“Don’t Make Me Come Back There!”
I don’t think my own father ever said that to me when I was a kid. Perhaps I don’t remember. In any case, I got pretty good at passing the time on road trips … we took quite a few when I was younger. My brother and I didn’t fight that much … at least not in the car. So we never gave dad much cause to bark at us in that way.
Parents of today have all manner of technological innovations available to help them not have to yell back at their kids when they start whining about the length of the road trip. When you’re a parent, as I am, the temptation is frequently to use television as an anecdote to a child’s fussiness, whining, and other emotional manifestations of boredom. The debate on the talk show was about whether or not it was a good idea — philosophically speaking — to let your kids watch a DVD in the car.
I was invited by Kristen at Motherhood Uncensored to participate in an online radio talk show today on the subject of DVD Players in Cars. You can tune in by clicking here.
Once you’ve had a chance to listen to the show, let me know if you have comments!
January 7, 2007 at 11:33 pm
“Don’t make me come back there”
Words from my past. I actually got a chuckle out of reading them and tried to think if I actually used them with my children. Ya know, I think I did. It is amzaing what triggers the fond memories.
I will say “Don’t make me come back there” never did me much good as a parent. By the time I got to where ever “there” was I was in the mix along with the munchkins.
January 14, 2007 at 7:01 pm
My brother and I fought constantly in the back seat. It was a game of seeing who could get the other one in trouble.
I remember pouting through miles of pine trees in Alberta because I hated my father’s Country Western music. I tried every passive aggressive nasty attitude trick in the book to get him to turn it off. A DVD would have helped me cope very much!
That said, I still think it’s ridiculous, all that today’s kids think they need to have: phones, iPods, DVDs, bedroom televisions, fancy clothes. It’s no wonder so many of them are eating so poorly.
April 9, 2007 at 11:08 pm
1st timer, so didn’t catch the raiuo show. But I don’t have a problem with them, as long as they are used sparingly. My wife’s car has a DVD (only because it happened to be packaged into the car), but she only let’s the girls watch on long trips. I don’t have one, and have no intension of buying one to hang on the back of the seat.