BY KEVIN SAWYER – Anyone who has had to travel in a vehicle with children is well aware of the anxiety ridden journey that can entail. However, new research done by CBS News has found that traveling with children in a vehicle can actually cause more stressful distraction that the usual distracted driving troublemakers.
In fact, the report states that driving with the children is likely 12 times more distracting than your cell phone or anything else. The researchers had cameras mounted in place on their volunteer drivers and examined the distracted driving behavior of people driving with children as well as people driving without children.
While most of the distracted driving behavior centered around talking on the cell phone as well as texting and driving, the study found that those with children were far more distracted when children were thrown into the mix. In fact, it seems that so little attention was paid to actual driving that it seemed a miracle there were not more accidents caused.
One of the main focuses of the study was concerned with the amount of time that people actually had their eyes focused on the road and their actual driving. That is a critical factor in staying safe. Researchers stated that some of the participants with children actually had their eyes off the road more than half of the time they were driving and for times of up to one minute or more. It takes less than five seconds of distraction to cause a possible crash.
The researchers concluded that you can deal with the children being a distraction and not take your eyes off the road and driving at the same time. It was factored that for a fifteen minute drive, many of the participants were not looking at the road for more than four minutes of the journey.
It can take less than a half second of inattention for something to happen. The research found that drivers who had the additional distraction of children up to the age of 12, were far more involved in accidents than those drivers who drove without children.
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