Help Your Teen Driver To Hit The Road
Parents are generally caught off-guard when it comes time for The Talk. Your kid is growing up now. Adulthood is just around the corner. What you teach your child now will direct him or her along the highways of life.
It may be scary, but don’t sweat it. It’s National Teen Driver Safety Week and all your anxieties can be allayed by a little internet research. You won’t have to teach your eager teen how to drive all on your own. There are plenty of websites full of general and New Jersey-specific driver’s education tips to show you the way.
Before all else, though, you have to instill in your teen a serious respect for the road. Driving is fun. But it’s also dangerous. The U.S. fatality rate for drivers 16 to 19 years old is four times the number for drivers 25 to 69 years old. And every nine minutes a New Jersey teen crashes a car. Here are five reasons why:
Simple driver error is a factor in two-thirds of fatal teen car crashes.
Two-thirds of teen occupants killed in car accidents are not wearing seat belts.
Two or more teen passengers more than triples the risk of a fatal crash when a teenager is driving.
Staying awake for 18 hours is like having a BAC level of 0.08, which is the legal limit for intoxication.
The distractions proven to kill teens in car wrecks? Teen passengers and cell phones.
A driver’s greatest danger is his or her own inexperience, carelessness or distractions. Well-practiced adults don’t always fare well with these risks, so you can imagine how much greater the danger is for inexperienced drivers. Remember you have almost a lifetime more of driving experience than your child, and that’s knowledge you can’t just hand over. Every driver has to learn along the way. New Jersey offers plenty of driving challenges. Driving adjacent to the New York City metropolitan area, on expressways and in inclement weather can’t all be encountered, much less mastered, within a few months’ driving lessons.
Sending your kid out onto the roads, and purposefully without a friend, may feel like the wrong thing to do. But learning how to drive is a transition into adulthood that requires solo time behind the wheel. A new driver doesn’t yet know how to focus on the road while being distracted by unpredictable passengers. Teenagers should not drive with child passengers or teen peers in the same vehicle for the first 6 months or 1,000 miles on the road.
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Once you’re sure your teen respects the roads, take advantage of the websites that can support your rules for driving. The New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety, Ride Like A Friend/Drive Like You Care, and Teen Driver Source all provide you with driving logs, instructional tips, and youth-targeted lesson plans to make your kid the safest new driver in the neighborhood.
Just last May, New Jersey initiated a Graduated Driver License (GDL) program to monitor teen driver’s abilities to follow the law, fulfill practice time behind the wheel requirements and limit the number of distractions in the car. Tennessee and Colorado are two other states that have used GDL programs to successfully decrease the number of teen auto accident deaths in recent years. Your work with education and enforcement of good driving habits, alongside the law, can make New Jersey a safer place for your kids, too.
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