Teaching Your Teen to Drive

By Catherine Powell

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When it comes to teaching your children life lessons, one of the toughest is giving your teenager driving lessons.  While many parents outsource the nerve-wracking job to a driving school, I’m here to tell you that taking on the task yourself can be rewarding.  Particularly if you find you and your teen have little in common and/or your teenager has devolved into sullen silence, one thing that can strengthen your connection and brighten their disposition is holding out your car keys and saying, “Want to drive?”

That being said, finding yourself in the passenger seat while your inexperienced teenager takes the wheel of your car can be a daunting prospect.  To help you keep from having a nervous breakdown or further alienating your teenager, I have come up with my top-10 list of things you can do to make the effort less stressful on both of you.

      1.      As the saying goes, attitude trumps aptitude.  That means if you want to keep from driving each other crazy, you need to start the lesson with the right attitude.  The best way to do that is with a preflight check.  Just as a pilot goes through a preflight inspection and checklist before taking to the sky, if you want to keep from winding up white knuckled, you need to sit down with your teen and go through a pre-drive briefing that covers such things as the intended route, the rules of the road (including turning off the radio and cellphone), properly adjusting the driver’s seat and mirrors, not to mention the correct positioning of hands on the steering wheel at 9 and 3 o'clock.

      2.      While an SUV might be your vehicle of choice, for an inexperienced driver like a teenager, it’s a case of too much too soon.  Better to borrow a friend’s sedan or even rent a car for the day than put your child behind the wheel of a juggernaut that anyone other than an experienced driver would have trouble controlling. 

     

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3.      No my way or the highway. Don’t micromanage your teenager, no matter how much you might like to.  Just as you had to take the time to learn how to handle a motor vehicle, so too does your teen.  That means if you want to keep from intimidating your teenager, you need to select a suitable learning environment.  For instance, start your teen off by driving to the mall on Sunday afternoon before relinquishing the wheel.  A big parking lot is the perfect place to start getting comfortable behind the wheel of an automobile.  Once you feel confident your teenage driver has mastered things like braking and acceleration, turning and parking, then you can progress to the back roads for some practical road work with minimal traffic.  Wait until your teen has gotten comfortable driving with other vehicles before you let them try the highway.  Also, always make sure your teen knows that pulling over and relinquishing the wheel to you is preferable to getting in a situation that could result in an accident.

      4.      The biggest hazard to a teenage driver isn’t other drivers, it’s distractions in the vehicle.  Today’s

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automobiles aren’t so much cars as they are rolling computers.  As such, there is a myriad of extraneous information that is displayed on and off the dashboard.  This tends to make inexperienced drivers take their eyes off the road, which is never a good thing.  If your vehicle has a flat screen display in the center of the console, chances are you can turn it off.  While you may like the convenience of seeing your route displayed or your music selections, to a teen this kind of display has a magnetic attraction that will do little to help them improve their actions behind the wheel.  If you can’t turn the display off, the next best thing is to cover it up. 

      5.      The second biggest distraction to a driver is passengers.  This means that you should limit your commentary during the lesson as much as possible.  If your teenager makes a mistake, don’t scold.  Just have your teen pull over to explain the error.

      6.      Less is more when it comes to instruction.  Just as you would have difficulty retaining anything taught to you in a foreign language, when it comes to teaching your teen to drive, it’s just as difficult to master as learning Mandarin.  To keep information overload from setting in, keep driving lessons short.  15 to 20-minutes is long enough for the first few lessons.  As your teen gets more comfortable behind the wheel, feel free to extend the lesson to a half hour.  Keeping lessons short will also keep your nerves from fraying.

      7.      Understand the limitations neophyte drivers have when it comes to being aware of potential hazards.  Be aware that your teen’s ability to scan for and react to dangers is going to be much slower than yours.  They have enough trouble keeping track of traffic much less having the ability to anticipate what other drivers are likely to do.  Unless your teen is in imminent danger of a collision, try to avoid pointing out every little peril.

      8.      New drivers make mistakes.  That’s how they learn.  Never tell your teen what he or she did right and wrong.  Instead, ask them to assess their progress at the conclusion of the lesson.  You’d be surprised at how much easier it is to have a new driver critique their own progress as opposed to you offering criticism that will go over about as well as a lead balloon.

      9.      Just as you provided a preflight briefing, take the time to do a post-drive wrap-up that not only covers the driver’s deficiencies, but praises the driver for what he or she did right.  Make a point of mentioning what you would like to cover in the next lesson.  Then schedule a day and time for the lesson.  The more opportunities a teen has to drive, the better they will get and the happier they will be.

      10.  Lead by example by making sure that you practice safe driving habits when you’re behind the wheel.  This means refraining from doing the things that you tell your teenage driver not to do.  Because when you come right down to it, the best lesson your teenager has is to watch the way you drive.

Catherine Powell is the owner of A Plus All Florida, Insurance in Orange Park, Florida.  To find out more about saving money on your auto insurance, check out her website at http://autoinsuranceorangeparkfl.com/