Jo Stanley: Forget I Spy, give me an iPad any day!

FAMILY road trips: We’ve all been on them. We’ve all hated them. But forget about traditional games, says Jo Stanley. Embrace the screen!

‘This is not lazy parenting, OK?’

I LIKE Easter better than Christmas. There’s the same traditional family-friends-too much food holy trinity, but without the panicked pressure of Christmas parties, presents, deadlines and decorations. Easter is like Christmas with its tracky daks and ugg boots on and can’t be bothered getting off the couch. It’s just way more relaxed.

Except, of course, the family road trip. That lunacy that sees once-perfectly sane people jam their sticky fingered offspring, stinky pets, and all of their worldly possessions into the family wagon and take off down a highway to halcyon days.

We’ve all been on them. We’ve all hated them. Some of us have had at least one dark moment in a country McDonald’s toilet where we’ve been tempted to do a runner, rather than get back in the car with our bickering, whingy, ungrateful kids. I mean, quit the whining! We’re on our way to a rented draughty old fibro shack to spend a long weekend doing exactly what we would be doing at home, except with scratchy sheets, an oven that doesn’t work and a really bad tele reception. WHAT’S TO COMPLAIN ABOUT????

We bet this picture perfect family doesn’t fight in the car. Although that smile does look kind of fake.

At the time it may feel like hell on four wheels, but this is the stuff memories are made of. Memories that are as integral to growing up as birthdays, favourite pets and that time Nanna got drunk at your cousin’s wedding.

For our family, notable road trips included the longest drive ever to Canberra to see nothing but war memorials, a broken down Toyota Corolla in Gundagai, and worst of all, when I was 15, a four-hour drive to the middle of nowhere that took place the day after I’d been caught smoking. There is no greater painful silence than between a fuming mother and a disgraced teenager, stuck in a car halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide. I could have happily jumped out of that speeding car to avoid the shame.

Whatever the chosen holiday spot, if we are adults now, our childhood journeys were all the same. Cramped back seats with siblings we probably had grown to hate within 20 minutes of departure, bored out of our brains, sticking to sweaty vinyl seats, oscillating between chronic carsickness and a desperate need to pee.

We did it tough. There was no air-conditioning, no iPads, no PlayStation, hell, we didn’t even have FM radio. Our main entertainment was torturing our little sister by threatening to touch her. Or if we were on the receiving end of the dreaded hovering finger, building an impenetrable fortress between the two seats out of a pillow and a colouring-in book.

It’s a different time now, though. A recent study commissioned by RACV showed that 50 per cent of parents are handing their kids screen time to keep them subdued, while only 5 per cent are keeping the game of I Spy alive.

The engaged mother in me wants to tsk tsk such lazy parenting. With my own daughter, I always start out refusing the portable DVD player, because there’s a whole world out there, look at it, take it in, you never know what you might see. But after half an hour of “Look, sheep! Look, a cow! Look a sheep and a cow!” I CAN’T STAND IT!!! The magic of a movie in a moving vehicle is the only thing that keeps me from turning around and going home.

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with R!

And as for I Spy, apart from being beyond tedious, playing it at a 100kmh on a highway is illogical! By the time you’ve spied it, you’ve well and truly passed it, so no one can guess the answer. Unless of course you restrict the game to within the car, in which case there’s only so many S for steering wheel and seat I can take from my 6-year-old before I give in and load up Frozen for the 24th time.

Family time is precious, and if you can come together and make your own entertainment like the Von Trapp family on a picnic, more power to you. But I’m tired and cranky, frazzled and fractious. Forget I Spy, give me iPad. Fully charged, with the Toy Story trilogy, you could get across the Nullabor without so much as an “Are we there yet?”

As they say, life is a journey, not a destination. And I choose to spend that journey expressing gratitude — for my well-behaved daughter and her babysitter, Disney.

Writer Jo Stanley with daughter Willow.

Jo Stanley is co-host of Weekend Breakfast on the TODAY Network nationally. Follow her on Facebook or on Twitter @realjostanley.