Digital Slob
Digital Slob
Do kids a favor:
ditch SUV DVDsChildless Digital Slobs rarely dispense parenting advice (since our ability to nurture living things peaks with shower curtain fungus). But when we do force real parents to endure our blather, we often compare our pets to their kids, unblinkingly thinking it will pump up our credentials. Sure, we'd laugh at us, too, if we could see ourselves. That said, let's see if I can get through this without blinking:
DVD players in the backs of SUVs are bad for kids. You should resist this road trip Ritalin for your offspring unless you want them to have the same impulse control as my first dog.
As Veruca "I want it now, Daddy" Salt demonstrated to Willy Wonka, immediacy is a drug, and kiddie detox involves getting all those "Are we there yets" out of our system until our spirit is broken like a horse.
Assuming we sweat it out, we grow up to help our kids push through that same wall. We shouldn't let them mainline "Beauty and the Beast" in progressive scan at 65 mph as we look away. Children who sigh early and often in the back seat watching telephone poles blur into each other will be better prepared for the tedium of life.
Now for my dog story, and no, I haven't blinked yet.
Sausage, a dachshund of course (c'mon, I was 10, give me a break), didn't have a DVD player, so he punched his family's buttons instead. He was as much trouble on the road as any toddler who ever toddled.
On our first family road trip with Sausage, we stopped at Burger King and left him in the car (note to Humane Society: It was night and 60 degrees and 1980, a simpler time).
Alone and bored and upset about missing "Knots Landing," Sausage found the car horn and made our Pontiac Grand Prix scream like an opera singer. As diners held their ears in disbelief, he leaned his wiener-dog torso on the wheel with the posture of a conquering Caesar, confidently still, with only his head slowly turning to watch my brother gallop back to answer his clarion call.
Thus for two days of driving and dining, Sausage's new road rule was, "If you honk it, they will come." The bipeds in our family took to eating in shifts, with one of us always baby-sitting Sausage for the good of society, to protect the fragile peace we've all come to expect from any exit-ramp Shoneys.
Like many other mammals that stretch out on couches, Sausage had no ability to delay gratification, and as a nation we're not faring much better than him. Far from delaying it, in the Digital Age we multitask it. We play Game Boys on the beach, expand holes in beer cans to make them guzzle-friendly, and spread peanut butter and jelly with a single stroke thanks to Smuckers' combo jars.
In the 1960s, Walter Mischel did a groundbreaking study, called the "marshmallow test." He left 4-year-olds in a room with a marshmallow and told them they could either eat it, or wait 20 minutes and get one more. Those who held out for two averaged 210 points higher on their SATs a decade or so later. And, one would think, those who made it into Harvard Law School got yet a third marshmallow; graduated with honors, a fourth marshmallow; and so on.
So, in my expert opinion, the best way to raise your kids is to forget the highway DVD player and strap them in for a cross-country trip with only a marshmallow on a stick, just out of reach, to amuse them. Oh, and disconnect your SUV's car horn.
OK, now I blinked.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's
production editor. Reach him at
at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com