DADVENTURE: Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring...

Summer is the season of boredom. Just ask my eight-year-old. Despite his frequent and high-pitched and really annoying protestations to the contrary, I think that boredom is a good thing.  Boredom is a fine teacher.  Boredom is a life lesson.  Experiencing boredom is essential to becoming committed to the pursuit of its opposite.  Children should be forced to endure long, painful stretches of boredom, with their heads dangling upside down off the side of the bed looking out of the window and wondering when the boredom will ever end.

My children are very bad at boredom.  I think all kids are, and always have been so, but I think they're getting worse at it.  It's partially my fault.  You see, I have a DVD player in my minivan.

The family car used to be one of the great American bastions of boredom – a mobile fortress of solitude loosed upon the great Continental landscape.  Children were banished to the backseat for endless hours of window-staring contemplation and telephone pole counting torpor.

How did you pass the hours in transit?

My kids watch movies.

I think I was convinced to get the DVD player in the van because I thought it would gain my wife and I greater freedom.  With the kids happily watching movies in the back, we would be free to roam – to really cut out and see the countryside.  Besides, it was an amazing and fairly new technology at the time – something that clearly I would have thought was cool when I was a kid.  So I went for it.

The fact is that we don't go anywhere new, the kids just watch more TV.  And having a TV in the car simply provides another venue for our multi-age kids to bicker about what to watch.  And, of course, I'm left to feel guilty that I've given corporate entertainment interests yet another crack at my children's formative consciousness.

So for most of the last four years that we have owned our van, the little screens have remained dark, even on longish trips, because I want my kids to have a reasonable crack at boredom and all her riches.

Recently, however, the tiny mobile screens have been flickering to life for ten to fifteen minute bursts on our frequent trips into the Texas Hill Country.  The charming DVD collection from Scholastic entitled Arnie and the Doughnut and four other fantastic adventure stories ($11.19 on Amazon)has convinced me that the boredom of car trips may be broken judiciously and in small doses.

This collection is comprised of five modestly but beautifully animated and gorgeously narrated versions of some of the very best children's books to be published in the last few years.  This video is a lot like reading to your kids, which is pretty dangerous to do while you are driving.

"Arnie the Doughnut" is "sweetly" narrated by Spinal Tap's Michael McKean, but the collection also features bedtime favorites in our house like "Roberto the Insect Architect" and "Hondo and Fabian" and well as the hilarious "That New Animal" and the classic "Swamp Angel."

The animation is completely faithful and the text is original.  They don't mess much with these wonderful books.  And they're short.  When on a road trip, I don't get committed to an hour of loud animated intrusions.  Boredom can still reign.  It just gets interrupted for a few minutes now and again.

So for the parent that appreciates the value of boredom, this DVD is for you.  If you are a bit of a sellout and have a DVD player in your car.  Like me.  

Clay Nichols, Health Correspondent:
Clay’s column, Dadventure, published twice monthly to Gather Essentials: Health, is a sure-fire guide to raising flawless, perfectly behaved, and always obedient children.  Yeah, right.
 
Clay is the co-author of Filmmaking for Teens: Pulling Off Your Shorts, an award-winning playwright, and the Chief Creative Officer at DadLabs.com, a fatherhood website. His DVD Due Dads: The Man's Guide to Labor and Delivery was released on Father's Day.

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