Holly's Blog: Tools For Safe Teen Driving

The year I turned 16, my father received a Christmas card from our auto body shop. My high school friends likely would tell you I wasn’t the best driver right out the gate. That year, I may have earned the nickname “crash.” While I find humor in that Christmas card today, my early driving experiences aren’t something I’m proud of. Luckily, no one was serioulsy injured while I was behind the wheel.

This week (Oct. 16-22) is National Teen Driver Safety week and I can’t help but reflect on my own bumpy start. If I knew then what I know now it would have saved my family and our insurer, State Farm®, some money. After that first year, my driving record improved significantly, to the point that for many years I was very proud to show off the “good driver sticker” on the back of my Illinois drivers’ license (to my chagrin, I renewed my license recently and no longer have the sticker). I attribute my lessons learned to my father’s “helpful reminders” about the importance of safe driving (i.e. grounded from the car), rules he implemented that limited the number of passengers in my vehicle and slowing down, allowing myself more time to get where I needed to go.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers. Teens today have even more distractions than I did when I was learning to drive. The cell phone I had was a large, bag phone that lived under the seat and was used only for emergencies. Graduated driver licensing laws today help provide new drivers with critical behind-the-wheel experience, by phasing in full privileges over time.

There are tools available today that I certainly would have benefited from using when I was learning to drive.

To help teen drivers and their parents, State Farm this week is making available academically-based interactive teen driver training tool equipping parents to be more engaged in teaching their teens to drive.

The new tool, Road Trips™, is a web-based tool to help parents build practice drives, log progress and increase communication with their teen. Through this tool, parents receive tip sheets on critical driving skills in addition to three-minute tutorials on how to teach these skills. Parents also can track and log required parent-supervised driving hours, skills learned, and rate the driving performance of their teens.

Another tool, Road Aware™ provides teens with a safe platform to develop and hone their hazard perception skills as drivers, without exposing them to crashes. Road Aware encourages deep processing by asking teens to visualize where hidden risks are located, rather than simply showing them the risk. This engagement increases the likelihood that these lessons will be transferred to long-term memory and practiced on the road.

These tools and more are available on State Farm’s Teen Driver Safety website. The tools are free and available to anyone. You don't have to be a State Farm customer to use them.

I hope you’ll share these tools, and your experiences, with teen drivers you know to help them prepare for their journey. Be a role model to teens by practicing what you preach behind the wheel. Save travels!