Learning To Drive: How You Can Help Your Teenage Child With This

Do you still remember the angst you went through when your father allowed you to get behind the steering wheel of his car for the first time? How your hands trembled when you fastened the safety belt? How you pressed the wrong button to adjust the rear-view mirror? When you turned the key for the first time, and you heard the sound of the engine coming alive, you wanted to jump out and run, but a strange excitement kept you glued to the seat.

Below we give some information so you can make this time of his/her life a little less daunting and a lot more fun for your teenage son or daughter.

A crucial tip is not to try and do everything at once. If you take it one skill at a time, it will take a lot of the tension out of the process for him. It’s very important that you should not allow the student to drive the car under any circumstances before he is fully trained in the position and function of all the major controls of the car. It can cause his death if he should one day end up in a crisis, and can’t remember how to switch on the lights, or where to switch on the windscreen wipers. Also make sure he knows the rules of road by heart before switching on the car for the first time.

The next step is to find an empty parking lot, and go there after hours when things are quiet. There your student can practice to start the car, pull away and stop the car again.

Starting off with parking skills is not a bad idea. This will give the student a feeling for how the car reacts to turning the wheel, braking etc. Reverse parking is never easy for a learner driver, so let him practice this many times over, even if he gets bored.

Something else that does not come naturally to a new drive is to slow down BEFORE you get to a curve, and how far from a stop sign you have to start slowing down and apply the brakes. Discuss this with him before you even leave the parking area and venture into traffic. One of the most terrifying experiences for a learner drive is to stop at a stop street, and then pull away while there is a car coming in the distance. It is therefore better to practice this after hours, in a quiet part of town.

Another thing that is very scary is knowing how to deal with people walking across the road, bicycles moving right in front of you, and other cars changing lanes without warning. This can be life threatening if your child should panic and do something stupid, so discuss this with him before actually venturing into the traffic, and start off where you will encounter this, but not on a bewildering scale.

Something that few driving schools or instructors concentrate on, is to prepare the student for unusual circumstances and conditions. Driving in the rain or snow, or at night, or where there are road works require particular skill, and you must not lose your presence of mind in such a situation. It’s hard to prepare someone for something not even you can foresee, so it’s probably a good idea to get a professional driving instruction video that covers this, and to watch it together with your student. You can then discuss the conditions it portrays and what a proper reaction would be under each set of circumstances. This is a better way of learning to drive than losing your life while trying.

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