Trying to parent my young children in traffic taught me to be present

first person

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Imagine 103 hours on Highway 401.

That’s how long I spend each year on North America’s busiest highway between our home in Vaughan and my parents’ home in Scarborough – with my two- and five-year-olds in the backseat.

As strange as it may sound, I’ve come to look forward to those drives.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to dread the 40-minute drives. Especially with the bumper-to-bumper traffic in the summers; listening to Baby Shark on repeat; and my frantic front-seat pleas of “why are you crying, Ethan? Do you want to play with this, uh, sunglasses case instead?”

I distinctly remember one swelteringly hot afternoon in the traffic crawl. I