I need some suggestions, How do you keep kids quiet on a road trip?

You kinda just gotta tolerate them. It’s your parents’ job to worry about the noise level.

Have a good trip! :)

Take small, portable games.

Thanks; but they love to play around.

Yeah that might work

Car games:

20 Questions
Beaver – saying Beaver when you see a certain type of car
Ghost, etc.

you can’t. sit back there with them and play with them

Bring a long list of fun car games. Here is a cool list of games. I prefer “I spy” with my small kids (1.5 and 4), but the rest look fun too. When I was a child on road trips, my parents (usually my dad, an engineer), would give us math problems to solve that involved the travel (i.e. how long will it take to get to our destination X kilometers away traveling at Y speed, etc.). Probably a bit too advanced with 4 and 6 year olds, but not so bad for older kids. Anyway, I think these types of family-based, interactive experiences are far better than allowing them to mindlessly watch videos or play video games. Imagination is the key to lifelong success and innovation, imho.

yeah What we all ways play with them is about the cars.

@shilolo thanks those are very great games. I even remember when I was a kid. I use to play that :)

I really want to say: duct tape!

But I doubt if that would go over well with your parents.

You could learn to ignore it. You could bribe them with candy. You could politely ask them to refrain from troubling you. You could try to get your parents to intervene. You could build a wall between you space and theirs. You could bring your hydra-head mask and growl at them whenever they did anything you don’t like.

Or, I suppose, you could play games. Sigh.

One gag per child and about 50 feet of rope! LOL!

Gameboy

@wundayatta
They really don’t bother me but we want to keep them busy and so they will not get tired because our road trip will take 2 days from where I live.

Put a sign in the rear window: “This vehicle makes frequent stops!” : D

We recently took a road trip with our two boys, ages 5 and 6. They are both very active and silly, but I was amazed at how well they did in the car. It was a 15 hour trip, broken up over 2 days. One day we actually spent ten hours in the car, and the adults still managed to stay sane.

We had a portable DVD player, but didn’t use it much. Each of the boys has a hand-held video game system, which kept them busy off and on during the trip. Before we left, I packed a canvas bag of activities for each of them. Each bag held extra video games, books, crayons, a blank sketchpad, small toys like Bakugan, plastic dinosaurs, etc. The only new things I bought for them were the sketchpads and a couple of very inexpensive CDs of silly travel music for kids.

When they started to get loud, I’d suggest they do something new. I’d put in a new CD, remind them of their toys and games, or give them ideas for things to draw. We noticed that for about the last hour of every driving day, they’d get more antsy and loud. I’d wait for those moments to use the DVD player. Don’t forget headphones!

It also helps to let the kids get some energy out whenever you stop. Each time someone needed a potty break, I’d have the boys do jumping jacks, march around in circles, jump up and down, or run back and forth. If you stop at rest areas with enough room to move around, encourage them to get all their wiggles out before you get back into the car. It was always pretty easy to find an out-of-the-way place for them to be active for a couple of minutes without bothering anyone else.

And don’t forget the snacks! We filled the center console with low sugar snacks like cheese crackers and snack mixes. We also brought a lot of small water bottles, instead of sugary juice. We took our trip a couple of weeks ago, and I am still amazed each time I think of how well they did in the car. Your brothers might surprise you too!

Is it possible to travel at night? Put them in their jammies and let them sleep in the car? Otherwise, you have some great suggestions above.

I admit we were the ones before we had children not to buy the portable dvd players.

After being parents, it is one of the best investments for long trips. Our oldest loves it and he is bundled with blankets and pillows to make the long road trip fun.

Also new books and toys to keep him busy from long boredom.

Put yourself and your partner on No-Doze and the kids on Sominex!

Hire a clown to ride with you! : )

Make them watch a bunch of movies where kids are the victims, then tell them that if they want to know why someone would hurt kids, tell them, “Chatter on the trip and you’ll find out!” Mwahahahaha!

Hire a police officer to stop your car just outside town and walk to the window with a glare of his face, and say, “I hear you have kids who won’t sit still and shut up. I’m going to have to arrest them and throw them in jail if they keep it up!” Hehehe!

How is it logical to expect young children to be quite on a long car ride?

@MissAusten Yeah thats very good. That will help me out alot.

@CaptainHarley Want to come on our next road trip with us? ;)

@MissAusten I think so

Tranquilizer Darts

Does everyone with a joke answer really consider themselves helpful? I count 8 so far. What, precisely, is the point of making jokes about duct tape or tranquilizers?

No they were not helpful at all but at least they said something but it looks they don’t really like kids.

@shilolo & @Love_or_Like
What is it that you expect ???
For people to give you a special subliminal language or instructions of a special pressure point touch that once said or applied it will automatically calm down kids and make them behave and grow halos ???
Got news for both of you,,,kids will be kids !!
If they were not a pain in the ass,there might be something wrong with them !

When I went to disneyland with my family, I was worried my cousin mikey would get bored and aggitated for the whole trip, so I let him stay up late the night before the trip. And he slept the whole way there.Then when we got there, he was completely awake, and on the way back he was so tired from walking around all day that he slept most of the way back. :] I also had his DS for him just in case.

@Pretty_Lilly Expect? How about some helpful suggestions, as opposed to snide, immature, unhelpful, comments (I can’t really bear to call them jokes, as to be jokes, they should be funny, in some way). I have two kids myself, so I know that kids can be unruly. The point of the question was to ask for suggestions to minimize the chaos, which some people have tried to provide, while others have not. Sigh.

Back in the old days when my daughter was little there was always the ‘Dimetap nap’....lol

( NO..I am not advocating drugging small children, well.. not often anyway, haha )

Yep…all us moms back then would joke about the kiddies having a stuffy nose and how a teaspoonful of Dimetap was a great 3 hour break for mommy! lolol

Portable DVD player…. Lifesaver.
Adapter that plugs into the cig lighter and you’re good to go!

@shilolo & @Love_or_Like

You miss the entire point. The point is that kids, being full of energy, are very difficult to keep still and quiet during aq trip. I should know, I had five of my own. : )

@CaptainHarley Exactly. Which is why someone asking for tricks to try to minimize the restlessness should receive legitimate answers from people with experience, such as you. Everything else is just fluff, and quite frustrating at that.

The redeeming quality of Fluther is that people can get real answers to real questions. This, in a nutshell, is why Fluther has suffered a deterioration in quality over the past year.

@shilolo

You still don’t understand, do you? Making those comments after having spent many, many years raising children indicates that I never did come up with a good answer to this question. The suggestion to make a sign for the rear window saying, “This car makes frequent stops,” was close to a suggestion that you indeed need to… you know… like, make frequent stops. Duh.

But just to make sure that your delicate sensibilities don’t get bruised by having to actually think about an answer, I shall henceforth utilize language you don’t have to think about… short words, simple sentances, brief paragraphs, no metaphors or analogies, bullet points, etc.

@CaptainHarley Thanks!

Of course, saying “After many years I never came up with a great system, but we’ve tried X,Y,Z, to some effect.” would have been so much worse than 4 sequential non-sensical answers that, incidentally, could have been lumped into one parsimonious answer (but I digress).

@shilolo

Well, that’s not a bad solution. At least it would have the advantage of even you being able to understand it. : )

@CaptainHarley Indeed. Who knew that after years spent in school, I’m supposed to read minds too? So, when you said, “Hire a clown to ride with you!” (or the other ridiculous quips), what you meant was, “There is no way to calm kids during a long road trip.” How did that elude me? I am so dense.~

Let’s try this in reverse. What do I actually mean when I say, “I’m so glad you commented on this thread.” Better yet “supercalafragalisticexpialadoshus”. Go!

LMAO! Now you’re just being silly.

How did this end up in and argument between Flutherers? Wow… ‘The Internet. Now, even more ways to spread misunderstandings and make enemies.’

It’s ok. We obvously just have different kinds of humor senses. : )

Large balloons and stickers, coloring books, puzzle games or duct tape.

Books on tape go over really well!

@liminal Great answer. You’re right, when the kids were that age they loved the books on tape when we traveled.

@Silhouette I just saw that you said duct tape.. that makes me laugh!

@It’s funny until you try to pull the tape off. heheh