We’ve all been there – the kids are bickering in the back seat of the car over something or other, while we try to mediate from the driver’s seat.
And often it can get so heated that we find ourselves upset and distracted as we try to navigate the traffic.
So when we came across one dad’s very simple trick to quell that back seat bickering, we just had to share it.
Dad Martin Haim was asked the question “How do you drive with kids fighting in the back?” in a post written on the Quora forum and shared on Fatherly.
And his answer was as simple as it was important.
“You don’t,” he wrote. ”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 realise 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 to drive the message home, Martin suggests taking out your phone and watching the below video on what can happen behind the wheel if you’re distracted, even for a second.
“Yes, he adds. “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 getting your children somewhere safely.
“So stop [driving] 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,” he says.
“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.”
So powerful, not to mention needed, considering the amount of avoidable accidents that happen on our roads each year.
