The Simple Trick I Use When My Kids Won’t Stop Bickering In The Back Seat Of The Car
Not fast, but effective.
The following was syndicated from Quora for The Fatherly Forum, a community of parents and influencers with insights about work, family, and life. If you’d like to join the Forum, drop us a line at TheForum@Fatherly.com.
How do you drive with kids fighting in the back?
You don’t.
You might have an accident. So you take the next exit or petrol station, park and shut off the engine. Then you pull a book from your bag (you do carry a book or an e-reader don’t you?) and start to read.
Your kids will realize that you’re stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting until you stop your bickering. I cannot concentrate on traffic with you fighting in the backseat, so until you can behave like normal people, we’re going to sit here.”
“But I’ll be late for X!”
“You’ll never make it there if I lose control of the car and plow into another car. Because I was distracted. By your bickering.”
Then you get your smartphone and find this youtube movie on the dangers of allowing yourself to be distracted, even for a moment:
Yes, I know it’s about the dangers of glancing away from the road to check your facebook status, but on a deeper level it shows that our complacency can kill us if we allow ourselves to be distracted from the task at hand.
And the task at hand is about driving your children somewhere. And their bickering is interfering with your task. So stop doing what you were doing for them until you are sure you can do that without risking your life and the lives of your children, not to mention the lives of the strangers you might hit with your car.
Let your children watch this movie, so you can refer to it, again and again, each time they are doing something in the car that might distract you from driving them to their destination.
They’ll thank you for it later.
Martyn V. Halm is a fiction writer and professional confabulator. You can read more from Quora below:
This article was originally published on
