Kill your DVD player

Call me old-fashioned but I much prefer to hear my kids scream "Are we there yet?" from the backseat of the car rather than "When can we watch a DVD?"

Turn on the DVD player in the backseat and your kids will never look out window.

My family is in the midst of a road trip, and I didn't bring a DVD player for my kids to watch while we travel the length of the Mississippi River and log more than 2,500 miles. I had this corny vision that instead of being glued to a Disney film my 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter would tell stories, play games, and sing songs. And well, it's actually happening. While I sit here in the front seat typing up this story my precious saplings are singing "You Are My Sunshine," over and over and over again. (Yes, while I tell my kids they can't watch Dora the Explorer in the backseat, I'm often up front working on my computer typing up blog posts. You don't need to tell me that I'm a hypocrite. My daughter has already made this clear.)
The first two days of the road trip were rough as my children adapted to life strapped into a car seat. They told me they were bored. They told me there was nothing to see out the window. They told me they hated road trips and wanted to go home. By the end of the second day, they started entertaining themselves. They began to ask "Are we there yet?" every two hours rather than every hour--and now that we're two weeks into the trip, I never hear those infamous words.
My daughter spends most of her time with a pad of paper in her lap and a marker in her hand. Yesterday she drew portraits of her family and a picture of a rock star (pictured above) singing into a microphone on stage. (There has been a lot of talk about Michael Jackson in the front seat.)
My son fills his time by talking to himself. He says goofy phrases repeatedly, usually with a plastic Batman figurine in each of his hands. "Garbage can head. No, you're a garbage can head. No, you're a garbage can head. Garbage can head! Garbage can head!"
Some planning went into my decision to ditch the DVD. I borrowed Books on Tape, such as Laura Ingalls Little House in the Big Woods and Mark Twain's Huck Finn, from the library and downloaded them onto the iPhone. I printed out coloring pages from the Family Fun Web site and road trip games, such as Backseat Bingo and I Spy with my Little Eye, from LilSugar.com.
The Crayola window crayons have been a big hit; they easily clean up with a baby wipe. And the Wikki Stix, bendable sticks of wax that you form into sculptures, have filled countless hours. But most of the time, my kids simply gaze out the window.
That's not to say that we're like the Leave It to Beaver family smoothly cruising down the highway. We have had our moments. Maybe you read the past blog post where I mention my kids spitting in the backseat. The lowest point was probably on my husband's birthday when the kids fought, whined and cried throughout a three-hour drive--and my husband finally stopped the car and said we're not moving on until you quiet down. And there was the day when my son said, "Hey babe!" over 1,000 times.
This is when I'm tempted to throw my laptop back at the kids and turn on an episode of Word Girl, but I know that once I do this, they will be asking "When can we watch a DVD?" the rest of the trip. We tried videos once on a drive from Seattle to San Francisco and for two days I was constantly negotiating with them about when the DVD player could be turned on. And then there were all the fights between the kids over what to watch.
Plus if my kids were watching a DVD player in the backseat, they never would have seen the herd of elk on the side of the road, nor the turkey buzzards feeding on a dead deer. They never would have noticed the family of gnomes parked in front of a country home, nor the blue waterfall at the miniature golf course.
They never would have seen the hundreds of lakes we drove by in Minnesota, the red barns in Wisconsin, the corn fields in Iowa, the swamps in Mississippi. They never would have seen the crop dusters, the rolled hay bales, the grazing cows, the trains carrying coal, the barges trucking down the river, the combines harvesting wheat, the firecracker stands, the manicured cemeteries, the homes with lawns bigger than football fields, the red-brick churches with white steeples. My daughter never would have been the first to spot the St. Louis Arch, and my son never would have realized the cluster of clouds looked like a dragon.
They never would have seen all of those Mississippi sunsets, the river water turning bright oranges, reds, and pinks. They never would have dozed off, watching the Mississippi flow down the center of our country. If they were watching a DVD, they would return to California at the end of the trip not realizing that they had traveled through an exotic land.

Do you let your kids watch DVDs in the backseat on road trips? Why or why not?