Family Matters / Kristin Jackson
The car's no place for TV, so buckle up and talk

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Once upon a time, families on car trips talked to each other, sang, played word games, gazed out the windows.

Of course, it wasn't always Norman Rockwell nice. The kids whined. They got bored. They bickered in the back seat. And parents got mad.

Car trips were, however, the one place in this TV-addicted nation — where even toddlers have televisions in their bedrooms — that electronics didn't rule. Even if parents and kids got cranky on long drives, at least they were interacting and eventually working things out.

Not anymore. Nowadays, more and more kids sit silent, staring at movies on DVD players built into the family minivan. Or they hunch over their portable DVDs, their video games, their GameBoys.

It's tempting to let electronic devices take over since it's an easy way to keep the peace on a road trip. But it's time for parents to turn them off, and tune into their kids, especially on vacation.

Car trips are one of the few times when overly busy parents and kids are with each other for long periods without interruptions.

Put limits on electronic entertainment, and even teens will start to talk as the hours tick by on the highways. Instead of staring into screens, kids can look out the window and see America. And they can daydream instead of passively watching screen fantasies.

When it comes to TV, my family is hardline. We banished our television to the basement and rarely turned it on when our daughter was a preschooler.

One day when she was 5, she proudly announced: "Did you know our TV has channels?" We took such blissful ignorance as a major parenting victory.

After all, we reasoned, if kids get the TV habit — which is seductively easy for adults, let alone young children — they'll find it harder to settle down and read or create their own entertainment. Too much TV can turn them into passive couch potatoes who see too much sex and violence, too young. It was easiest to avoid temptation by just keeping the TV off.
 
Such a tough approach doesn't make parents popular, but I felt vindicated earlier this month when Seattle-based scientists issued a major study showing that TV watching by very young children significantly increases the risk of attention deficit disorder. (The study, led by Children's Hospital pediatrician Dimitri Christakis, is published in the April issue of the journal "Pediatrics," www.pediatrics.org.)

Of course, limiting screen time in this wired world isn't easy. Kids will fight it. But it's the right thing to do, especially when children are young and their perception of the world, and even the physical structures of their brains, are being formed.

My daughter is a teenager now and I've loosened up — although not graciously — on television. I wander past as she watches the popular teen show "The O.C." and I mutter about bad values, stupid ads and sexist stereotypes. She humors me, and at least she's old enough to see through much of the TV hype.

But on our car trips, there's no screen time.

That's talk time.

Kristin Jackson is an editor and writer with the Travel section. Her Family Matters column runs the third Sunday of each month: 206-464-2271 or kjackson@seattletimes.com

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