This summer millions of Americans will pack their cars, load up the kids, motor out to the interstate and plunge into the jaws of hell.
The family road trip is not as colorful as a jaunt through Dante`s Inferno, perhaps, but no less terrifying. At this moment, vast numbers of Boomers and their Boomlets are poised to drive to the beach, to the mountains and to new frontiers of interpersonal conflict.
On June 14, for example, Charlie Vernon, a Chicago real estate agent, took time out from zipping suitcases and preparing snacks to explain optimistically that he and his wife would, that very day, begin a 900-mile trip to the North Carolina shore, locked in a vehicle with their three small boys.
Though he insisted that a similar journey went swimmingly last summer, Vernon was clearly nagged by doubts. ”You think I`m shaking my fist up at the gods?” he asks. ”You may be right. At least we don`t have any pets. I`m not nuts.”
Any parent can tell you that driving is not the challenge. Driving with children is.
”A major trip in a family car contains the two elements for which children probably have the lowest tolerance: confinement and boredom. It is a recipe for trouble,” child development expert Lawrence Kutner writes in
”Parent and Child.”
No stopping `em
No one needs to remind Mary Jane Thwaite, an Atlanta mother of two, about confinement and boredom. She remembers a recent 1/2-hour trip to with two children and a 100-pound dog. Her son Zach, 6, asked, ”When will we get there?” before they had left their neighborhood. He asked the same question repeatedly, she says, ”until my husband said he was going to pull off the road and get a peach tree switch.”
Such road hazards don`t deter U.S. vacationers, 84 percent of whom will drive to their summer fun spots, according to the American Automobile Association.
Among them are Cindy and Billy Mallard, who strive to make their yearly odysseys to the North Carolina Outer Banks more tolerable with such amenities as a well-stocked cooler, Waldo books and hand-held video games for the two children, ages 9 and almost 11.
When the store-bought amusements lose their charm, ”there`s always auto bingo if you get desperate,” Cindy says. (Auto bingo, a classic road diversion, involves spotting familiar objects that match squares on a game board.)
Window to the world
Richard Salter, author of ” `Are We There Yet?`-Travel Games for Kids,” says the highway is uniquely suited for certain games. ”What`s happening outside the window is a constantly changing landscape,” the New York author says. ”So what we have here is a game board that never goes stale.”
Paul and Martha Vickers and their three children are highway game veterans, ”but you can`t play auto bingo on the superhighways because there`s not enough stuff,” Martha says. ”You have to go the back country roads and look for the cows and the pigs.”
In 1985, the Vickers family undertook a 10,000-mile, meandering, round trip to the West Coast, entertained by auto bingo, the alphabet game and Hank Williams songs. (The taped version of ”A Tale of Two Cities” was not a successful diversion.) On the road, the parents insisted their children listen to rock music only through headphones.
TV on wheels
There`s little conflict on Anthony and Kimery Daniel`s family trips, since 4-year-old Jasmine generally watches home movies and cartoons on the TV- plus-VCR built into their Chevrolet conversion van. The Daniels agree that such a road machine, with its reclining seats and sofa bed, is the ultimate luxury for their two kids, especially when compared with their previous set of wheels-a two-door Nissan sports car. ”That was very rough,” Daniel says.
Parents can help their offspring enjoy long highway journeys if they try to involve the children in the trip, from its planning to its execution. This technique, it seems, contributed to the success of the Vickers family`s marathon outing.
”We got to sit in the front sometimes and help Dad navigate and show him where to go,” says Elizabeth Vickers, who was 15 at the time of their 1985 trek. ”That helped us feel like we were part of it.”
Younger children can also get caught up in the trip by plotting the course on their own maps and being encouraged to spot landmarks.
The very young will eventually lose interest in navigating, at which point sleep is the best antidote.
”One thing we do for real long trips is we leave at 3 in the morning,”
says Leslie Heermans, mother of two. ”We put them in the car seats with their bears and blankets while it`s still dark, and get four hours of driving in while kids are still asleep.”
This strategy can be exhausting for the adults, however, and can backfire if the little darlings stay awake with nothing to see outside their windows but blackness.
Buckle up for safety
Highway officials have a warning for parents who are tempted to let children stretch out on the back seats with pillows and sleeping bags.
”They`re forgoing safety for convenience,” says Jim Albertson, a safety educator with the Georgia Department of Public Safety.
Though he sympathizes with parents traveling with sleepy kids, Albertson says it`s almost impossible to lie down and wear a seat belt correctly. He notes that many back seats are now equipped with shoulder harnesses, which can help hold sleeping children upright-perfect, if they can sleep sitting up.
For the sake of safety-and sanity-make sure the amusements you choose for your children aren`t deleterious to your own peace of mind.
When 8-year-old Laura Thwaite was an infant and overly fond of nursery rhyme tapes, the Thwaites made a five-hour drive. After a few repetitions of
”Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the trip turned into a Mother Goose nightmare, Mary Jane says.
To solve the problem, she passed a handful of kiddie cassettes to Laura and let her unspool them for about an hour. ”She had a ball,” Mary Jane says. ”It got rid of those cassettes, and it kept her quiet.”
