Car loaded, children tied. We put first and begin the journey towards the long-awaited family vacation. We know that at some point our offspring will ask the million dollar question, it's only a matter of time ...
Do you know how long it takes children in asking "how much is missing" when we drive? A study has proven it: children take about 90 minutes in asking. Specifically, a little less, an average of one hour and 27 minutes. Do you think it's too much? Me.
It is such a universal fact that a study has been done in this regard. According to a survey conducted by Enterprise-Rent-A-Car to 4,500 fathers and mothers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany and Spain that is the average, but then each country has different results.
The most anxious children are the French and German children. 46% and 48%, respectively, ask the question during the first half hour of travel, while in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain, it occurs during the first hour of travel in more than half of the cases.
But there are strange cases of children who never ask that question when they go in the car. 12% And that's what the average drops, but come on, that most children endure, at most, an hour before showing their desire to want to get out of the car. One in 14 children barely allows 15 minutes.
On the contrary, 8% of children take it easy. It takes 3 hours to ask their parents "how much is missing".
"They misbehave"
In general terms, 12% of the parents who participated in the study consider that their children "misbehave" during coch tripsand. In the case of the Spaniards, the percentage rises to 21%.
Man, they are children. It is normal that they get bored of sitting so many hours in the car. Therefore, instead of scolding them and making the trip a hell, we have to try to make it fun and take advantage of that time to share it with the family. I suggest some simple games that you can put into practice on long trips to make them more entertaining.
Simple travel games
Riddles. From the simplest, as "gold seems, silver is not" to true riddles for the intelligence of the human being, riddles constitute the ancestral game par excellence. They are ideal to pass the time since the more elaborate they are, the more minutes they take to resolve, although an excess of difficulty can turn the hobbies into a frustrating experience that will motivate the child to leave the game.
I see I see. Divinatory amusement popularized by the homonymous song by Teresa Rabal played as a dialogue: “I see, I see. Do you see? A little thing ... And what little thing is it? Start with the letter ... A ”. And here the interlocutor has to express his imagination thinking about visible objects whose names begin with that letter. The game has a color variant, the so-called "color-color", which replaces the track of the initial letter with the color of the object sought.
Count items. If the myth of counting sheep exists to sleep, to travel there is nothing like counting elements of the same color. For example, "red cars." It will increase the difficulty of the challenge of selecting hard-to-find colors, but exceeding ourselves with that parameter may leave the child as impossible, since there is nothing more boring than looking for lilac cars with green moles when we know that we will not find any.
Tell jokes It can be stimulating for the most grown-up children, although normally it will be for little unless all those who travel in the car are great humorists; In any case, it can be used as an emergency resource among other games. Singing songs can be fun to some extent, although to avoid possible discomfort for the rest of the occupants of that enclosed space that is the cabin of a car, it is convenient to reserve this resource as an intermediate between the rest of activities.
