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When a deer runs out in front of you a decision needs to be made right now--brake? swerve? freeze? Driving a car can present stressful and challenging situations at any given time. Your teen will react to them much like she reacts to other stressful, challenging situations. She must understand that she has ultimate control of the decisions when driving, and can't simply choose not to get involved. Indecision or poor decisions can be very costly, if not deadly.
Teens who naturally shy away from being decisive in challenging circumstances need to develop decisiveness for their encounters while piloting an automobile, and you'll need to help him build up his confidence and nerve. You may want to wait several additional months before you have him tackle night driving on a busy highway, for example. Even more important is to practice appropriate driving responses over and over until she doesn't feel like she has to agonize over a decision-it's instinctive.
If your teen reacts to stress with a head-on and aggressive stance, make sure she understands the potential consequences of such an approach on the road. Your teen will be cut off by other drivers. Flipping them the finger or tailgating in retaliation can result in unpredictable and potentially nasty situations. Your teen will face the sudden oncoming headlights of other drivers when he pulls into the passing lane. Whether he speeds up to complete the pass or brake and return to his lane may be a life-or-death decision.
As your teen's driving coach, you can not only encourage safe behavior, but also help her in ways that take into account her particular needs and personality. If you tend to be confident and aggressive, you might well decide to speed up and complete that pass. Encouraging a much more passive and less confident son or daughter to do the same in that situation could be counter-productive, if not traumatic.
Your teen has also already exhibited an appetite, or lack thereof, for taking risks. Count on his general approach to risk to carry over to his approach to driving. If he started climbing trees at three, skateboarding at five and competitive motocross at eight, you will have more challenges in discouraging risky driving than with a teen more interested in chess, reading and bird-watching. The setting of limits, earning and loss of privileges and the severity of consequences for violating mutually-agreed upon rules may need to be different for the former than the latter teen.
Be aware of other types of potentially risky behavior you've observed in your teen. Does she anger quickly or has she ever gotten in trouble with her mouth? Have there been many occasions where he has acted impulsively in order to prove himself to someone or to exact revenge?
For the risk-averse teen, you may have to help develop more decisive (and in their view risky) driving behavior as they become more comfortable behind the wheel. Merging into heavy traffic, for example, can be problematic without a degree of decisiveness. We've all seen nervous drivers slow to a crawl or even a complete stop on merge ramps, causing a dangerous back-up of cars accelerating behind them. For timid types try a more gradual learning process broken down into several steps.
To teach them to merge into heavy traffic on a busy highway, for instance, try the following sequence:
- Map out on a piece of paper how a successful merge should happen and talk them through it. Show how you could end up at the end of the ramp with no gap to merge into, and diagram the right way to pull off onto the shoulder and get back on the highway when a gap appears.
- Next, you drive and demonstrate a successful merge, talking through it the whole way. Then get off at the next exit, get back on the highway and if you can do it safely, begin another merge and abort it safely, pulling off onto the shoulder.
Now your teen can attempt it, having seen on paper and watched in person not only how it should go, but also what to do if you encounter a problem. You've reduced most of the elements of fear and uncertainty through those exercises.
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