Parents Commonly Engage in Distracted Driving with Children in the Car

Distracted driving accounts for thousands of motor vehicle deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries in the U.S. every year. The use of mobile devices to talk, text, or access the Internet by parents while driving with children in the car not only contributes to these fatalities, but also models that it is acceptable behavior and increases the likelihood that the children who observe it will someday do it, too.

To determine how often parents engage in distracted driving when a child is in the car and what factors are associated with this behavior, researchers conducted an online survey of 760 parents of children aged 4 to 10 years that included questions about mobile device use and other driving-related activities.

While driving with a chi…