Keeping Your Teen Crash-Free
By Joseph D. Younger

If you’re a parent with a new driver, this fact will keep you up at night: Traffic crashes rank as the No. 1 killer of American teenagers. You can do more than simply lose sleep. Although you can never absolutely crash-proof a new driver, the following steps will reduce the risks in a big way. 

1. Size up your teen’s maturity. In assessing readiness to drive, the ability to make good decisions counts more than age. Driving is basically a social activity. You need to know the rules, respect others’ rights and keep your temper to stay out of trouble on the road as well as in life.

2. Drive the way you expect your kid to drive. Here’s a discomforting truth: Bad drivers beget bad drivers. According to a recent study sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, teens involved in crashes are much more likely than crash-free teens to have parents with bad driving records. Like it or not, you become a behind-the-wheel role model for your teen long before he or she reaches driving age.

3. Practice, practice, practice.  Your teen needs you even more after getting a learner’s permit and starting driver education. That means scheduling regular over-the-road sessions, knowing the specific skills covered in the driving school, reinforcing them during practice, correcting mistakes calmly and providing plenty of praise when your teen does well.

4. Just say no to peer passengers and night driving. Statistics overwhelmingly identify the two biggest risk factors for teens as driving at night and having other teens as passengers. Setting stricter curfews and prohibiting all non-family teen passengers for the first few months of driving are ways to give your teen the chance to log valuable solo time in lower-risk conditions. 

5. Limit other distractions. Cell phones, CDs, iPods, fast food, mascara — the list of potentially dangerous behind-the-wheel distractions goes on and on. Of course, you can’t monitor your teen’s behavior every minute in the car. But you can model safe behavior by avoiding such distractions yourself.

6. Set clear consequences and stick to them. Just as traffic-law violations earn tickets and other penalties, violations of family driving rules should bring consequences too. Good behavior should also have consequences.

7. Put everything in writing. Once you and your teen agree upon the conditions and restrictions for driving privileges — as well as the consequences for violating them — spell them out on paper. The agreement should also spell out your teen’s responsibilities to maintain the vehicle and pay for driving expenses.

8. Schedule Sunday summits. Simply put, better parent-teen communication leads to better driving. Gather around the kitchen table every few weeks to review your teen’s driving performance, as well as the conditions and restrictions you’ve set.

9. Get high-tech help. Several companies offer event data recorders that keep track of several parameters that indicate aggressive driving. Whatever you do, don’t install an EDR surreptitiously. Secrecy only defeats the real purpose — discouraging risky behavior.

10. Let your teen use the safest car. Often the family’s oldest car becomes the hand-me-down teenmobile, even though it may not be the wisest choice. It stands to reason that the least experienced driver should use the safest car. Size matters in a collision, and large sedans make up in crashworthiness what they lack in cool.

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