Oz Rabinovitz chokes back emotion when recalling being in a car accident with his parents at seven years old.
“I saw my parents injured,” he says. “I heard my mother screaming. Then there was a second hit, and I lost consciousness.”
The Framingham, Mass. father of three says that traumatic experience weighs on his mind whenever his daughter, Maya, takes the wheel, and when he gives driving instruction to his son, Erez. Maya began driving last fall, and Erez will take his driver’s license test this spring.
“It is effecting my approach to teaching the kids,” says Rabinovitz, adding that he wrestles with his enthusiasm for this teen rite of passage, and, on the other hand, letting go of control. He tries to sound optimistic.
“It’s their time …show more content…
Both say they have texted while driving.
“That’s a horrible, horrible habit,” Ann says. “And I even do it in front of the kids, so I’m teaching them the bad habit. But hopefully, my kids are smarter than me.”
Like Parent, Like Child
Hope alone however is not enough to dissuade teens from engaging in distracting behaviors when driving. Parents have greater influence on theirre teens’ driving than they may think, including unintentionally fostering risky behaviors. That’s one of the conclusions drawn from a study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and Toyota.
The study polled 5,500 young drivers and parents and also interviewed 400 pairs of teens and parents from the same households. Many of the findings revealed an undeniable link between parent’ and teens’ driving habits, including:
● 54 percent of teens said they use a hand-held cell phone while driving; 61 percent of parents said they …show more content…
More than a quarter of teens (26 percent) in the study said they read or send a text message at least once every time they drive, but just one percent of parents said they believe their teen does so. Safety experts cite that discrepancy as a reason and opportunity for parents to teach safe driving behaviors by example even before their children reach teen years.
“Driver education begins the day a child’s car seat is turned around to face front,” says Sayer. “Always be the driver you want your teen to be.”
That may not be a matter of simply exhorting teens to do the right thing. Other findings from the UMTRI/Toyota study show that children form their own perceptions of parents’ driving habits.
For example, a third of teens (32 percent) believe their parents operate an Ipod or other device for music while driving, even though just 10 percent of parents say that they do. That gap also manifests in what teens think about other distracting activities, including texting, searching for something in the car, eating and dealing with passenger issues while driving. Parents may not be aware that they’re conveying a “Do as I say, not as I do”