Last Thursday evening at the Jean Runyon Theater in Sacramento, representatives from Allstate and the National Safety Council spoke at an event about helping parents understand their pivotal role in teaching teens to be safe drivers. The event featured The Second City comedy skits and helpful insights from John Ulczycki, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for The National Safety Council.
Local promoters of the event include The Safety Center and Impact Teen Drivers in Sacramento.
The comedy skits focused upon cautioning parents with humor about the folly of distracted living and driving, by showing a typical family whose communication is thwarted by mom constantly checking her smart phone in the middle of important conversations about driving habits and other teen issues. Mostly the parents in the skits were freaking out and making their teen driver nervous.
Julie Domenick is an Allstate agency owner based out of Lincoln. “As I watch these skits about parents in the car trying to teach their teens how to drive, I have flashbacks of my own experiences as a teenager with my parents,” Dominick mused. “And we are here tonight for a very serious reason. Fifty percent of teen drivers will have an accident of some sort before graduating high school. And the number one killer of teens in the United States is auto accidents.”
Dominick offered another way to think about it. “Annually we loose 4,000 teens to car crashes, which is the equivalent of eight high school graduation classes per year,” she said.
John Ulczycki is the Group Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the National Safety Council.
“The most important thing we can do for our teenage drivers is model the way we want our children to drive,” Ulczycki said. “The number one reason teens get into crashes is because of inexperience, and they need to witness how it is done correctly starting at a very early ages as passengers in your car.”
Below are some helpful parenting tips from Ulczycki:
- Parents make the rules at home about driving to fit each child based upon their individual strengths and weaknesses (you can require more hours of practice than the law, for example)
- Do not allow the mobile phone to distract either of you from the important business of driving
- Teach your children to scan the road to anticipate traffic flow, ask your teen driver what she sees ahead as you are accompanying her for practice
- Enforce the provisional license because kids are easily distracted by others in the car
- Give your teen plenty of practice with you driving in all conditions, such as wet roads, rush hour traffic and night time
- Once your teen is granted a license, keep riding with them and lower the risk of accidents
- Keep practicing the challenging stuff, entering the highway, pulling out of a parking lot and left turns
Parenting Resources
- Banana Moments: Help for Parenting in the Network Culture
- The Authority In Me
- Impact Teen Drivers
- Safety Center Incorporated
- National Safety Council
- DriveItHome
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