Teen drivers, those words alone just scare most adults who are experienced drivers. This is going to be a personal story about my own teen driving experience. I got my very first car when I was 16, back in the day when cell phones did not exist. It was 1997, and I was working my very first job at a local mall. The town I lived in was small, one stop light, one tine grocery store, and no fast-food restaurants. It was finally time to take drivers education, but to do that we had to pay for a private driving school because it was not offered in our high school. Fast forward through that whole process, I passed and then took my written exam at the local driver’s license place along with my formal driving test, passed those too!
The rules, my parents were strict. No friends allowed in my car. I drive to and from school with no stops between. I stayed at home until one of them got home from work. If I had to work, then they needed me to call them at work to let them know I was leaving for work. Yes, of course, I still took friends to and from school, I had the coolest car! I was a kid who observed everything around me, so when I rode along with my aunties who had bad driving skills, I thought that it was a normal thing to react in certain ways when driving. I also thought it was normal to eat and drink soda while driving because everyone in my family did that too.
One of the biggest challenges I remembered from my teenage driving years was thinking I could do the same thing in my small car that the boys did who drove big farm trucks that were lifted and had giant tires. I could never imagine how it would have played out, because I was a kid. I did not think ahead on certain choices. One day, everyone from school was going to a vacant parking lot to do “donuts” on the ice. I was invited, so I went. At first, I watched how it was done. I had never done this kind of thing before, so I had no idea what to expect. It was my turn so I did what I thought everyone else was doing, which was accelerating as quickly as I could, then pushing the brake and turning my wheels so do these glorious donuts. My friend in the backseat did not wear the seatbelt, so she went flying across the seat and into the back window. My front passenger had done the same thing. I hit my head on the steering wheel. Everyone was laughing. It was later the next day when I realized that my neck hurt. That was my first experience getting whiplash. That was the only time I did that either.
This was not the only time I made risky decisions driving. We lived out in the country, so no highways, no traffic, no city, just quiet country roads lined with corn fields. There was this one road that our bus took when I rode the bus, that I remembered it had a little bump. The bump was just big enough that if you went about 40 miles per hour your car would jump off the road temporarily. I did that several times, until one day my hub cab flew off into the field. I had to get out, on a narrow road, and find this thing in the field. I took it home to try to pop it back on, but it was harder than I thought because it was a little warped from hitting the road. My dad noticed the scratched-up hub cab and I told him I took it off to clean it and couldn’t get it back on. I lied. I know he probably knew that, but he just never said anything else about it, so I took that as my lesson to stop being so curious and realize I am not driving like the Dukes of Hazard.
Looking back, I made some bad decisions driving and I am lucky that nothing too bad happened. Knowing these days that I have 3 kids of my own who are all drivers I worry about bigger concerns like them driving with cell phones, and all the technology that some vehicles come standard with. If I could do something to improve driving outcomes for today’s teens, it would be to teach kids that their life is not replaceable and simple distractions like cell phones can be the thing that stands between them arriving safely or not. I am grateful that my generation did not have cell phones, or the technology that we do today. It makes me a better driver because I never needed it before, so putting my phone away when driving is so easy to do.
I think everyone who helps raise children, the whole community, is responsible for helping teach kids the importance of following the laws on the road while they operate and learn to operate vehicles of all kinds. Having new and inexperienced drivers is challenging enough, so adding to the difficulty of navigating the road should not be influenced by cell phones and other technology.