If you can, picture the parent with a child in the back of their car tucked into their car seat, trusting their parent as they drink from a full bottle of alcohol as they go along.

It’s something that is lesson one in a hot to parental guide, but yet parents do something just as dangerous all the time. Texting while driving.

Texting while driving might be more predominant in teenagers, but it in no way is confined to their age range.

If drinking and driving is seen as terrible act, why then do people routinely careen down the road, with kids in the car, with their eyes fixed on their smartphones, sending and receiving text messages as though they were relaxing in the recliner at home?

Because the message has the chance to be important, right?

It could be the boss with a big assignment. Or your spouse calling with a change in dinner plans. Or your Google alert for sleepy pandas.

So drivers think it’s OK to frequently reach for their phones to take a peek, and in doing so take their eyes off the road for a substantial amount of time for driving a motor vehicle around at 60 MPH.

It’s dangerous, extreme, and needs to stop.

Not only does texting while driving put the driver, his passengers and others on the road at risk, there’s new evidence showing that kids whose parents text while driving are more likely to do the same once they are behind the wheel themselves.

Know the saying do as I say, not as I do? Well, text as I say and not as I text is the motto of these parents.

Everyone has seen drivers whose attention is clearly not on the road, but rather on their phones.

Going too fast. going too slow. Weaving accidentally, breaking at the last second. Running stop signs.

It’s terrible, and terribly dangerous. And when these people are doing it with their kids in the car, it is unconscionable.

Texting motorists with kids who observe their wayward ways are unconsciously training a new generation of badly behaved and dangerous drivers.

And they wonder how our generation got to be this way.