Teen drivers "need to do everything right"

Experienced drivers develop and rely on intuition and ingrained habits to drive safely. They have the benefit of a fully developed brain that appreciates risk and moderates danger with judgment and restraint. After years of emerging from congestion and bad weather, and dealing with impulsive drivers, they can anticipate the movements of other vehicles. Older drivers are likely to be driving on familiar roads, and in cars whose handling they know well. Without staring at the perimeter of the car, they know its position on the road.

This is not the case with teen drivers. Driving instructors have a saying that teens "need to do everything right." That is, they have little or no margin for error. Why? In answering this question, we can identify several important realities about teen driving and advice for parents about supervision.

New drivers face several disadvantages, some of which cannot be overcome with training and good intentions. First, the human brain is not complete until we reach about age 22 to 25, and the last part of the brain that develops is the part that restrains risk-taking. Second, teen drivers have not worked through those hundreds of complex traffic scenarios that eventually create what we call "experience"; rather, they are learning, drive by drive, how situations develop and how to react to them.

In addition to these so-called "baseline risk factors," new drivers focus intently on the perimeter of the car, trying not to hit anything, rather than on the traffic situation down the road that they should be evaluating. New drivers are also learning to navigate while learning to drive; while in drivers ed we train them on familiar local streets and often in compact cars, but then they drive an SUV, a light truck, or a high horsepower vehicle on roads they have never driven before, and in levels of congestion and complexity they have not seen before.

All of this translates into teen drivers not having the margin for error that older drivers have. They don't appreciate what can happen from following too closely. Moreover, teens are more likely to carry passengers who may try to distract or pressure them. They simply do not have the experience to react instantaneously when they refocus from a distraction or driver error.

The implication of these realities for parents of new drivers is the need recognize and take steps to deal with what might be called a "parent disconnect." Today's parents did not grow up with Graduated Driver Licensing, the step-by-step legal restrictions that take direct aim at the situations and practices that leave a teen driver no room for error and thus most often lead to crashes, most notably: passengers, night driving, use of electronic devices, and not wearing seat belts. In addition, of course, today's parents are at least twenty years removed from their first years of driving, and may well have forgotten how challenging it was.

This disconnect points toward several steps that parents of teens need to take to counteract new driver inexperience:

• Treat driving like flying. Pilots also have no room for error, and parents can do well by acting like air traffic controllers, requiring a "flight plan," a safety checklist review, each time their son or daughter gets behind the wheel.
• Strictly control passengers, at least enforcing state law but also going beyond it, by not allowing teen passengers for at least the first year of licensing, and never allowing "joyriding," teens in a car for fun with no destination or purpose.
• Impose zero tolerance for cell phone use and texting (the phone goes in the glove box before the car starts and stays there until the ignition is off).
• Insist on the same zero tolerance for any type of impaired driving (fatigue, alcohol, drugs).
• Don't push a teen who is not ready to drive into doing so, on the assumption that driving will speed up maturity.
• Demand seat belts at all times for driver and all passengers.
• Discuss and sign a parent-teen driving agreement that establishes the rules and what will happen if they are violated.

Parenting a new teen driver should be based on a clear understanding of the dangers of teen driving and the day-by-day, well-informed, proactive oversight that is essential until a teen develops the experience and intuition that give older drivers a margin for error.