Driven to distraction on a family car trip

YOUR kids yanked off the construction-paper pilgrim hats they made at school, tossed their backpacks in the hallway and celebrated the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday by staying up late.

Big mistake, Mom or Dad. There goes the family road trip to Grandma’s house. Children who haven’t reached puberty don’t have the ability to sleep in as their teenage siblings do. They cannot make up the lost rest.

“By the second or third day of the vacation, the kids are fighting over the armrest and the parents wonder, ‘What’s happening to our wonderful family time?’ ” says Don MacMannis, a Santa Barbara child psychologist who consistently sees the bedtime problem in clients younger than 12. “Parents relax sleep rules. That leads to a sleep debt that builds toward a meltdown, and the kids take it out on each other in the back seat.”

If you’ve blown it before, you’re not alone. More than 37 million Americans took a family road trip last year during the Thanksgiving holiday. For many of them, the minivan became a rolling torture chamber.

In my family, 8-year-old daughter Grace can angelically sing “Over the River and Through the Wood” in a Thanksgiving pageant one day and plot the demise of her brother Gabe in the back seat the next.

“Being in the car together is a workshop in the course of life,” says MacMannis, who also is creator of a soon-to-be released CD “Ready to Rock Kids.”

“Part of my job as a parent is that I will be there to give them social and emotional coaching. Consider it an opportunity to have that workshop cruising down the highway at 70 mph.”

Stock that workshop well. Think magnetic bingo games, grapes, peanut butter crackers, crayons, books, favorite stuffed animals and puzzles (make sure they don’t have a million pieces). The kids need to be well-rested, well-entertained and well-fed.

If kids begin to take out the car-trip blues on one another, MacMannis suggests that they be given tasks to do together. Ask them to count green cars, find license plates from other states or name animals that start with each letter of the alphabet. Create stories with each person in the car adding a part. Make up a song to sing to Grandma. Play hangman, tic-tack-toe and connect-the-dots.

“Pushing each other and hitting each other will be worse in the car. A lot of that is out of boredom,” says James Crist, clinical director of the Family Counseling Center in Woodbridge, Va., and author of “What to Do When You’re Sad and Lonely.”

“If you have a family that tends to do things together other than just sit in front of the TV, you’ll do better on a road trip. Too many of us don’t know how to interact with each other because everyone at home is in their own electronic suite.”

Wait a minute. Don’t we need Gameboys, a DVD player (two-screen, please) and MP3 players with headphones to make it any distance by car?

“The use of DVDs is sometimes a substitute for working on those emotional and social skills,” MacMannis says. “Balance between screen time and time spent practicing getting along with one another.”

I resisted borrowing a DVD player until two hours before our family left this summer on a 3,000-mile car trip. Days before the trip, I called the pediatrician’s office to see whether Grace could take a nondrowsy medication for carsickness so she could read her Lemony Snicket books on our long road trip.

“Why don’t you just take a DVD player, and let her watch movies?” the nurse asked. “Don’t let her read in the car. That’s the worst thing for kids who get carsick.”

So “Princess Diaries” and “SpongeBob” it was. But we agreed that whenever an interesting sight was on the horizon, she would hit the pause button and see America.

Another key to a successful car trip, the pros say, is the parental pause. Our kids aren’t wired the way we are; they don’t want to get there as quickly as possible.

Think about how we cram our kids into the car, drive until hunger has reached an evil peak and then ask them to sit still in a restaurant booth and mind their manners. My family was much more relaxed during our recent car trip because we packed a cooler, tossed Gabe’s football into the back of the car and had rest-stop lunches with running, catching and a game of Simon Says as dessert.

Stagger incentives for good behavior along the way, Crist suggests. For example, if everyone gets along and is patient for the next two hours, then the family will stop to see the world’s largest ball of string or the Dr Pepper Museum or stop for that Dairy Queen blizzard the kids have wanted.

It’s critical, though, for parents to think like those inspirational posters that remind us that life is a journey, not a destination. Go with that cliche as much as possible. Sometimes, let the kids have a vote about what’s happening on their trip.

“Making a car trip successful depends on the ebbs and flows of the situation. Practice being in the moment,” MacMannis says.

“Let go of the agendas we have as parents. Effective parenting is more about a dance than rules.”

If all else fails, revert to Lamaze breathing. I find it much more useful when cruising the highway with my loved ones than it ever was on the delivery table.

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Kids on Board columnist Mary McNamara is on maternity leave.