The Art of Looking Out The Car Window

“I wonder how long this spider can hold onto the window while we’re driving?” my 11-year-old says to his brothers as we’re pulling away for a 3-hour drive. They start placing bets while I start doing a silent, private happy dance in the front seat.

This is exactly the kind of activity that kids who are “forced” to be bored in the car must come up with in order to survive. And I am here for it.

We recently drove an RV from Toronto to Calgary. And while I did have to dip into sanity-saving movies a couple of times, my kids actually spent most of the drive looking out their windows, spotting animals, noticing things and asking questions. They took to making up stories about other drivers and trying to get trucks to honk their horns by making that classic '90s fist-pumping motion – and absolutely losing their minds with joy when they did.

Just like car safety has come a long way since the '90s, so have options for entertaining kids on long (and short) journeys.

When we were kids, we didn’t have TVs built into the ceiling of our vans or iPads we could pull out as soon as we left the driveway. We had to fiddle with the radio or, if we were lucky enough to have a CD player in the car, we could be in charge of swapping the discs between our parents’ favorite Beatles albums and what we actually wanted to listen to: Big Shiny Tunes.

Punch-buggy was an always-on game in our car and for some reason, at some point I learned from a friend that I should be holding my breath every time I passed a cemetery, so I had to be on high alert for those, too.

I noticed weird and wonderful vehicles, tried to decipher vanity license plates and pointed out animals, birds, landmarks and roadside attractions along familiar routes – all things I would have missed had my eyes been glued to a screen. Road trip distractions were limited to activities like coloring books, small toys and whatever snacks my parents could toss into the back seat to keep us sane (OK, that hasn’t changed).

There’s a fine balance between pushing kids to find beauty out the window and them fighting in the back seat. When my kids start bickering over someone daring to look out someone else’s window, that’s my cue to lean into the tools I have available and put on Cars for the dozenth time instead of losing my shit.

My preferred distraction, though, is audio-only. When we all reach our limits confined in the car, I flip on a podcast or audiobook and we can all let our minds wander – while still looking out the window.

(The spider only lasted about 8 minutes, by the way.)