John and I are mean spirited and old fashioned in our parenting and we are at our nastiest in the car where we won’t let the kids play on screens while we drive.
Clearly we are monsters.
We enforce this rule because we want the girls to grow up with the skill of being able to occupy themselves without a screen for more than five minutes without succumbing to a case of “I’m bored’s”. I do realize that this is probably a skill they will never need to use once they leave my house. That’s fine. My dad made me learn DOS, I’m just passing it on to the next generation as well as I can.
The other reason we are sticklers about this particular rule is that we are not shelling out the money to get them each some sort of handheld screened device and you know what would happen if there was only one to share…
Fighting. One screen does not divide among three girls. We know this. Oh do we know this.
Instead my poor, deprived, screen-less girls current favorite thing to do in the car is to “collect” all the edibles we drive by.
“I get this side!”
“I get this side”
“WHAT SIDE DO I GET?!?”
“I get the corn!”
“I get soybeans!”
“I get that wheat!”
“Yeah, well I get ALL the corn!”
“You can’t have ALL the corn!”
“I got those strawberry patches!”
“I DIDN’T SEE STRAWBERRIES, THAT’S NOT FAIR!”
“I got this corn too!”
“YOU HAVE TO SHARE THE CORN!”
Yes, that’s right. Currently my girls’ favorite thing to do in the car is to fight over the cornfields we drive by.
Proof that it doesn’t really matter what you do as a parent, when in the mood kids always know exactly how to push each others’ buttons.
On the bright side, it’s working – they aren’t bored.
Behind the Willows 