Relieving Back-Seat Doldrums

Before snapping the suitcases shut and zipping all the backpacks for this year’s road trip, make sure the bags are crammed with plenty of marshmallows, toothpicks, masking tape, balls of many sizes, a spray water bottle and a guide to the finger alphabet used in sign language. Throw in a couple of fishing vests, even if hooking a big one has nothing to do with this year’s vacation agenda.

Wherever the family is heading by car this summer, these items represent parent-tested remedies for the inevitable back-seat wars and we’re-never-going-to-get-there blues.

“Get miniature marshmallows and big ones,” said Bev Johnston from New Hope, Minn., who wouldn’t leave home with her two granddaughters without bags of marshmallows and toothpicks.

“We make animals and stick people and houses out of them,” Johnston said. Preschoolers learning the alphabet can make letters while older kids fashion entire towns. The kids will be too busy, she said, to wage wars in the back seat.

Elise Modesitt discovered the tranquilizing powers of masking tape during a particularly war-torn car trip. The Winter Park, Fla., mom explained that out of desperation, her husband handed each of their two daughters a big roll of masking tape. The girls played for hours, tearing strips of tape into intricate designs, sticking it all over the back seat. “When we stopped, we’d just peel it off and they’d start again,” Modesitt said.

Modesitt and Johnston are among the many Taking the Kids readers--children as well as parents--who have written to offer their family travel survival tips.

Especially this year, many of us will need help: The American Automobile Assn. is forecasting a record car-travel season: 184 million auto trips taken.

Those of us among them might benefit from an idea by Anne Seals of Sumner, Wash. She suggests filling the pockets of a fishing vest with toys and inexpensive surprises and putting it on a child just before leaving on a trip. Children have so much fun looking for games, toys and snacks secreted in the pockets that they forget how much they hate sitting in one place. Seals wrote that her 9-year-old son Brian’s vest keeps him busy for hours on the road.

Susan Heller and Mary Ann Cannone, who both live on Long Island, N.Y., and are the mothers of sons, feel the same way about a game of catch. They see it as a perfect light exercise for children who can’t sit still another.

Cannone wrote that balls proved a terrific boredom-buster for a whole gang of kids waiting to get into the FBI building in Washington, D.C.

Retired naval officer Richard Sloane of Oviedo, Fla., wrote that on one trip involving two cars, his daughters communicated between vehicles using the finger alphabet, teaching their parents some of the letters in the process.

Nine-year-old Alex Jedraszczak of Altamonte Springs, Fla., sent along his own idea for family harmony: “Families should change seats every few hours because they then have more things to see than just one side of the road and you get to talk to different people.”

A spray bottle of water can help break the tedium, too, especially when the air conditioner conks out as it did on the Trankina family’s trip from their Scottsdale, Ariz., home to Arkansas. Two-year-old Joey loved squirting his mom and dad, Victor Trankina said.

In case you’re wondering if anyone still counts license plates: They do. Just ask Debbie Van Zuilen, a fourth-grade teacher from Fairbault, Minn. Her family hits the road with maps of the United States. Each time they see a vehicle with an out-of-state license plate, the kids find the state on their map and color it in. She tells them weird facts about that state from a book she takes along.

Last year, while motoring through the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Van Zuilens colored in their entire map. “It’s amazing how much faster time goes on the road when you’ve got something to do together.”

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