Greg Bruce: Keeping kids happy in the car has never been easier - or harder

Family road trips: lots of fun from the outside. Photo / Getty Images

Because my wife long ago proved unable to prevent herself from shrieking with fear every time I sat in the driver’s seat, I am now a permanent passenger on family road trips. This means I’m responsible not just for answering the majority of the kids’ endless questions, but also for the disbursement of snacks and drinks, the resolution of violent arguments and all the rest of the high-level executive decision-making required to quell the disturbances and complaints from the back.

Two weekends ago, we took our longest-ever family road trip, from Auckland to Palmerston North. Out of fear, we decided, based on advice Zanna received from friends, that we would pack everything the night before our departure, wake the kids at 5am, and put them straight in the car in the hope they would go back to sleep, meaning we would be able to spend at least the first couple of hours in peace.

The day before our departure, we went over to the house of said friends to pick up one of our children from a play date. While there, Zanna mentioned that we were planning to borrow their early departure tactic. “Oh, right,” our friend said, “That used to work quite well when they were babies.”

“Not anymore?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” she said sadly.

This was dispiriting news, but at least it prevented us from setting out with false hope in our hearts about hours of peace we would never have.

Nevertheless, because we were committed - and it seemed a bit exciting - and it would give us an opportunity to stop and do stuff along the way and still arrive before nighttime, we did it anyway.

It became clear, not long after setting off at 5.15am, that no one was going back to sleep. I braced for 6.5 hours of agony, a feeling that was reinforced when we suggested an audiobook and they began arguing about which one they wanted.

But the agony never eventuated. They eventually agreed on How to Train Your Dragon and, when they tired of that, they took turns choosing songs. When they tired of that, they listened to a podcast. For large swathes of the trip, they were relatively undemanding.

Over the course of those 6.5 car-bound hours, I discovered that my children have now reached the age where their primitive attention spans have developed sufficiently that phone-based entertainments can keep them engaged long enough to dull the horror of the parental nightmare that is the family road trip.

But a dulling of horror is not an absence of horror and the technology that helps keep them entertained also brings with it some new horrors

For instance, although you can now employ Google Maps to give a precise number of minutes in answer to the question, “How much further?” you are required to give that precise number every single minute of your drive, and sometimes more often than that, and you are frequently required to explain why so few minutes have passed since the last time they asked.

Because your phone provides access to infinite information, it merely serves to whet their appetite for more information. They start demanding the setting of various timers to measure your progress to various waypoints, then they start requesting other numbers – how long have we been driving? What’s our ETA? What’s our average speed? What is the circumference of the earth at the equator? What is the average lifespan of a cat? – until you are too exhausted to carry on.

But you carry on anyway: because you still have three hours to go, and because you’re on the Desert Road and the army could be blowing stuff up there, and because your wife won’t let you drive, and because you have to get to Palmerston North before nightfall.

Mostly, though, you carry on because you’re a parent, and that’s what parents do, because their kids force them.