Teaching Kids to Drive Mentally

Teaching Kids to Drive Mentally
by: Robert Ragazzo

About the Author: I am a Certified Defensive Driving Instructor, Founder of Save Your Teen Driver.com, but most importantly, the Father of two young drivers

If you’re the parent of a teenager, you know how smart your teen is. You also know how smart your teen thinks he or she is. Of course there’s a significant gap between the two on occasion.

Lack of life experience makes it tough for teenagers to get an accurate grasp on what they actually know versus what they think they know.

When it comes to safety behind the wheel, most teens are pretty confident that they know what they’re doing—and that they are good drivers. They're almost always wrong of course, but it isn't entirely their fault. (Nor is it the fault of the "experienced" unsafe drivers among us, for that matter.)

When I speak to groups or teach a defensive driving course, it never ceases to amaze me that more than 95% of drivers are totally unprepared and totally under-trained. Driving is the most dangerous thing we do and most of us do it every day, yet only about 1% of drivers actually put any effort into improving their driving skills!

The reality is that most crash victims are simply the unwitting casualties of a broken training system. If we want to stop losing 35-40,000 drivers per year (3000 of which are 15-20 year olds), we can do it easily, but only if we make the commitment to more effective driver training.

Of course there is one thing you can do to protect your young driver today – convince them to put the phone away when they're driving!!!

What? Your kid swears that they don't text or use the phone when they drive? Please read on and be enlightened.

According to www.distraction.gov, the average teenager sends 2500 texts per month. That's like a part-time job! Do you actually think that this stops just because they're driving?

In fact, 97 percent of teen drivers surveyed said they thought texting while driving is dangerous—while 43 percent of them admitted to doing it anyway. (see the AT&T survey)

About 46 percent of all drivers between the ages of 16 and 17 will admit to texting while driving. It doesn’t get that much better as they get a little older, either: 48 percent of drivers between the ages of 18 and 24 engage in the same activity.

For teens, that’s just “normal” behavior. After all, if half of their friends do it (and you know there are more who don’t admit it), why shouldn’t they?

Just because your teen can parrot back to you all the rules about safe driving (or agrees to sign a "pledge") doesn’t mean that he or she is practicing safe driving habits.

We as Parents have to be proactive and make sure that our teens are mentally prepared to drive defensively. That means helping teens go beyond just knowing what to do and  training them to respond properly so that it’s instinctive.

That’s why I founded Save Your Teen Driver.com. We help parents and teens evaluate their actual driving behavior and then train them on how to protect themselves on the road, so that it becomes second nature.

I invite you to download our free e-book on what parents need to pass onto their teens before turning over the car keys. Or have your young driver take the course. The first step is a 20 minute evaluation that will tell you whether your teenager is a High, Medium or Low risk driver.

Get your teen’s knowledge out of his or her head and put it behind the wheel!