Letting her take the driver’s seat

WE parents are used to guiding our kids through rites of passage. Toilet training? Tick. Teaching our kids to ride a bike? Tick.

Tying their own shoelaces? Tick.

School, sleepovers, learning to swim? Tick, tick tick.

We work through the checklist with research and precision, knowing that with every milestone ticked off we are meeting a key parental KPI.

And for the most part, we are able to navigate the emotional journey through fear, stress and pride as our little ones master these key life skills.

As a mother of teenagers, it’s been a while since I have had to use my life experience to guide one of my children through a key milestone, so I was both thrilled and a little apprehensive when the time came to teach my daughter how to drive.

She’s a bright cookie so I was pretty confident she’d pick up the skills fairly quickly. But I soon discovered that being a passenger to a learner driver is as much a learning experience for the parent as for the teenager behind the steering wheel. For instance, who would have thought that a passenger ramming their left foot on an imaginary brake pedal could be distracting for the driver? Or that it’s not accepted practice to reach across from the passenger seat to grab the steering wheel? My mother was far more aware of her limitations and refused to teach me to drive when I was a teenager — the job was left to my boyfriend, who managed the task in his old Holden Kingswood with its clunky “three on the tree” gear system. A true baptism by fire.

That same boyfriend is now my husband and it has been interesting to note that the casual, cavalier approach he adopted teaching his girlfriend to drive back in the 90s doesn’t seem to apply when it’s his daughter behind the wheel.

And neither of us have quite had the gumption to tackle teaching her in a manual car yet.

But it has been thrilling to watch her grow comfortable in the driver’s seat, tackling everything from the road to school to Melbourne’s congested freeways and CBD.

And at the very least it has given us a mandatory 120 hours to sit beside our smart, funny and clever daughter before she drives away from us towards her own exciting future.