Kids Driving (repost)

On Monday night I was woken at 3:00AM by the sound of an aircraft overhead. It was incredibly loud and seemed to stay overhead for quite a while. I thought perhaps it was someone from the local air strip getting in some instrument practice. As the noise faded, I went back to sleep.

I found out later that the noise was the Flight for Life helicopter and it was trying to find somewhere to land. There had been an accident about half a mile from our house. Four kids had been visiting one of our neighbors and had left at around 2:00AM. It's about 200 yards from the house they were at to the accident site on a dirt road. The driver had managed to roll the car four times and ended up through the fence of a neighbor's yard. Apparently, the kids they had been visiting heard the noise and called 911. It took 30 minutes for them to arrive. By that time the driver was dead. The other three survived.

The girl driving had gotten her driving license just two days before.

I am in the process of teaching my younger son to drive. This is the third of my four that I've white-knuckled my way through explaining how to drive at a safe speed, control a slide and generally get comfortable driving a car at the speed limit with an idiot in a truck six inches from your back bumper. We start our kids off with Master Drive which has a truly excellent program run by a great set of instructors. They treat teenagers as adults and over the course of a weekend give them amazing skills. On the Sunday afternoon you get to ride shotgun as your child hurls the car through an obstacle course of cones. It's a better thrill ride than Disney Land.

I'm quite paranoid about what my kids will do once they have a license. I make them sign a driving agreement which you can find here: http://www.nadtec.to/doc/personal/DrivingAgreement.pdf. We've had one horrible experience and one very good one with our older kids. I have no advice to parents other than to try to do the very best possible job you can to stay connected with your kids. Keep telling them the same stuff over and over again even if they are not listening and set boundaries that will make you unpopular with them but might keep them out of trouble.

It's very tragic when young kids die at any time but I find it especially horrible when they die after this right of passage - getting a driver's license. My thoughts are with the families of the kids in that car.