The chip "game"

I always hated the quiet game as a kid. Such thinly veiled manipulation was an insult to my intelligence. But now I'm all grown up, and here I am insulting kids' intelligence with my own version of the quiet game.

Except my game is vastly superior to the quiet game. It started when I was student teaching back in college and my mentor teacher would put a few cheerios on her students' desks and allow them to eat one when they were quiet. Surprisingly, it worked. Turns out kids will do a lot to be allowed to eat food that's sitting right in front of them.

Last summer sisters #2 and 4 and I took the four Littles to the beach for a week. The young crew is new to road tripping, so we had a few unpleasant moments in the car. That's when I brought back the food game, except this time I didn't have cheerios, so I gave each one of them one chip, and every minute or so I'd tell a kid he or she could eat a bite. They'd take small bites to make their chips last longer, and we had a good hour of silence in that minivan. Brilliant. It shouldn't work, but it does.

So last weekend during a six-hour drive in a packed minivan, when the kids were getting way too fussy for my own good, I asked them if they wanted to play the chip game.

They were ecstatic.



I mean, when else can you take tightly regulated bites of a food item you would ordinarily be given freely?

So I handed them each a Pringle, and they were happy. And the car was quiet.

Then they realized their chips were running out, so they decided to break them up into small bites so they wouldn't accidentally eat too much.



With two minutes of silence per bite, that's an awful lot of silence right there. Brilliant.

Of course, the game does have a downside: namely, that the Chip Game Officiator has to say, "You can take a bite" every minute or two. So no sleeping, or reading, or deep conversations, or any other meaningful activity. But sometimes silence is worth the sacrifice.