Is Your Teenage Driver Safe? |
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Margaret Adams
June 22, 2006
Teenagers are known as one of the accident-prone drivers on the streets and roads. Studies have given blame to the adolescents’ raging hormones and risky behavior. Of course, you yourself would know about this if you learned to drive a car in your teens. For most teens, getting behind the wheel of a car gives them a new sense of freedom which is a different situation from their restrictive rules at home or in school.
On a parent’s end, the worrying seems to be so natural for they, themselves, have been drivers themselves and they do know just what kind of risks these teenage drivers are putting themselves into.
Dan Olmsted is the president of Atlantic Mutual and he also is the father to a new teenage driver. He states, “Parents have good reason to be concerned. Traffic crashes account for 44 per cent of teen fatalities, more than any other cause, and driving at night with other teenage friends in the car just about tops the list of risk-laden situations.”
Olmsted also states that besides such a fear of knowing that their teenagers could get injured any minute as they are behind the wheel, parents also fear that they are also responsible in cases during accidents. Aside from paying up for their own vehicle’s damages, if there are any third parties involved, the parents would also be the ones involved in taking care that everybody is well and everything has been paid for.
If you have a new teenage driver or any teenage driver for that matter, it is important that you, as the parent, let him know about the consequences of his driving behavior. You should both sit down and try to develop an agreement on using the car. Write everything you have agreed upon. Just make sure that you include everything like seatbelts, the use of cellular phones, who can be their passengers and how many passengers can he drive, and curfews.
Olmsted further states, “Nothing will make your teen drive perfectly and take all of the anxiety away. But with planning, clear communication, and a firmly enforced set of rules, parents can rely on a lot more than prayer and a large helping of trust when they hand over the keys.”
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