does the van have a room darkening feature, what about reclining rear seats, mini fridge and microwave? Id be interested then 
I doubt the DVD player would keep the peace for long in my family, disagreements would arise over which video to watch and when to watch it. And if its one they’ve seen before, there will be lots of seat bouncing, talking, wrestling and popcorn throwing just like at home!
At least if they are bored to tears they might go to sleep.
because, of course, children in front of a video never do anything distracting. Nor is the video itself ever a potential distraction
The family they show are definitely not on an interstate.
I suppose it’s just an extension of the trend of putting a tv in every possible public space. If adults can’t go 10 minutes in a hotel lobby without the tv, then I guess it’s too much to ask kids to.
In my parents’ old van, the little TV with the VCR and Nintendo hooked up was what prevented my older brother and I from killing each other on all those 14 hour drives to Florida. This was 15 years ago. Yeah we’d also chat, attempt to color, read, sleep etc. but driving for that long is plain boring. I see nothing wrong with it. Keeping kids quiet helps whoever is driving concentrate on the road and not about how their kids are fighting. I miss that van…
Ain’t it great?
People instinctively realize that God is IN the machine! They aspire to a state of Transcendental Vegetation, in which they can watch and enjoy whatever is on television. Let us all praise Saint Philo and the miraculous Boob Tube (or Glass Teat as it is often called) he delivered to us.
When I was a kid we’d listen to old-time radio on tapes; this just seems like a more advanced version of that.
SILENCE! TV IS BAD! Rotting brains! Zombies! It’s completely different from reading, listening to the radio, knitting, or any other pastimes I’m used to that don’t scare me. Obviously it is. People stare at it, they’re drawn to do so! Just like fire! Better ban that too, rotting brains!
When I was four my parents drove from Texas to Florida.
When I was seven we went from Florida to California.
When I was about ten we went from California to Rhode Island.
When I was about twelve, Virginia to Mississippi.
And at various times we visited Texas because both sets of my grandparents lived here.
We weren’t awfully rich – the military doesn’t pay all that well. But I had a little tape player with headphones (I hesitate to call that brick a Walkman) and a few tapes, all sorts of books to read and puzzle books and coloring books and an ancient little battery operated football game with red dots playing the alternate team. My parents listened to tapes we all liked in the car, and when they played the stuff that bored me I listened to my own tapes.
When I first saw the in-car DVD players my first thought was “Good Lord, I wish I’d had one of those when I was a kid!”
Cross-country trips are one thing. Heck, even a trip to Grandma’s house three hours away is a reasonable candidate for some kind of alternate entertainment. But watching a kid slumped in the backseat watching Finding Nemo for the thousandth time for the ten minutes it takes to get to the grocery store, that bugs me. What bugs me even more is the radio commercial I once heard with a mother complaining about how often her child asked her questions like “Why is the sky blue?” and “How do cars work?” before she finally got one of those DVD players to shut the little shit up.
And when that fails, there’s always Ritalin.
Beakman’s World, Mister Wizard- shut your kid up and answer their questions at the same time.
Can I interject for a moment to bitch?
Why yes, of course I can.
Every single summer of my childhood (that is, until I got a summer job), save two, I had to ride along in a little station wagon, and later an old minivan, as it trundled its way north from my hometown to my city of birth. It took three freaking days each way. And no, we didn’t have any of those fancy-shmancy DVD players. It was books, talking, sleeping, and being more bored than you could ever image. And damn it, we enjoyed it!
Now get off my lawn!
BTW, I’ll be taking the same little ride this summer. That fact does not make me happy.
I do take my daughter (soon to be four years old) on six hour drives and I will not have DVDs in the car. Part of learning to be a human being is learning to travel long distances in the company of others and behaving appropriately. People travel. Even before vehicles, families traveled together long distances.
I look forward to the opportunity to be social with her and the rest of the family without many of the usual distractions. We play games, talk, listen to music, talk about the music we are listening to, and generally socialize. I do my best to answer my daughter’s questions. I look forward to new ones and don’t understand why honest questions from children would be greeted by efforts to tranquilize.
I don’t use video as a pacifier. I don’t let my daughter watch more than one children’s tv show in a day. I do think television/video is different than other pastimes because it doesn’t require the cognitive or physical activity that other pastimes do. It is far more passive even than listening to the radio because so little is left to the imagination. I don’t think it has no place in ones life, but I do think its place should be limited especially in those still learning how to be people.
My husband used to be so passive in front of the television that it scared me. I found that if I had the television on, even watching something he had no interest in, he was incapable of not watching it. If he were to be ready to go out for any reason and I flipped on the tv to watch something, he would not leave until the tv were switched off. This was true even though the reason I would be turning on the tv then was to watch something that he did not like. He is also incapable of doing any other task while the television is on. Since we have been together, his television watching has been sharply curtailed. He even found he likes to read books. His mother did encourage unthinking television watching and forbade book reading. She did not want her children to get ideas of their own. She wanted to control them and television made that easier for her.
I used my Dad’s time-honored method of dealing with travel with kids. I got the car packed the afternoon before the trip,then took a nap till around midnight.
The kids were encouraged to stay up as long as they pleased while I lay in earplugged bliss.
Once food and drink were put in the car, we left. Kids went to sleep immediately. Mom, too.
At sunup, we stopped for gas and breakfast-- 6-7 hours closer to where the South Dakota
scenery stoppe being boring. I didn’t have to look at it–they didn’t either.
My sleeping a whole different shift from the co-driver meant she was fresh. Kids were a lot less antsy still groggy and full of breakfast for the remainder of the trip to the Black Hills.
During my own childhood, the Old Man never owned air-conditioned cars. The drive-by-night strategy made suumer trips bearable.
And I LOVED – well, I loved Mister Wizard. I didn’t love Beakman’s world until after it came out
Oddly enough, Beakman’s mom would come into the bookstore my mother worked in all the time. I think it was Beakman’s mom, at least.
Err, you do realize that this is just a commercial…a commercial that was being silly to highlight a feature of the car? You do realize that cars really can’t glide along the sides of buildings and really can’t turn a geeky black guy into a studly guy once he enters the car like has been shown in other commercials?
That being said, I do get your general idea of the negative side of parking kiddos in front of the DVD/TV during every spare moment of the day so that you don’t have to deal with them. I have seen parents who do that. I personally rarely turned on the TV during the day. I don’t think that TV is the devil, it is just a lot of it is pretty stupid and a lot of the ads creeped me out. My child and I were too busy running around and having fun to watch TV during the day. We had fun on our short around town trips talking, telling stories, and playing games. If we watched TV or a DVD, it was at night as part of our wind-down procedure.
Now a long distance trip is a whole different animal: I am supportive of whatever works to keep people from going insane. Heck, I think that a long trip would be a great time to have a film festival. One time I rented this Chrysler Pacifica with GPS and drop down DVD for an extended trip- it was awesome vacation cruising vessel-it actually made our trip extra special!
I let my kids watch pretty much however much television they want. Same with video games. Of their own accord, they play outside.
My oldest, who is in sixth grade, again this period got straight A’s. He generally nails the standardized testing, such that we got a spontaneous post card from his teachers wishing that they could bottle his intellectual curiosity to share with others. He’s the only person I know (including myself) who could have answered, off the top of his head in class, what the oldest republic in Europe is.
Television doesn’t make you stupid or intellectually incurious. Being stupid and intellectually incurious does. (Television, by and large, doesn’t help much either, unless you seek out certain types of programming). On the other hand, most of the time when people go on about not having a television, they don’t seem particularly bright or interesting. (Usually interesting people don’t go on about television at all.)
I would be concerned if my kids didn’t also go out to play or weren’t also highly intelligent and curious about the world, but those things aren’t a problem for us.
Well, I like it.
I’ve used portable DVD players for my kids on long trips (DC to Arkansas) and they’re a godsend.
While there’s a shut-the-damn-kids-up-with-some-passive-entertainment aspect to this which isn’t great, the fact of the matter is that generally speaking, kids will watch a DVD for an hour or two, then they’ll do other things, like play games, do puzzles, put gum in each other’s hair, and ask if we’re there yet/to go to the bathroom 11,000 times. It’s not like they spend 8 straight hours mesmerized by the DVDs. And that couple of hours of relative peace is like heroin, all right - for the parents!
I would actually vote yes, if we’re talking about a way to start moving things. I don’t think it is yet, though.
lee, I agree with nearly everything you say. My daughter saw no television under the age of two, in accordance with the APA guidelines. She now watches no more than 2 hours a week. Her upcoming drive will certainly be an anomalous day - and that’s exactly why I think there’s no harm in it. I don’t think it’s appropriate to assume that parents using TV in the car are allowing excess TV at home - it’s a false leap in logic.
Frankly, those kids who are over TVed at home are LESS likely to be pacified by TV in the car. WhyBaby (2.5 years) is utterly captivated and fascinated by TV, because she hardly sees it; it’s still very new and exciting. Some of the kids I babysit, raised in TV heavy houses, barely take notice of the television when it is on - they get bored with it before the hour is up and start wrecking havoc with the TV on in the background (heaven forbid I try to turn it off, though!)
(Yeah, this is the “but”. You felt it coming, right?) Have you considered that you’re not, in fact, teaching her how to travel long distances in the company of others as it’s done and going to be done in the 21st century? That learning to compromise on a DVD choice, keep the volume to a level that doesn’t disturb other passengers and keep her voice moderate while others are watching are just some of the skills she’s going to need in the future when video screens are on buses and trains as they already are on planes? Those are the “behaving appropriately” lessons she’s going to need, as well as Stop Kicking Your Father’s Seat and Just Try To Go To The Bathroom While We’re Stopped, Okay?
I could teach my daughter how to hand churn butter, and that’s a fun and I guess one could argue valuable skill to have for when we accidentally step into that worm-hole to the past. But in the world as it’s lived today, I also need to show her where it’s found in the grocery store and the difference between butter and margarine. Likewise, no one is suggesting that “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Hey, Moo Cow!” are to be left behind, only that there are now new lessons to be added.