So. Your Humble Blogger has been opposed to the idea of kids watching videos in cars. Not just opposed, actually contemptuous, if you want the truth. Cars with DVD players! The heck? And yet, I cannot at this point come up with any actual arguments against it. It still seems wrong, but I can’t seem to create a logical case for it.\n
I should say—My Perfect Non-Reader suffers from carsickness when she reads, and although the Youngest Member does not (yet), neither is he currently reading books long enough to while away a long car ride. We do listen to stories, on occasion, and music of course, and we play The Minister’s Cat<\/a> and I’m going on a picnic<\/a> and I Love My Love with an A<\/a>, and we have been known to have a sing-song (tho’ The Youngest Member objects strenuously to sing-songs, alas), but there are times when the car rides are dull nonetheless.\n Most of our car trips are under fifteen minutes; we probably have two or four trips a month that are more than an hour long, and probably two or maybe four a year that are more than three hours long. I’m counting round-trips as two, of course, and often those two trips are in a single day—a trip of ninety minutes in the morning and a return in the evening, for instance, or sometimes a very long trip and then return four or five days later. I often experience those trips as being continuations of a single interrupted drive, so that by the middle of the return trip I am out of ideas for amusing myself and the others. There is grumpiness. It isn’t pretty.\n So why not<\/i> television? I mean, when the choice, for all practical purposes, is staring out the window, is there some downside to having the children look through a window at a narrative rather than a landscape? Yes, I do think that the habit of watching screens is not a good one—and the Divine knows how thoroughly Your Humble Blogger has chained himself to that habit—but I’m not sure that the habit of watching out the window is a better one. And on a longish ride (say, over ninety minutes) I don’t know that the use of electrons would really replace much in the way of conversation and game-playing. It might well be that the use of electrons for sixty minutes would refresh the car’s prisoners to the point where conversation and game-playing could be entertainment and not chore.\n And yet. I have not yet resorted to the DVD player when I am in the car. Airplane trips, yes. For some reason, perhaps because the airline provides movies for grupps, the use of a DVD player to while away the children’s time on an airplane does not seem so wrong to me. Now that I think about it, though, I am not sure I have resorted to a DVD player on the plane for either child once books were an option. But then, we haven’t taken The Youngest Member on a plane since that particular switch got flipped, and even My Perfect Non-Reader has had only three such trips that I can remember.\n I have begun urging my Best Reader to consider the DVD as a possibility for those rides where she is the Only Parent in the Vehicle. She is reluctant. I think I would be, too. But I’m not sure I can defend that reluctance. Can you?\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn’t quite see how it could be about class, but it feels<\/i> like a class thing, somehow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19385,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13767\/revisions\/19385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"