How to Deal With Road Rage When Your Kids Are in the Car
I don’t quite understand why the trucker was so offended by my lightning merge – that’s the right way to merge , thank you very much – but he obviously didn’t like it and his horn let me know about it. I was driving to school in a minibus full of children aged 6 to 8, and this morning the traffic was unusually heavy. A few minutes later, one of the kids noticed that the same trucker was flipping another car, which caused a lot of excitement in our car, since they all recently learned what raising the middle finger means.
“He’s not in a good mood today, is he?” I said as the truck approached us again in the creeping traffic. And indeed, the truck drove up to us, and the driver showed us two middle fingers.
How do I react to road rage?
My vindictive son muttered, “I’ll get my revenge on him,” and readied his fingers, but I had a better idea. The traffic was so slow that we were still close to the trucker, so I ordered all three children to smile as widely as they could and wave to him. I ordered them to be “as nice as possible.”
I watched the trucker’s reaction. He waved back, even smiled. We made eye contact with him. He looked remorseful. We reached a truce, and the rest of the journey passed without incident.
I felt very self-satisfied, but after telling this story to others, I wondered if I should have left it alone. I didn’t know how deep his rage ran, and I didn’t know if he had a weapon in the car and what it might take to make him feel justified in using one.
How should you respond to road rage with kids in the car
I asked David Clark , a Michigan attorney, how I should have reacted at that point, and he told me that while laws vary from state to state, “your only course of action is to be on the defensive. Keeping minors out of the turmoil is vital, as engaging in bullying can also put you, the parent, in a position where the child is at risk.”
I certainly wasn’t aggressive . Passive-aggressive? Yes.
We previously recommended the following ways to respond to road rage to defuse the situation rather than escalate it:
- Get out of the way if possible
- Put your pride aside (don’t do anything to piss them off even more)
- Don’t look into my eyes
- Be empathic (assume something else is going on with them unrelated to this incident)
I did a few things wrong. I made eye contact, which I usually didn’t. At that moment, I really couldn’t get away, but in real danger, I could use my shoulder. And in shaming him with cute kids, I didn’t show much empathy—and that’s where the instructive moment could come. When you have children in the car with you, you can use the road rage episode to talk to them about how sometimes when people seem so angry over such a small act, there is actually deep sadness behind the anger. Maybe they just got some really bad news and it makes them react in a different way than they usually do.
You can report unsafe or violent driving to the DMV or your state police, and if the driver was driving a commercial vehicle, you can call their employer. If you (or the passenger) can do it safely, you can also take them off for the police.
Or you can just let it go and get on with your day.