Medcalf: Summer road trip poses parenting challenge - how to spark curiosity?

On a road trip, I’m a tour guide.

Basically, my father.

On my recent trip to Milwaukee with my girls, I pointed out historical facts and notes about the towns in Wisconsin that lined Interstate 94.

Eau Claire boasts a beautiful riverfront that’s worth seeing. In Tomah, there are numerous cranberry bogs in a hub for a state that produces the most cranberries in the country.

And as we approached Wisconsin Dells, I told my girls about the trips to Lake Delton we took as kids. My cousins, who were brothers, married two women who were sisters. They lived next to an Amish community in a twin home. When my immediate family and cousins, aunts and uncles – all Black – would pour out of our fleet of vans after we’d arrived, we’d all just stare at one another. We had never seen anyone who dressed and looked like them and they probably felt the same way. I’ll never forget my father’s confusion as he trailed a horse carriage on a country road for miles, unsure if he should pass or not.

But as I looked around the vehicle on our recent trip, tablets, phones and naps were the main attractions. It highlighted the ongoing battle we all face to capture moments and memories in a world full of distractions for kids who’ve been steeped in technology since birth.

I don’t blame them. I would have picked my favorite movie on Netflix or a game on my iPad — if I would have had those options on road trips — over my father’s commentary. But I couldn’t haul the family computer and its CD-ROMs on road trips when I was a kid, so our conversations and observations were the main course.

That lack of technology, however, fueled my inquisitiveness. Whenever my family would travel — with nine people, we always drove because flying was too expensive — I would pay attention to the signs of every city we passed. I would count the number of semi-trucks I saw on the highway. I’d look at all the farms, water towers and high school football fields that marked those country towns. And when we’d park at rest stops, I’d stare at the giant map and feel like I’d traveled to another world.

“We don’t have control over what kind of brain our kids are born with,” said Ryan Holiday in his podcast, “The Daily Dad.” “That’s not up to us. But what we can influence is whether they’re curious. We can encourage this instinct — asking them questions and rewarding them for asking their own.”

I don’t always know how to spark that curiosity in my own kids. In part because I’m not sure how to defeat technology. And if you’ve achieved this feat … congratulations. But I’m not anti-technology. It’s attached to everything we do, beyond entertainment. I guess I just crave more balance.

A five-hour road trip felt like the right opportunity to be collectively present. But maybe I’m a fool for believing it might be possible to capture some of the awe and wonder I had in my youth before all of this. To be in the moment feels as challenging — for everyone — as it has ever been.

In his book “Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!,” Julio Vincent Gambuto argues that pursuit of balance with technology, for ourselves and our children — he calls it the “infinite loop” — is real.

“The infinite loop is the very graphic at the heart of endless Keynote and Powerpoint presentations from Silicon Valley to Burbank to Chicago to Dallas to New York,” he says in the book. “Business teams work nonstop to find the best way to easily get us in the loop … and to make it really, really hard to break free.”

I did wish, on that road trip to Milwaukee, that my girls would take more mental notes and ask more questions and make more observations.

I guess I worry that maybe they’ll have fewer memories from these road trips later in life — that the hours on the road won’t feel the way they did for me when I was their age. And what if that means these trips are less meaningful for them than they were for me?

I wrestled with that thought.

On the way home, however, I decided to be intentional about that ambition. We stopped at Wisconsin Dells and rode the land-water hybrid boats, the Original Wisconsin Ducks, a first for me despite numerous trips to Wisconsin Dells over the years. My youngest daughter pointed out the birds on the water and the deer who ran near the trail. My oldest girls rode the go-karts and narrowly avoided a major crash initiated by a boy who pushed the gas pedal instead of the brake at the finish line.

We got back into the car just before a furious downpour arrived. There were no phones or tablets on that little detour. Just us. And even though it only lasted for a few hours, I felt like I’d made the most of the trip.

But as we sang ‘90s R&B songs — I’ll take responsibility for that — on the way home, I had to check myself.

Because maybe I’m not just asking them to put down the tablets and phones to live in the moment and appreciate the world around them.

Maybe I’m, unfairly, asking them to be more like me — and not themselves — as they create their own memories.