Teens and Driving

The Driver's License
If you are like most parents, when your teenager begins taking the steps towards getting a driver's license, you will experience intermittent waves of anxiety and excitement. Anxiety over the prospect of your child driving a car; after all, driving accidents are the leading cause of death among American youth. (In 2000, for example, there were over 2 million teenage driving accidents and over 6,000 fatalities.) Excitement over your new-found freedom from having to play chauffeur on twenty-four-hour call. But just below the surface of these two dominant emotions, most parents will detect a small current of grief. And this grief is twofold.

There is no greater signifier of your teenager's independence than her driver's license. Once she has her license, she no longer needs you as much as she used to. Furthermore, you have less control than ever over where she goes and whom she goes with. It's scary. All this says that you need to do your work about your teenager's driver's license long before she goes to the Department of Motor Vehicles for her driving test.

At the same time, her getting her license means less time spent with you, less opportunity each week to connect. This is when parents suddenly realize how many of their best conversations happened in the car.

I took it for granted that Cy and I had a good relationship. Maybe because I was a single mom and he was an only child, but for some reason we had always enjoyed good communication throughout his childhood and into adolescence. But it was when he got his license that I realized how much time we spent together in the car talking. At home, we were too busy living our lives; but in the car, that's where we talked.

Strange, now that he's driving, I know less about what he's up to than ever before, and not because of any conscious choice on either of our parts. More than that, I miss him—hanging out and especially laughing together on some of those rides.

And:

Sheila has been counting the days until she gets her license for the past two years. It's been kind of a family joke: How many more days, Sheila? And she always knew. She worked hard at part-time and summer jobs so that, after getting her license and driving safely without any tickets or accidents for six months, we allowed her to buy herself a used car.

But just last week the radiator sprung a leak and it took a couple of weeks for her to earn the money to have the repairs done. During that time, we reverted to old patterns, and I was again the designated chauffeur. It was wonderful. I had forgotten just how much I used to learn about my daughter by listening to her and her friends chatter and gossip in the backseat. It was great to catch up like that again; so much so that I'm thinking of slipping the mechanic another $100 to keep the car an extra week!

Of course, the time it takes to learn to drive and to get the driver's license offers yet another wonderful opportunity to connect with your teenager. In this context, he more than ever wants a close relationship with you so that you will teach him to drive, support him in getting his license, and let him use the car afterwards. Make use of these temporary and very real motivations. These are the times when he will open up to you, as much to let you in and hear your input as to show you how mature he is and, therefore, capable of driving the family car responsibly.

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