By Patricia Gallagher Newberry
Enquirer contributor

With summer on the horizon, it's time to settle on strategies for the Family Driving Vacation.

You could start with a stack of books, with titles like Traveling with Tykes: Hold the Sugar, Are We There Yet? and I Stop, You Stop, We All Stop for Potty Stops.

Therein, you'll find lots of helpful, albeit retro, ideas for passing time in the car: play cards, count license plates, sing songs, play word games, read aloud, etc.

But none will tell you how most American families - ours included - now spend their highway hours: Watching tapes on TV.

Yes, we have joined the legions plugging a TV-VCR into the car cigarette lighter and fixating on a fuzzy 8-by-8 screen.

After one trip with our little electronic baby-sitter, though, I'm not quite a champion for the cause.

First off, lodged between the front seats, the thing took up a lot of space. (Goodbye elbow room.) So, too, did the stack of tapes the kids packed, with enough footage for a cross-country tour.

Second, the box made noise - loud, annoying noise, akin to, well, loud, annoying children. Front-seat conversation, radio listening, reading and even concentration were reduced to bare minimums.

And then, of course, the movies themselves were mind-numbing. It's one thing to play a plotless Scooby Doo adventure at home, where you can retreat to a different, far-away room. It's cruel and unusual punishment to have to listen to endless Shaggy and Company dialogue just inches from your ears. (OK, we're new at this. We don't have headsets for the children - yet.)

The mind-numbing feature is, I gather, the selling point of these contraptions, though. For five hours, the kids were mute zombies, speaking only to negotiate another snack or tape. A double dose of Children's Nyquil couldn't have worked any better.

No one fought over whose toe went over whose imaginary "side" in their seats. No one whined for a turn with the best of the Game Boy cartridges. No one sent animals flying in a spirited game of Beanie Baby Tag - a pre-TV stunt that prompted my husband to utter a line now part of our family lore: "I'm looking for a cement wall to crash into."

Now that we are as wired as every other American family, no one has to interact (much) or cooperate (much) or engage in any meaningful, potentially educational activity (at all) despite being packed into an SUV together.

While I enjoy the relative peace of traveling in Scooby-induced inertia, I also mourn the end of my hope that those skills - interacting, cooperating, learning - might have a fighting chance of taking flight as we travel.

E-mail patti@marriedwchildren .com.