Should you let your young teenager drive?
The day a teenager passes their driving test is, for them, a major milestone in their becoming an adult; for the parent it may be the start of a whole new set of worries! In some families, passing the driving test is automatically followed by the teenager being given a car, very nice for the teenager, perhaps not the best decision by mom and dad.
The legal age for driving varies across the world, but statistics on road traffic accidents support the fact that the younger the driver, the more likely they are to have an accident. Most teenagers expect to be able to drive once they leave high school, and hope to own a car, with which to go to college, and this is often the reward for gaining a college place.
If the teenager has a history of acting out and disruptive behavior, ownership of a car may simply give them the means to behave badly further afield. Many parents use a car to acknowledge their child's transition into adulthood, and to make their stay at college easier, and hopefully encourage them to come home occasionally, by giving them the means with which to return.
Passing a driving test, however, is only the start of learning how to drive. Teenagers have to learn how to drive with passengers, at night, in the rain, when they are tired, on a freeway, for long distances. Sometimes teenagers seem unable to learn good driving habits, it is as if any common sense they ever had goes out of the window once they are behind the wheel of a car.
On average 10 teens a day die in road accidents, either as drivers or passengers and in July and August, the percentage of fatal accidents involving 16 and 17 year olds jumps by 20%; school is out and the roads are deadly. Surveys of teenagers driving habits make scary reading. Teens admit to using their cell phones whilst driving, 50 % of them text as they drive and 515 make and receive calls. Teenagers like to have their friends in the car and despite the fact that this dramatically increases their chances of having an accident, and may have been forbidden by their parents, they continue to pile groups of friends into the car, often with none of them wearing seatbelts.
Adults frequently multi task in a car, overtake, light a cigarette, change the radio station, all of which require excellent reflexes if the unexpected happens, and a very good capacity to read the road, but it is still risky. Teenagers with much less experience do all these actions, and put on make-up and frequently if the driver is a teenage male, speed recklessly because speeding is a form of getting high. Parents need to think long and hard before allowing their young teenager to have a car, perhaps insisting that advanced driving lessons are required before allowing their teenager out on the road with, what is, a deadly weapon in the wrong hands.