When you’re young, the car isn’t just a mode of transportation; it’s a liminal space. A place where rules are both enforced and ignored, where the sacred (your parents’ cassette collection) intersects with the profane (whatever’s rotting in the cup holder). But there’s one rule every kid who grew up in a pre-smartphone world knows by heart: never, ever touch the dome light.
To children of the ’80s and ’90s, the dome light was practically a nuclear button. Turning it on was an act of rebellion so severe, it felt like you were summoning the wrath of every safety-conscious deity. To this day, I have no idea why it carried such disproportionate weight. But as a kid, the logic was airtight: the light comes on, the car crashes. End of story.
It’s not like parents explicitly explained this. They didn’t have to. The reaction was Pavlovian. You’d reach for the switch, and your dad would shout, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” in the kind of panicked tone reserved for falling off a cliff. It wasn’t fear of inconvenience—it was existential dread, like flipping that switch would not only blind the driver but summon a black hole in the middle of I-94.
And yet, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. This wasn’t about the light itself; it was about control. Parents treated the car as a floating dictatorship, and the dome light was a symbol of their fragile grip on power. It disrupted the order of things, their ability to concentrate on the road, their confidence that they were the captain of this minivan-ship. When you flipped that light, you weren’t just illuminating the car—you were challenging the very foundation of their authority.
Culturally, I think this has roots in a larger phenomenon: the performative panic of parenting. Parents of that era didn’t know everything (despite what they told you), so they compensated by manufacturing arbitrary boundaries. “Don’t eat before swimming, or you’ll drown.” “Cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis.” “Turning the dome light on at night will instantly blind every driver within a five-mile radius.” These proclamations weren’t about facts; they were about certainty. And when you’re a parent running on coffee and the fumes of a 9-to-5 job, certainty is a rare and precious thing.
Of course, now we know that turning the dome light on while driving is, at worst, slightly annoying. It doesn’t make the car explode. It doesn’t even really make it harder to see. But it felt catastrophic because it represented a moment when a kid could assert their will against the machine—both the literal car and the metaphorical system of parental control.
So, the next time you’re tempted to laugh at how irrational this all was, remember this: someday, you’ll have your own version of the dome light. Maybe it’ll be an argument about screen time or whether air fryers are “real cooking.” The specifics will be different, but the dynamic will be the same. You’ll enforce rules that don’t make sense, and when your kids ask why, you’ll default to the ultimate parental trump card: “Because I said so.”
And the cycle will continue. Because that’s what parenting is. It’s a long road trip where everyone’s just trying to get to the destination with their sanity intact—even if it means pretending the dome light is an existential threat.
