7. Car time is conversation time.
7
The Deep End of the (Car) Pool
7. Car time is conversation time.
What would you say if I told you there was a place where you could talk with kids—really talk—about everything that truly matters: relationships, faith, school, the future, the past? Where conversations would last long enough to get beyond both superficiality and awkward silence to the deep truth and to real silence as well, the kind of silence that holds and bears both joy and pain?
I would never have expected the place where our family most often has found that kind of conversation. It was, actually, the place I most dreaded as I anticipated being a parent, especially of middle school and high school kids.
It was the car.
As our children left elementary school—which for our family meant leaving the school just a five-minute walk away, with its wonderfully small circle of neighborhood relationships—I anticipated years of tedious car trips to sports events, musical rehearsals, and friends’ houses.
Now, near the end of our children’s high school years, I can truly say that some of the most treasured and transforming conversations I have had with each of our children came on routine trips—which were, indeed, just as numerous and in some ways tedious as I had expected. As I write this chapter, our daughter has just qualified for her learner’s permit to drive, and I find myself oddly wistful at the thought of her driving herself to all those events, with no more need for her dad or mom to chauffeur. One dad whose children have already passed that threshold said to me, “I thought I would miss them when they went off to college, but I realized that the bigger loss came sooner, when they could drive themselves wherever they wanted to go.”
I won’t miss the awkward interruptions in my own schedule, and I’m sure my wife won’t miss the complications of arranging shared rides with other families (which she somehow has handled graciously and efficiently all these years). But I will certainly miss the conversations, because car time can be some of the best conversation time of all—if we nudge ourselves in that direction.
Seven Minutes and Counting
The author Sherry Turkle, who has done so much to help us realize the dangers to real relationship that come along with technology’s promised benefits, suggests in her book Reclaiming Conversation that most conversations take at least seven minutes to really begin.1 Up until that point, we are able to rely on our usual repertoire of topics—the weather, routine reports about our day, minimal and predictable chitchat. But around seven minutes, there is almost always a point where someone takes a risk—or could take a risk. The risk may be silence; it may be an unexpected question or observation; it may be an expression of a deeper or different emotion than we usually allow. All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths.
The tragedy of our omnipresent devices, Turkle suggests, is the way they prevent almost any conversation from unfolding in this way. A conversation interrupted several times before the seven-minute mark does not get deeper more slowly; it stays shallow, as each party makes room for the other to opt out and return to their device. What might be on the other side of the seven-minute mark, we never find out.
Stunted Conversations
My family does not know how to have a conversation anymore because we are all on our phones/devices.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17; due to rounding, the numbers do not add up to 100
Car rides, for many of us in car-centric America, give us some of our best chances to break the seven-minute barrier. Ideally, the dinner table can serve this purpose as well, especially if dinner is our daily Sabbath hour away from distracting technology. But in the car, we’re arguably even more present to one another, and physically closer to one another, than at the dinner table (and for many families, at least some nights of the week, schlepping from one activity to the next, the car is the dinner table!).
Auto Nirvana
But this is not how most of us treat the car ride. The next time you’re the passenger in a car, start watching the people in cars you pass. Of course, the great majority in most places and times of day will be solo drivers. (An alarming number of them will be visibly preoccupied with their cell phones, an activity that impairs driving more than moderate alcohol consumption, but try not to be too freaked out by that.)2 But watch for cars with someone in the front passenger seat. In my informal observations, I find that a good 80 to 90 percent of them are obviously “on their phone,” a phrase that used to mean making a voice call but now of course simply means engaged in some screen-based diversion. They are mere inches away from a fellow human being, probably a family member or friend, but despite that—or maybe because of that—they are mentally miles away.
And this starts earlier and earlier. The availability of in-car DVD players, as well as phones and tablets, allows harried parents to “bewitch” their children into compliant silence as they drive from place to place. We solve the immediate problem of how to keep small, squirmy children from going ballistic in the backseat, but we also teach our children, sometimes before they can talk, that the car is a place to be entertained, one more boring spot where, thanks to technology, you don’t have to notice how bored you really are. We miss out on cultivating the virtue of patience, the kind of patience that can help us survive or even enjoy a long car ride (or a short one—I’ve seen parents who only had a mile to drive from the grocery store to home fire up the DVD player for their toddlers).
Honestly, I get it. When you’re just trying to get the groceries home while they’re still frozen, without dealing with a meltdown in the third row of the minivan, a little bewitched silence is close to heaven (or, more accurately, nirvana—the realm beyond all being where our earthly passions are extinguished). Who wants to turn every trip home from the store into an opportunity to build character? Except, of course, that’s exactly what character is made of—daily, slow, sometimes-painstaking steps toward handling everyday challenges with courage and grace. And these opportunities are not just for our children but for us too, figuring out how to cultivate our own patience and spark our own creativity as we deal with their sometimes unreasonable or impossible desires.
The Disruption of Devices
Electronic devices are a significant disruption to our family meals.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
And creativity is definitely required. Young children don’t generally engage in extended conversations about the meaning of life, and nothing can squelch a conversation with most teens like the sense that their parent is desperately trying to conjure up some “quality time.” The great, deep conversations that are possible in the car after the seven-minute mark grow out of practicing simply staying engaged with each other and the world around us. With toddlers who are just becoming verbal, the best “conversation” is musical: making up simple, joyfully silly songs or rhymes that they can learn and echo over and over again. We had months of delightful car time when our children were learning the alphabet, just spotting letters as we drove along (our son, Timothy, gleefully called out every t in sight for several months). Later, we sequenced the alphabet, looking for each letter in turn on street signs (often stuck for miles on the letter j).
And we don’t have to make up all the conversation on our own. The car is the perfect place for reading—for audiobooks that, unlike videos, can engage and involve the driver as well as the passengers, or for reading aloud to one another. During pauses in the reading, our conversations will be deeper and better, enriched by the way story enlarges our vocabulary and imagination. Back in the days of the iPod, during car trips our family designated the music player as the “wePod”—played through the car’s sound system, not through individual earbuds. We’ve loosened that rule in recent years, but only after the pattern was set: we are here to share an experience together.
None of this comes automatically or easily, for children or parents. There will be childish meltdowns—on the part of children and parents. Something about the confined quarters and limited options of the car brings out the very worst in all of us at one time or another. Of course, that too is part of developing wisdom.
But those same confined quarters can also, if we persevere with patience and creativity, eventually bring out the best in us. One friend, now an adult, still drives every year with her parents from Colorado to Nevada the day after Christmas, even though she and her siblings are scattered around the country the rest of the time. “We have our best conversations on those drives,” she tells me. “It’s my favorite day of the year.”
Most of us wouldn’t sign up to turn our car rides into Dad’s School of Wisdom and Virtue—unless there was something truly better waiting on the other side. So set the pattern early: car time is conversation time. We’re on this trip together, and to make it to the end and gain wisdom and courage along the way, we’re going to need to talk, for seven minutes and more.
Crouch Family
Reality Check
It is true that some of the best conversations we’ve ever had with our children, from very early in their lives right through the summers of their high school and college years, have been in the car. It’s also true that one of my wife’s great disappointments early in our marriage—she uses the very kind word adjustments instead—was discovering that when I am driving on long trips, I all too readily withdraw into silent absorption with the road, missing the chance to talk at length with the love of my life. I’ve tried to learn, in recent years, to make the most of the chance to talk with my wife as well as my kids, and we have had some seven-minute moments, and seventy-minute moments, where real insights and breakthroughs came.
And yes, when you pass our car on the highway on long trips to visit family, you may see some white earbuds in the ears of Crouch children (or spouses). You might even spot the two kids, now practically grown up, watching Pixar in the backseat. But you may also catch a glimpse of one of us reading aloud to the others, or our son gleefully explaining the history and structure of the music we’re listening to as we drive, or the whole family pitching in on planning the meals for the next week, with our daughter and her love of fantastical cooking ideas taking the lead. And even if Dad is driving and tempted to withdraw, you might catch him listening, and talking too.