ON THE ROAD
IT’S enough to send even the coolest parent into a nervous sweat. Your teenager has just scored their L-plates and can’t wait to hit the road — with you as chief driving instructor. With young drivers overrepresented in road trauma statistics, teaching your kids to drive is one of the most important lessons you can impart. But it doesn’t have to be something parents dread, according to road safety and driver training expert Prof Teresa Senserrick. “They don’t have to be a perfect instructor,” said Prof Senserrick, from Queensland’s Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety. “It’s really about just helping to get them exposed to what everyday driving is really like.” Prof Senserrick said it took most learner drivers about 15 hours behind the wheel to get a feel for how to handle a car. And once that was done, parents could play a key role in building their learner’s skills in a variety of conditions, including at night, on short trips, long trips, with passengers in the car and in heavy traffic or rain. “As an experienced driver you know that what happens out there on the road isn’t always textbook perfect, and what young drivers really have to do is build up their instincts on the road,” she said. “You can’t teach that, it comes with experience and so really the role for parents is to give young people, once they’ve got the basics,
as much experience as they can in various conditions.
“While it is good to have some professional lessons just to anchor young people in the rules and what to expect for the test, parents can offer that variety that is hard for professional instructors to offer in a 60-minute lesson.”
Prof Senserrick said learner drivers went from being the safest group on the road to the most at risk after getting their P-plates, not necessarily because they were higher risk-takers or over-confident, but because they lacked experience.
She said the risk of crashing was at least three times greater for a new
driver than an experienced driver, and the risk grew to five times greater when even small amounts of alcohol were thrown into the mix.
She said parents who were nervous about teaching their children to drive could benefit from the Keys2Drive program, a federal government initiative that provides a free lesson to a learner driver and their parent or supervisor.
They could also consider having a few professional lessons at the start to set kids on the right path before parents stepped in to do the majority of training.
Prof Senserrick said deciding who was the best person to oversee the learner’s driving was important.
“Some combinations will work better than others,” she said. “Where it becomes a bit more risky is where a parent feels they can’t correct their child if they are doing something wrong without the child becoming upset or angry.
“Having a good conversation about that before you start is a good idea. Tell them, ‘You’re new and you’re learning something new, so I expect things not to be quite right, but I am going to have to correct you if you’re doing something wrong. But I will also try to remember to let you know when you’re doing things really well’.”
She said debriefing at the end of a driving session to review what went well and what didn’t was useful, as was pausing during a drive to discuss something that had just happened.
Planning routes suitable for the learner’s level of experience was important, while calm and clear communication was also key so the learner knew exactly what they were being told to do. Using words such as “brake” could be confused for taking a break, while “right” might be taken as turn right rather than “correct” or “OK”.
And, contrary to what your teen might tell you, advice from mum and dad was valued, Prof Senserrick said.
“You are offering a lot more than you think you are,” she said. “They are not going to tell you that you’re a fantastic communicator or that they agree with everything you say — they might say the complete opposite — but we know that young people trust the information they get from their parents the most.”