Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I Want My Teen Driver to be Safe

Beth has been getting quite a bit of experience driving this winter, in all kinds of conditions. She has been driving on roads I wouldn't want to be on. I like to think she's a good driver, but I still worry about her. When she was on her learner's permit, we were always with her, and we could correct what she was doing or suggest a different approach. Not that she wanted to listen, because she already thought she knew it all. Now that she has her license and drives on her own, we can't be certain what she is doing, and the best we can do is always remind her to be careful, slow down, etc. She still doesn't want to hear it.

She has had a few friends who have gotten into car accidents. Thankfully, none of them was fatal, but some of them have been quite serious. Every time something like this happens we try to talk about it and hope she learns something - so she doesn't get into an accident herself. Teen Driving is the most dangerous activity teenagers engage in, but, because they're teenagers, they don't believe it will happen to them. That's something that happens to someone else.

Since we can't always be in the car with Beth, this little device called the Personal Mechanic would help us to know how she's really driving, and not just what she tells us. It plugs in under the steering wheel and records information from the car, then all that information can be retrieved by connecting to a computer and logging into the Personal Mechanic website. Armed with the hard facts, we could address how she is driving and hopefully help her to be a better driver. She thinks something like this is a big invasion of her privacy and that we have no right to 'check up' on her. The simple fact that she'd be aware that someone was checking up on her and paying attention to how she drives would probably make her more careful.

Unfortunately the Personal Mechanic is out of stock, so I can't check to see how much it costs to get one. On the other hand, how much is the life of my daughter worth?

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1 comment:

  1. Aurora is counting down the days until she is old enough to drive....I'm counting down the days until I have a stroke.

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