JOHN ROSEMOND | PARENTING 16-year-olds are too young to drive

Here's a thought exercise for you: Let's say that playing video games was the leading cause of death among preschool children. Researchers had found that video games sometimes caused the immature nervous system -- attempting to protect itself against sensory overload -- to suddenly shut down, causing an equally sudden end to all biological functioning.
Would you allow your preschooler to play video games? No? What if the chances were only one in one hundred? The odds wouldn't matter, would they?
Now, here are some facts for you: Automobile accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 15-19. In the last 10 years, more teens have been killed in automobile accidents than were American soldiers during the 10-year Vietnam War.
The numbers
In 1999, there were more than 2 million teen driving accidents and 6,000 deaths. This highway mayhem cost the nation $150 billion. One out of three teens has an accident during his or her first year of driving.
Teen drivers account for 7 percent of the driving population, but 14 percent of all accidents and deaths. According to police reports, 82 percent of teen accidents are caused by error on the part of the teen driver.
The sad truth is that even highly intelligent parents, knowing they are putting their children at extreme risk, will still allow those children to obtain driver's licenses at age 16. They will even buy their children cars, rationalizing that they don't want their children to be the "only" kids who cannot drive, and they are looking eagerly forward to the day when they will not have to drive their children to and fro.
One can only conclude that those parents, to protect their kids from feeling "different" (discomforting, but not life-threatening) and for personal convenience, are willing to expose their 16-year-olds to -- say the following slowly, so it really sinks in -- the leading cause of death for teens ages 15-19.
Times have changed
Shame on them! You're not one of those parents, are you? Laws allowing 16-year-olds to drive (in some highly rural states, the legal age was 15) were passed by state legislatures prior to World War II, when 16-year-olds were considerably more trustworthy and responsible than are today's teens, on the whole.
Matching maturity levels, I'll wager that today's typical 16-year-old is on a par with a typical Depression-era 12-year-old. (And please, teachers, don't have kids in your sophomore English classes write me angry, disrespectful letters telling me I'm wrong.) Consider also that in the 1930s, passenger cars were not able to accelerate from zero to 60 in seven seconds.
Mixing a powerful automobile with an immature, oft-rebellious teen is simply a recipe for disaster. I am obviously building a case for not letting 16-year-olds drive. Period. Consider that the crash rate of 16-year-olds is three times that of 17-year-olds and five times that of 18-year-olds.
A good number of 16-year-olds mock their elders, especially the elderly, yet their crash rate is twice that of 85-year-olds. Who's "mental"? Obviously, not letting a child drive until he is 18 and has graduated from high school is a matter of life and death. And yes, both conditions should be satisfied, in which case a license would be withheld from a high school dropout until either he obtained a high-school equivalency degree or turned 21.
Signs of change
Some states are seeing the light, slowly, and enacting graduated driver's licensing, with heartening results. In the initial years of North Carolina's graduated licensing program, for example, the number of automobile crashes involving 16-year-old drivers was reduced by 23 percent. Unfortunately, it will be years before the laws are adequate to the magnitude of the problem.
In the meantime, parents should do what most legislators are too timid to do. "How do you expect teens to work?" a parent recently rejoined. Why, parents can drive their children to work. If parents can spend countless hours driving children to and from soccer games and the like, then on what basis do these same parents object to driving 16- and 17-year-old children to and from jobs? No one would argue -- would they? -- that a job has more long-term value than soccer.
XJohn Rosemond is a family psychologist. Questions of general interest may be sent to him at Affirmative Parenting, 1020 E. 86th St., Suite 26B, Indianapolis, IN 46240 and at his Web site: http://www.rosemond.com/.