If you’ve got kids in the car while you’re driving, chances are you’re more distracted than if you were chatting on your cell phone, at least according to Australian researchers. As Paula Faris reports for ABC News, this “first-of-its-kind” study indicates that kids are actually 12 times more distracting than cell phone use.
Faris does not go into much detail about the study itself, other than to say that the “average parent” will have his or her eyes off the road for an average of more than three minutes during a 16-minute drive.
Faris strapped cameras in her own car, as a sort of experiment, for monitoring her driving behavior while she drove her kids around on a Saturday morning.
Her infractions included adjusting the DVD player, retrieving an empty snack wrapper, looking at her kids for four seconds with her eyes off the road, and having the rearview mirror adjusted to see the kids, not the road.
So it turns out that even a driver who thought she was rather safe with her kids in the car turned out not to be.
At Tyler & Peery, we handle all types of motor vehicle accidents, including those caused by driver distraction. To learn more, please visit our San Antonio texting while driving page.
Source: One of the Worst Driving Distractions on the Road: Your Kids