I would disagree. If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger, you can have a conversation with your kid. Ask them how their day was, do they have homework, are they excited for soccer tonight? It all goes a long way to making your kid feel special, developing communication skills etc.
>If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger
To give a frame of reference, I don't believe that driving is so easy that most people can do it competently on a daily basis.
I find the experience extremely broken, and it seems difficult for a lot of people to drive 100% correctly; signalling before turning would be an obvious one: It should be simple, but the fact that otherwise competent people don't do it hints at a problem with the system itself. People commute and don't scratch their car everyday, but I think for the majority it's more a combination of luck and tolerance of the system than pure skill and mastery of the art.
In this respect, I think most drivers are not OK having a discussion with their passengers. They can, because they don't devote 100% of their brain power to driving (it's more of a chore than anything else, and no one wants to focus on chores), but personally I think they shouldn't. Eventually we should find a driving system more centered about user safety, better designed and less taxing for the driver, but I'm not holding my breath.
I guess it's obvious now, but I think most people should live in urbanised areas with good public transports, and/or high tolerance to walking/biking/kick boarding. Walking my kid to school is a nice experience, like you describe it; Driving my kid would be stressing at best, I'd be more focused on the brake light of the car in front of me than the soccer match tonight.
