Recently my oldest received his license and was off to the races. That should be just a cool old phase but sometimes it’s a little too accurate.
Sure we explained about wasting gas, driving too much and speeding up too fast. How do I know? It could be from all of the gas I wasted when I was a teenager. Stopping into the gas station to get $1.42 in gas because that’s all I could find in the astray. I even went so far as to move the distributor cap on my old “70 GMC pickup to try and get better mileage on the highway. I had to move it back to drive in town as it would barely run otherwise. Did it make a difference? Probably not but it was worth a try to get to the city.
As I explain to the kids that sure I might have driven a little fast and been a bit of an idiot at times but there were a lot fewer people on the road (and less police) and I was driving a truck that I bought and had to pay all the bills on. If I smashed it up I was walking or worse….riding the school bus.
Fast forward to now and there are a ton of changes. More people on the road, more police, cell phones to call the police with and what every kid loves….technology and satellites. And also he is behind the wheel of my truck.
After a couple of weeks of suspecting he was driving around too much, jumping on the gas and being an idiot, the last one was confirmed by another parent at the school, we did the old school methods of following him to school, driving him once in a while and seeing if the truck moved while he was at work.
Then life started getting in the way so it was time to make a move. Hello GPS tracker.
About a week after the simple installation and setup we asked a few questions about where he was driving, Was he going straight to school and staying there? Was he driving around when he was on break at work? Of course, the answers were no, yeah a bit etc.
Once we dealt with those issues it was time to lay out some rules. Routes to work and school, speeding, acceleration and breaking too fast.
Now we have a good understanding of the cause and effect of driving my truck. If the daily report card I get emailed is bad he gets to take it to the coach and explain why he won’t be playing this week. Nobody else can push the pedals while he’s driving.
There are some other advantages. If someone calls saying he was driving bad or he cut them off we can check and see if he was even in the area at the time.
If you have teen drivers and want to help them be responsible behind the wheel CLICK HERE for more information.
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Play Safe
Ken
Teen Driver Safety. It’s a different world now.