When a teen gets near their 16th birthday, everyone in the family begins to think about the teen getting their driver’s license. Getting the driver’s license is the first MAJOR step that a teen makes to become an independent person — to begin to make more of their personal, daily decisions about who they are and what they are going to do.

In fact, the process makes a great “rite of passage”. That is, of passing from childhood to adulthood.

For you teens, you need to understand that parents are usually scared to death at about this time! And they should be. Why? Because more teens are killed and injured in car crashes than anything else. And also because they remember what it was like when they went through this process. And they begin to think about what they went through, and the “close calls” they had, and they wonder how in the world they survived the process.

So for you teens — you need to understand that this is a VERY emotional time for your parents. So you will need to “hang loose” a bit!

And yet, when we ask teens, “what do you think MOST adults think about MOST teenage drivers”, we hear all kinds of things. Most of the time we get responses like … they think we “drive too fast” … or “we are irresponsible” … or we are “not very good drivers” … or “we don’t know what we are doing”.

It is amazing to me that it is the adults who think the teens are the ones who are “irresponsible” … when in fact I believe that it is very often the adults who are irresponsible. Irresponsible because we, as parents, don’t do what is necessary to TRAIN a teen to become a skillful driver. Not because they (the adults) are idiots, but simply because adults sometimes don’t look at what it takes to prepare a child to become a safe, competent driver.

We have measured the results of a more experiential, intensive training program with more than 65,000 teens.  What we have found is that most — not all, but the large majority of teens — are totally willing to become a RESPONSIBLE driver. IF we make sure they get the right type of training.

In addition, we have found that a large number of teens don’t really believe that they are ready to become a driver — yet.  Very often teens have a great deal of fear themselves, because they have had friends or family members who have been killed or injured in car crashes. And they have experienced this first hand. They just don’t want to take on that responsibility yet.