantage of the opportunity to tell stories and jokes.
When you don’t feel like talking, car trips are a rare and special chance for kids to sit in silence and be alone with their thoughts. This is something that happens far too infrequently nowadays. Our society tends to crank up the volume on childhood, blasting them with noise and stimulation every moment of the day. How can a person ever have any fresh or interesting ideas if they never experience silence? A screen-free road trip gives kids a chance to be bored, which we know to be rich fertilizer for creativity.
A lack of stimulation can also lead to sleep. I’ve heard parents complain that their children never sleep in the car, but if you give them a tablet and headphones, what do you expect? I wouldn’t want to sleep either! It’s far more exciting to keep staring at the screen, and the combination of visual and auditory stimulation is sufficient to stave off any natural sleepiness that might come over a child who’s tired of looking at the window. Take away the screens, and your child’s body has a chance of reclaiming a healthier rhythm and responding to sleepiness when it arises.
Not staring at a screen allows a kid to orient themselves in the world, and that is a critical skill we’re losing these days. My kids all know how to drive across Ontario to their grandparents’ house because they’ve been alert for every kilometre travelled. They know the turn-offs and the towns and the scenery. They comment on billboards that have been updated. They observe fancy cars along the way. They beg to stop at our favourite coffee shops and farm stands. They complain less about how long it’s taking because they understand how the journey must progress.
Of course, I’ve had to take active steps to entertain them, especially when they were younger. I relied on physical toys, packing “survival kits” of toy cars and trucks, Lego figurines, stuffed animals, story books and comic books and sticker books, and modelling clay. As they got older, I found magnetic board games like Battleship and checkers that they loved playing with each other in the backseat. I bought books on CD (Magic Treehouse was a popular one), downloaded top-rated podcasts about history and Greek mythology, and played a lot of music. We had to stop more often back then to let them run around and “get their sillies out.” But that was OK; I built it into our travel time. Now they listen to our adult podcasts, read books, or make music requests.
You may have heard screens described as “experience blockers”, and I think that applies to car trips, too. Many parents are quick to reach for a screen to “distract” a child, and yet what they’re actually doing is protecting the child from the more boring bits of life itself, which seems like a short-sighted decision. Kids are far more adaptable than we often give them credit for, and if you set an expectation for how we want them to move through the world, they will rise to it. As I repeat in my book, “Begin as you mean to go on.”
This applies to car rides: If we avoid tossing kids of all ages into a digital vacuum where they become oblivious to everything that goes on around them, they will ultimately be calmer, more rational, better rested, and more communicative. And they won’t have to rely on Google Maps to get from Point A to Point B when they start driving themselves!
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So glad you wrote this one: I am 100-percent on board with screen free road trips. Audio books have been huge for ours.
Yes!! Definitely. 10 years ago our family drove down the West coast of US and Mexico to Baja with 4 and 6 year old boys, no screens, for a month. There were lego's, blanket forts, boredom, and good conversations. Kids need to learn how to amuse themselves, think for themselves and be bored.