Last week I attended (and spoke at) the Lifesavers Conference, the annual meeting of the national traffic safety community, and as usual I came away with new ideas for blog posts. Let me start with a new thought about teen driving agreements (see my model agreement in English and Spanish, on the landing page of this blog).
At Lifesavers I was part of a panel with Violet Marrero of the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety. She explained an innovative and effective program called Share the Keys (which I will discuss in a later post). Violet reviewed my model teen driving agreement and suggested that compliance with teen driving agreements is improved if some form of incentive or reward is built into the agreement. This makes perfect sense; I appreciate the suggestion, and pass it along with some thoughts and caveats about how to implement it.
The first question is: When has a teen driver “complied” with a Teen Driving Agreement? As noted in a recent post, we should not measure a teen driver’s success, or compliance with an agreement, based on him or her not having gotten into a crash and not having received a ticket from law enforcement. These are not measures of compliance. Teen drivers are supposed to avoid crashes and not get tickets, and doing so is not extraordinary effort. So what is an appropriate measure of and procedure for determining compliance? My suggestion is to pick a time frame — if the term of the agreement is at least one year (as my model suggests), then perhaps every three months, the supervising adult and teen can sit down and go through the agreement section by section, and if the teen has willingly followed each and every section, and has no violations, that would be compliance. (Yes, the supervising adult will need to rely on the teen’s say-so for several items, but I don’t think that is unusual for parenting a teen.) Put another, way, if a teen has been dragged kicking and screaming into compliance, or if there is some significant doubt (such as denial of a report of misconduct from a reliable source), then that should not qualify as compliance.
What type of reward is appropriate? The obvious one is the supervising adult paying for a tank of gas or some driving-related expense. This can be written into the “Expenses” paragraph of the agreement. The supervising adult should be sure that taking over a particular expense does not undermine one of the purposes of the agreement, which is to make the teen driver realize the costs of driving. The expense paid for should be modest and on a one-time basis. The reward should not be substantial (such as buying a teen a car, or helping buy one). I don’t think the reward should involve a non-driving item such as household chores (and my model recommends keeping these separate). Finally, by no means should the reward ever be permission to violate state law or a safety provision of the teen driving agreement, such as allowing the teen to carry illegal passengers or stay out past the legal curfew.
So, with these understandings and limits, rewarding teen drivers who willingly and fully live up to the terms of teen driving agreements is an appropriate incentive.
