What Teens Should Know When Learning to Drive

It's one of the most dreaded rites of child-rearing—teaching a teenager to drive.

Many parents are riding shotgun with their teens for 40 hours or more to provide the supervised exercise required to get a driver's license in most states. About do a good job of education steering, parking and controlling the car. Parents are not then skilful, however, at instruction the skills young drivers need to actually avert accidents, according to new research. At present, there are new techniques and even guides that have grown out of new scientific research into the parent-child dynamic in the car.

Suzy Hoyle of Wallingford, Pa., has taught 2 of her 3 children to bulldoze. "It's a scary ride," she says, "just I think information technology'southward very important they gain confidence and learn that they tin practice it." She has picked up tips from friends (have your teen drive on snow, stash the cellphone in the glove compartment) and refrained from criticizing her daughter Ashley, now 18, when she hugged the correct shoulder, uncomfortably close to several trees.

Suzy Hoyle has been pedagogy her son Gracein, 15, the basics of driving.

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"Staying calm is very, very important," she says. Ms. Hoyle has begun teaching her third child, 15-year-sometime son Gracein, safe driving techniques.

Laws requiring teen drivers to have supervised practice earlier getting a license have been adopted in most states since the mid-1990s. Near phase in driving privileges after a parent certifies that the teen has had 40 to 50 hours of supervised practice behind the bike, ordinarily with a parent, guardian or some other licensed driver over age 25. The laws accept helped cut teen driving fatalities by near half—mainly because teens are driving less and at older ages.

The accident rate among teen drivers subsequently they get their licenses has fallen far less, however, suggesting teens have a lot to learn when they start driving solo. Even after six months of supervised practice, some 54% of teens are notwithstanding making serious mistakes in a nineteen-mile driving assessment, such as hitting a curb, running a end sign or pulling out and crashing in oncoming traffic, says a 2014 study led by Dennis Durbin, co-scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Teens continue making like mistakes for several months after they commencement driving unsupervised, according to a 2011 analysis of 257,000 crash records led by Robert Foss, a senior enquiry scientist at the Highway Condom Research Middle of the University of N Carolina, Chapel Hill. A lot of learning goes on in those beginning few months of solo driving, the study says, considering teen crashes taper off rapidly after that.

Ms. Hoyle teaches her son in an empty parking lot with no other cars effectually.

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In the first study of what actually happens during practice sessions, researchers placed video equipment in 50 parents' cars during supervised driving. They constitute much of parents' instruction focused on vehicle treatment, says Arthur Goodwin, a senior inquiry associate at the Highway Prophylactic Research Center, who led the study. Parents too tended to stick to routine daytime driving along familiar routes, Mr. Goodwin says. Parents' education tapered off afterward teens learned basic vehicle-treatment skills.

Few parents went on to teach college-order driving skills, such as spotting and avoiding potential hazards, according to the report, published in March in Accident Analysis and Prevention. Many parents aren't even conscious that they exercise these skills, such as slowing when approaching a crosswalk where pedestrians might appear, Mr. Goodwin says.

Parents tend to drill teens on maneuvers that gave them the most trouble when they learned to bulldoze, such as parallel parking. "Most people don't get killed parallel parking," says Deborah Hersman, president of the National Safe Council. "The most important things parents can teach teens are how to develop risk recognition and judgment—making the left turns into oncoming traffic, how to merge on and off highways at high speed."

Ms. Hoyle has Gracein sit down behind the wheel to larn near the controls.

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One route to reducing crashes is having teens practice on progressively more challenging roads, at dark and in bad weather, according to a study of 217 parent-teen pairs led by Jessica Mirman, a research scientist at the Middle for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Participants were given a web-based plan, TeenDrivingPlan, with instructional videos, target skills and practice settings, driving logs and rating tools. Insurance company State Farm, which funded the inquiry, offers a program similar to TeenDrivingPlan, called "Route Trips," at teendriving.statefarm.com.

Parents who used the program had their teens drive on more varied roads, at night and in bad weather, compared with controls, says the study, published in June in JAMA Pediatrics. These parents' teens performed better on road-safety tests later.

One participant, Monica Pica, says the programme led her to exercise driving with her son Austin Dean, now 19, on "more diverse and crowded roads, back roads, highways and turnpikes. Having a game plan to work with, and to be accountable for, was amend" than logging driving hours without a program, says Ms. Pica, of Exton, Pa. She is using some of the aforementioned principles to teach her xvi-year-son Alex to bulldoze.

Austin did well during do, but Ms. Pica yet had white-knuckle moments. "It's not that I'm worried about your driving. I'one thousand worried about everybody else," she says she told Austin.

Mr. Dean says that while driving with his mom helped him learn, seeing her grab the dashboard was stressful. His advice to parents: "Don't freak out. Maintain your cool and calmly aid teens over rough spots and then they tin learn," he says.

Teaching Tips

Parents can learn to make driving practise more effective and less fraught.

• Do have teens practice on progressively harder roads, from tranquility streets to busy highways. Practice at night and in rain or snow.
• Do coach teens to avert glancing away from the road for more than ii seconds.
• Don't bring upwards sticky issues while your teen is driving, such as poor grades.
• Don't tell the teen what is incorrect in sweeping terms, such equally "You're ever in too much of a hurry" or "You never mind."

Driving exercise strains communication for many parents and teens. Parents' nigh mutual utterance in the video study was, "You need to slow down," Mr. Goodwin says. More than 1 in 5 of parents' comments almost teens' driving were critical, and many teens became defensive.

"Teens would be maxim, 'Stop screaming at me,' when a parent was just speaking in a normal voice," Mr. Goodwin says. "Teens can be touchy, and it makes parents' task that much harder."

Scientists at the University of Iowa recently tested a positive strategy for parent-teen communication about driving. In a contempo study of 83 parent-teen pairs co-authored by Corinne Peek-Asa, director of the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of Iowa, parents were trained to enquire open-ended questions about teens' driving, summarize the teens' answers without judging or criticizing, and describe how the teens' driving made them experience, using "I" statements.

For example, if a teen rolls through a stop sign, a parent might say, "Tell me about how you handled the intersection back in that location," listen to the answer, and say, "And then you lot did sort of a rolling cease? After listening to whatsoever additional explanation, the parent might say, "When you don't stop completely, it scares me. I get concerned that information technology might become a addiction and the next time someone will be coming fast. For my peace of mind, I need to know that stopping completely becomes a habit for you." Teens in such conversations were more likely to concur, and parents' apply of the method was linked to a 21% refuse in risky behaviors by teens, compared with a control grouping.

Teens also need help learning to recognize hazards, such as brake lights ahead on the road or vehicles bankroll out of driveways, says Dan Romer, associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the Academy of Pennsylvania. Teens who listened to expert commentary nearly potential hazards on traffic videos, or described the hazards themselves, afterwards did every bit well as experienced drivers in spotting them, co-ordinate to a 2012 study in New Zealand. Parents might help instill this skill past encouraging kids during automobile rides to spot potential hazards.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

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Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/better-ways-to-teach-teens-to-drive-1413915957

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