For the past week I have been reading in the Hartford Courant, as you have in your newspaper or news source, about one high school after another celebrating its graduation. The school year is over. Summer is in full swing, weatherwise (it’s 94 here in Ct today) and in all other dimensions of the most fun season of the year.
And most likely, it is this week when parents are begged by their teen drivers to allow them to drive with passengers or to take the car to “hang” with friends.
Anyone who has been remotely following the news about teen driving this year knows that it has been horrifying – one multiple-fatality teen driver crash after another, each involving a teen driver with multiple passengers. Four crashes in four states in four days in March took 20 young lives.
So, it seems like a good time to go all the way back to one of my first posts on this blog in 2009: the critical difference between purposeful driving and joyriding. In summary, when teen drivers have a destination, a route, a timetable, a reason to arrive safely and on time, and a safety check with a supervising adult before leaving, they are likely to arrive and return safely. It is when teens are allowed to carry passengers and to drive for fun or recreation, so-called joyriding, that we see peer pressure, risk-taking, speeding, and distraction, all of which take a teen driver from the category of “at risk” to “a crash waiting to happen.” As but one example, a few weeks ago here in Connecticut, five teens in an SUV on a Saturday night decided to travel at high speed over a locally well-known bump, to “get some air” with their vehicle. The first time they did it was apparently thrilling, so they tried again — and this time two of the five in the vehicle died.
Without meaning to put a damper on summer fun, let me remind parents that in the next 90 days it is essential to know where your teen drivers are, and to set a mandatory, zero tolerance rule: no joyriding, no illegal passengers. Put another way, consider how a crash would put a real damper on the summer.
