Cars & Art: How do parents calm their children?

To ascertain how parents view long car rides and their methods for calming down children, I sent out a survey to a community of parents. Specifically, I surveyed The River, a church with approximately 26 families that regularly attend. I received 22 viable responses. Each participant was asked to fill out the questions with their knowledge of their 5-12 year old children in mind. If the child was older than that range the parents were asked to draw on memories from when the child was in that age range.

As seen above, there is a rather even split in what parents would consider a long car drive. More than two hours is the winner but it is less than ten percentage points greater than the next most common answer. This indicates that the definition of a long car ride varies greatly from family to family. Specific wording when advertising what duration my design solution is effective for will be important to avoid confusion.

Interestingly, when asked about how stressful long car rides were with their children, none of the parents said that they were exceptionally stressful. This could point to a couple of insights. First, the stress caused by children could be less significant than previously thought. Alternatively, perhaps no parent wanted to indicate that taking care of their child was stressful for other reasons such as appearances. Additionally, this could indicate that the main stress when driving with kids isn't caused by the children but could be with another factor introduced by the kids such as extra needed equipment or rest stops.

For this survey question the winning answer was abundantly clear. More than half of the surveyed parents said that their perfect car ride with children would be quiet. As such, design solutions aimed at calming down children in cars should be careful to isolate sound.

When asked about what techniques they used to calm their children down in cars, parents indicated strong use of music, games, and screentime. For music and games many parents indicated that they interacted with their children this way, such as by having a sing-a-long or by playing eye-spy with the cars on the road.

The majority of parents were receptive to using art to calm down children in the backseat of cars. This indicates that my special interest, using art as a meditative technique, could be well received. The maybe slice of the graph represents parents who provided a conditional, such as how messy the art was or if it caused motion sickness.

Most of the answers given by parents to this question require paper if done traditionally (drawing, paper-craft). However, they are very easy to replicate in the digital space. Music took a larger share than expected. This, along with the prevalence of music in the previous survey answers could point to the medium of music being an effective and widely accepted tool for calming down children. However, about 41 percent of parents said that their children do not create art while in cars, with another 32 percent claiming that their children never create art in cars. Thus, a design space centered around making art activities easier in cars for the purpose of meditation opens up.

All original works in this article were done without the assistance of AI tools.