Draconian? Or Loving Parent?

Robyn Kozierok wrote:
In article ,
Louise wrote:

Somewhat apropos, I've been wondering lately whether and how
attention-deficit issues and driving schools fit together. Do the
people who diagnose ADD and advise teens and parents on how to handle
school with ADD also give advice about how an easily distractable
young person can learn to drive safely?


On a related note, how do you deal with the fact that a teen with ADHD
may have impulsivity issues, making them perhaps more likely to engage
in occasional instances of extremely unsafe driving behaviors?

--Robyn, without any answers, just questions
.


I would withhold driving privileges.

DD and DS are learning from me that there isn't any place
in town that they can't bike to. Or ride a bus to. Or
walk to. I think that's one vital thing a parent must
teach a child: How do you get around if you don't have
a car? So I could withhold the car from them (DS is so
extremely cautious he's more likely to cause an accident
from slow driving -- but I'm sure that will change) and it
wouldn't be too onerous a burden. YMMV.

Scott DD 11.9 and DS 9

In article ,
Scott wrote:


Robyn Kozierok wrote:
In article ,
Louise wrote:

Somewhat apropos, I've been wondering lately whether and how
attention-deficit issues and driving schools fit together. Do the
people who diagnose ADD and advise teens and parents on how to handle
school with ADD also give advice about how an easily distractable
young person can learn to drive safely?

On a related note, how do you deal with the fact that a teen with ADHD
may have impulsivity issues, making them perhaps more likely to engage
in occasional instances of extremely unsafe driving behaviors?

I would withhold driving privileges.

DD and DS are learning from me that there isn't any place
in town that they can't bike to. Or ride a bus to. Or
walk to. I think that's one vital thing a parent must
teach a child: How do you get around if you don't have
a car? So I could withhold the car from them (DS is so
extremely cautious he's more likely to cause an accident
from slow driving -- but I'm sure that will change) and it
wouldn't be too onerous a burden. YMMV.

Do you think that a teen can't do stupid life-threatening things
on a bicycle? The point isn't really about driving, it's about
giving a teen increasing independence when you justifiably don't
trust their judgement.

I'll give you that it is easier to take other innocent victims
with you in a car than on a bicycle, but the notion that not
driving somehow protects kids from the dangers of the teen years
seems rather misplaced.

(I agree that it is good to teach kids how to get around without
a car -- easier in some locations than others! -- but that is
rather orthogonal to the questions of independence and responsibility
that I was trying to raise.)

--Robyn

..

On 2005-06-07, Robyn Kozierok wrote:
In article ,
Scott wrote:
DD and DS are learning from me that there isn't any place
in town that they can't bike to. Or ride a bus to. Or
walk to. I think that's one vital thing a parent must
teach a child: How do you get around if you don't have
a car? So I could withhold the car from them (DS is so
extremely cautious he's more likely to cause an accident
from slow driving -- but I'm sure that will change) and it
wouldn't be too onerous a burden. YMMV.

Do you think that a teen can't do stupid life-threatening things
on a bicycle? The point isn't really about driving, it's about
giving a teen increasing independence when you justifiably don't
trust their judgement.

I'll give you that it is easier to take other innocent victims
with you in a car than on a bicycle, but the notion that not
driving somehow protects kids from the dangers of the teen years
seems rather misplaced.

(I agree that it is good to teach kids how to get around without
a car -- easier in some locations than others! -- but that is
rather orthogonal to the questions of independence and responsibility
that I was trying to raise.)

I'm with Scott on this one---teaching kids that they can get around by
other means than cars is great for increasing their independence,
without putting lethal weapons into their hands. It also provides
them with a safer alternative to riding home with drunk friends.

Although teens can and do do stupid things on bicycles, the risks are
much lower than for drivers---in the US only about 800-900 people a
year die on bicycles, and only a modest fraction of those are
teenagers. Death by suicide is a much higher risk for teens as is
death by riding in a car driven by a drunk.

My view may be biased---neither my wife nor I have ever had a driving
license (I did have a learning permit as teenager). We have found
that walking, biking, and buses are perfectly adequate for getting
around town, though we do have a somewhat smaller shopping radius than
some of our neighbors (we're not willing to go 50 miles to save 20%).

We do live in an area where public transit is fairly good (by US
standards---still awful compared to most European communities) and
where the weather is good for bicycling most of the year. Of course,
we chose where we live knowing that we didn't drive, but we did live
for 4 years in Ithaca, NY, which can't claim to have good public
transit or good weather.

------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
(Senior member, IEEE) (Board of Directors, ISCB)
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Affiliations for identification only.

In article ,
Kevin Karplus wrote:

I'm with Scott on this one---teaching kids that they can get around by
other means than cars is great for increasing their independence,
without putting lethal weapons into their hands. It also provides
them with a safer alternative to riding home with drunk friends.

In general, I think I'd rather have my kid be the "designated driver"
than riding with friends, even if the friends are not drunk. This
assumes that I trust my child's judgement and driving skill (diverging
somewhat from the thread about what to do if you don't -- since my oldest
is only 11, I don't yet know if I will be able to trust his judgement
and driving as a teen, but I suspect that I will).

I would think not teaching one's children to drive safely and expecting
them to always rely on car-free transit would probably put them at
greater risk of riding with a poor (not necessarily drunk) driver than
teaching them to drive safely and sometimes providing them with a car
to use. Do you think your teen will opt to bike everywhere when s/he
has friends offering him/her a ride?

This isn't to say that teaching kids to get around without a car is not
a valuable and important skill. But you seem to be advocating not
teaching/allowing teens to drive at all, and I think that that learning
to drive safely and defensively is also a valuable and important
skill.

Although teens can and do do stupid things on bicycles, the risks are
much lower than for drivers---in the US only about 800-900 people a
year die on bicycles, and only a modest fraction of those are
teenagers.

That number means nothing by itself. What percentage of teens who use
bicycles as their primary means of transportation die in bicycle
accidents, versus the percentage of teens who use cars as their primary
means of transportation who die in car accidents? The fact that the
absolute number is small may well be a result of the fact that such a
tiny percentage of people in this country use bicycles for
transportation at all.

we chose where we live knowing that we didn't drive, but we did live
for 4 years in Ithaca, NY, which can't claim to have good public
transit or good weather.

That is impressive. I assume you didn't bike everywhere but rather
relied on others (bus and taxi drivers, and possibly friends) to do the
driving for you. While laudable from an environmental point of view,
unless you have a particular reason for being unable to learn to drive
safely, I would think that learning to drive safely and driving yourself
would actually be safer.

--Robyn
..

Robyn Kozierok wrote:
In article ,
Kevin Karplus wrote:

I'm with Scott on this one---teaching kids that they can get around by
other means than cars is great for increasing their independence,
without putting lethal weapons into their hands. It also provides
them with a safer alternative to riding home with drunk friends.


In general, I think I'd rather have my kid be the "designated driver"
than riding with friends, even if the friends are not drunk. This
assumes that I trust my child's judgement and driving skill (diverging
somewhat from the thread about what to do if you don't -- since my oldest
is only 11, I don't yet know if I will be able to trust his judgement
and driving as a teen, but I suspect that I will).

I'm with you here. But if I witnessed -- or was told --
my kid doing irresponsible things in a car, they'd find
themselves car-less. (Well, they couldn't borrow our
car anymore. No way on God's Green Earth will DD or DS
have their own car in High School). DD and DS are, today,
very responsible compared to their peers. Who knows how
things will change in the next 4-7 years.


I would think not teaching one's children to drive safely and expecting
them to always rely on car-free transit would probably put them at
greater risk of riding with a poor (not necessarily drunk) driver than
teaching them to drive safely and sometimes providing them with a car
to use. Do you think your teen will opt to bike everywhere when s/he
has friends offering him/her a ride?


This is the task I think that is most difficult to teach --
when to say No when you feel unsafe, i.e., when to trust
your instincts. If kids read 'The Gift of Fear' by Gavin
(insert last name here -- I'm blanking) -- does it
register with them? How do you teach a kid to determine
if their friends are safe drivers -- or how to rely on
the judgement of others, when a good friend asks your
kid to come along, saying that the driver, unknown to
your kid, is a great driver.

This isn't to say that teaching kids to get around without a car is not
a valuable and important skill. But you seem to be advocating not
teaching/allowing teens to drive at all, and I think that that learning
to drive safely and defensively is also a valuable and important
skill.

Yes -- if you do not drive, then how does one inculcate
the expectations that other drivers will have? My dearest
friend from Kindergarten lived in the Bay Area for a long
time, and remarked all the time on Driving While Oriental,
that is, driving at odds with the prevailing culture, because
the drivers don't grow up in a car. I'm hoping my kids
learn a whole lot of good driving skills by observation.



Scott DD almost 12 and DS 9

Kevin Karplus wrote:

On 2005-06-07, Robyn Kozierok wrote:
In article ,
Scott wrote:
DD and DS are learning from me that there isn't any place
in town that they can't bike to. Or ride a bus to. Or
walk to. I think that's one vital thing a parent must
teach a child: How do you get around if you don't have
a car? snip

In our area, which is extremely rural with almost no public
transportation, that would not have been a possible lesson to learn.
My ds did bike down to the barn before he got his license, and they
were sometimes able (in elementary and middle school) to take the
school bus to where their horses were stabled, but then I had to go
and get them when it was time for dinner.

In HS, if they wanted to be in the band (practice was after school),
or go out for sports they had to drive to school or else I had to come
get them from school (and both dh and I were working in a place where
that would have been difficult) or they had to ride with a friend.
For them to drive to school was safer than riding with a friend.


I'll give you that it is easier to take other innocent victims
with you in a car than on a bicycle, but the notion that not
driving somehow protects kids from the dangers of the teen years
seems rather misplaced.

When each of my kids got their driver's license they were restricted
from taking any other un-related children with them unless I gave
specific permission for them to do so. And dd#1 was told that if her
sister caused a problem, she was to put her out on the side of the
road and leave her. [They've now got a law in MD about teens driving
unrelated persons, but this was way before that.]

When ds was learning to drive, I was sitting in the car with him and I
bought a pulse monitor to measure my heart rate. I tried it out in
the car while we were driving home. WHOA - my pulse rate was WAY up
there. And then when we got home it went down to normal again. So
teaching a kid IS stressful for the parent, as is this whole issue.

My mom did a LOT of driving with me. We drove back and forth from
Baltimore to Philadelphia almost every weekend when I was a senior in
HS (before there was an I-95 on old US Route 1), and I did a good
percentage of the driving.

(I agree that it is good to teach kids how to get around without
a car -- easier in some locations than others! -- but that is
rather orthogonal to the questions of independence and responsibility
that I was trying to raise.)

In my case, my kids were responsible for their own horses - I did not
do any of that for them, and it was a big responsibility.

snip
My view may be biased---neither my wife nor I have ever had a driving
license (I did have a learning permit as teenager). We have found
that walking, biking, and buses are perfectly adequate for getting
around town, though we do have a somewhat smaller shopping radius than
some of our neighbors (we're not willing to go 50 miles to save 20%).

My job required that I used my own car to drive to locations all over
the state carrying equipment with me. While Maryland is a small
state, it does extend from the Atlantic Ocean to West Virginia. Not
only is there is no statewide transportation system that would allow
me to be at job sites at the start of whatever shift I was monitoring,
but the equipment was too heavy and bulky to allow me to use such a
system even if there had been one. So I absolutely had to have a car
and a driver's licence in order to do my job.

My dd#1 would not let her oldest son get his driver's license because
he could not get a good student discount on his insurance. I think
this was false economy (although I have not said so to them). This
meant that he never got to practice with his parents in the car, and
get the benefit of their guidance.

So when he went to college, he didn't know how to drive. When he
dropped out of college and was living at home, he could get work, but
he couldn't get there (not only was it too far to the metro station,
but the roads had a lot of speeding traffic and no shoulders or safe
place to ride a bike or walk) without someone at least driving him to
the metro and picking him up after work. Plus sometimes he was
working out of metro range.

He finally (at about age 22) got his license. He found that he is
unable to keep the car in gas and insured so he doesn't have a car
now, and has to rely on friends to get home and see his parents. I
guess locally he walks


grandma Rosalie

In article ,
Scott wrote:

This is the task I think that is most difficult to teach --
when to say No when you feel unsafe, i.e., when to trust
your instincts. If kids read 'The Gift of Fear' by Gavin
(insert last name here -- I'm blanking) -- does it
register with them? How do you teach a kid to determine
if their friends are safe drivers -- or how to rely on
the judgement of others, when a good friend asks your
kid to come along, saying that the driver, unknown to
your kid, is a great driver.

Actually, what my kids found harder was to refuse to get in the car with
an impaired grownup. How do you tell your friend's father that he's too
drunk to drive?

I wish I'd thought to have a code for them to call home with when that
happened: my kid would call home and ask to be picked up after I'd told
her she could only go out if she had a ride home; I could usually tell
from the tone that there was a good reason to do it, but they felt they
couldn't SAY why in front of the adult in question. DH didn't always
pick up on that, and would start to demand that she get a ride home from
the person who'd promised one.

I know they did call on occassion to get picked up because the teen
driver had been drinking; and I found out recently that my son called a
friend to pick him up and bring him home when HE had been drinking (I
would have picked him up; in spite of assurances that there'd be no
repercussions if that happened, he apparently was too embarrassed to
call.)
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care

On 2005-06-07, Scott wrote:
Robyn Kozierok wrote:
I would think not teaching one's children to drive safely and expecting
them to always rely on car-free transit would probably put them at
greater risk of riding with a poor (not necessarily drunk) driver than
teaching them to drive safely and sometimes providing them with a car
to use. Do you think your teen will opt to bike everywhere when s/he
has friends offering him/her a ride?


This is the task I think that is most difficult to teach --
when to say No when you feel unsafe, i.e., when to trust
your instincts. If kids read 'The Gift of Fear' by Gavin
(insert last name here -- I'm blanking) -- does it
register with them? How do you teach a kid to determine
if their friends are safe drivers -- or how to rely on
the judgement of others, when a good friend asks your
kid to come along, saying that the driver, unknown to
your kid, is a great driver.

I don't know how my son will be as a teen, but I suspect that he
*will* bike or walk everywhere rather than ride in cars.

This isn't to say that teaching kids to get around without a car is not
a valuable and important skill. But you seem to be advocating not
teaching/allowing teens to drive at all, and I think that that learning
to drive safely and defensively is also a valuable and important
skill.

I do plan to have my son take drivers education when he turns 16 or
17, but since we won't have a car in the family, and will not buy him
one, he will have somewhat less opportunity to practice than most
teens.

Yes -- if you do not drive, then how does one inculcate
the expectations that other drivers will have? My dearest
friend from Kindergarten lived in the Bay Area for a long
time, and remarked all the time on Driving While Oriental,
that is, driving at odds with the prevailing culture, because
the drivers don't grow up in a car. I'm hoping my kids
learn a whole lot of good driving skills by observation.

One learns a lot of good driving skills by riding a bike in
traffic and getting proper safety training. In fact, I have often
thought that middle schools should offer correct bike safety education
as pre-driver training. Unfortunately, what passes for bike safety
education is often aimed at very young elementary school students, and
amounts to little more than "get out of my way or I'll run you over".

Proper on-road bicycling skills are much the same skills that
motorists need (knowing where to look for hazards, who has the right
of way, ...) plus some specialized skills (emergency turns, emergency
braking, rock dodging).


------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
(Senior member, IEEE) (Board of Directors, ISCB)
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Affiliations for identification only.

In article ,
Kevin Karplus wrote:


Although teens can and do do stupid things on bicycles, the risks are
much lower than for drivers---in the US only about 800-900 people a
year die on bicycles, and only a modest fraction of those are
teenagers. Death by suicide is a much higher risk for teens as is
death by riding in a car driven by a drunk.

It's nice if you CAN live somewhere where mass transit and biking is
do-able. When I lived in Madison, WI, I didn't have a car, and even
after DH and I got together (he had a car) we only used the car on
weekends, to go out of town or do some shopping that was harder to do by
car (hard to bring a stereo or TV home on the bus...) I didn't have a
car when I lived in Superior, WI or Duluth, MN, either; I was able to
bus, walk and bike pretty much anywhere I wanted to be, and used cabs
when I had to transport something big (or asked friends with cars to
help me out.)

However, where we live now, it's almost impossible to rely on mass
transit and biking. For example, for my oldest to get to the doctor she
has to see, it would take three different buses (each way) and take over
an hour and a half. She can't afford to take over 3 hours to visit the
doctor very often. Biking would be pretty close to impossible, since
the most direct route is by freeway, and the back roads would take her
on some streets that I don't think are safe to bike on. She can bike or
walk to work, but if she were still living at home, she would not be
able to rely on the bus: again, it would take several buses to get
there, and the buses stop running after about 9:45 (she is often not
done until after 10:00).

And that's the other thing: when teens and college age people get jobs,
it isn't uncommon for them to have to work quite late into the evening.
Since the buses stop at 10:00, they can't use buses, and many of the
streets they'd have to take are not particularly safe after dark.

It's nice that you could pick where to live based on the easy
availability of mass transit: we have to live where DH can get a job.

All of my kids know how to read a transit map, and how to get around
that way. When we visited Boston, my son had no problem figuring out
how to use their system to get to where he wanted to be. I did make
sure of that, and we used to rely on the light rail frequently (we don't
live near a stop any more).
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care

In article ,
"Rosalie B." wrote:

My dd#1 would not let her oldest son get his driver's license because
he could not get a good student discount on his insurance. I think
this was false economy (although I have not said so to them). This
meant that he never got to practice with his parents in the car, and
get the benefit of their guidance.

I did the same thing, but it wasn't an economy measure -- it was an
incentive to get good grades, which all of my kids were capable of doing.

Fortunately, they all got their license while still living at home, so I
was able to drive with them quite a bit before they went in for their
road test. All three of them passed the road test the first time they
took it -- which I attribute to the superiority of my teaching (she said
modestly).
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care