031826 ~ 1 in 3 Parents Fear their Teen Driver Could Cause a Crash - Sarah Clark

The new map poll is out for the month and it shows that one in three parents fear their team driver could cause a crash.

Sarah Clark is co-director of the Mod Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

She joins us this morning as we take a look at parents thoughts on their teens and driving.

I would have expected it to be a little higher than one in three to be honest with you Sarah.

Right.

Well, and we did something a little different this time.

We pulled parents of teens and young adults.

So these are parents of kids 16 to 25.

So I think you're right, probably the parents of the teens that are just starting out worry more.

But this poll showed that parents are observing a lot of, let's call them some optimal driving behaviors for their teen and young adult drivers.

And for a lot of them, it doesn't seem to be bothering them very much.

Well, that is surprising.

I remember being kind of mouthy with my dad when he would, you know, tell me what to do in a car in hindsight.

I look back now and I'm like, he was absolutely right.

And I wish I hadn't given him so much grief because we think we know everything when we're a teenager, right?

We should do when, you know, the results of this poll show that teens are exhibiting.

A lot of them teens and young adults are exhibiting these risky driving behaviors in front of their parents.

And most of the time parents aren't really doing anything to try to address that.

Oh, really?

So I'm looking at the poll here, the pneumat poll and the unsafe driving behaviors of teens and young adults and the percentages of parents observing these driving patterns.

So speeding, tailgating, road rage, 44% and that would be considered aggressive driving.

44% see that texting and multitasking.

That's distracted driving 25%.

Wow, that's pretty brazen if you're a young adult or teen doing that in the car driving.

Well, your parents right there.

And then impaired driving sleepy, emotionally upset, maybe after drinking alcohol or using marijuana, 17%.

Those are pretty high percentages for those Sarah.

What did you think?

There are, I think that's something that we have to consider is for some people, they might not recognize like driving when you're excessively sleepy.

Parents as well as their teen and adult kids might not recognize that as impaired driving.

But you know, they've done research to show somebody who is very sleepy has the same reaction time as somebody who's legally drunk.

So I think some of it is not knowing.

I think the same thing about multitasking when driving, whether it's eating, putting on makeup, you've seen people do that, right?

We have the laws against texting, but we sometimes don't think about other ways that we have distracted driving.

And that is also risky behavior.

Parents rate their child's driving ability is about average.

53% or better 43% than other teens or young adults, 4% rate their child as worse.

So I'm also seeing here that one quarter of a parents have taken steps to address their child's driving behavior 24%.

What are those steps that they have done?

When they do that, so there's not many considering how many reported to us that they had observed some risky behaviors.

When they do that, they try things like using a monitoring device on the car that would then kind of they can monitor how fast, for example, the teen is going or even where.

A small number have taken away driving privileges or refused to let the teen or young adult child use their car or even threatening to stop paying for the car insurance, which would be a big one.

That would be huge wouldn't it?

I think that people forget that driving is not a right.

It's a privilege, isn't it?

And I know that a lot of people who don't want to wear their seat belts, or at least when that law went into effect, they would say, oh, it's my right to do this.

No, it's a privilege to be in a car and to be driving.

And I think that's something we need to impress upon our teens and young adults.

I think that's true.

And there was one other pattern in this month's report that I wanted to point out.

And I think it's something you mentioned sort of at the beginning.

We think about teens as just starting out and being more careful.

And then by the time we get to the young adults, like the 21 to 25, then they know it all and they're doing whatever they do.

We saw that a little bit in terms of the distracted driving and the impaired driving, right?

It was more common among the young adults compared to the teens, but here's the weird thing.

The aggressive driving, the speeding and the tailgating, the same number of parents observed that for teens as for young adults.

That means right out of the gate, teen drivers are engaging in that aggressive driving.

And I think one thing is, you know, lots of parents do that themselves.

And so we think it's normal, right? Everybody does it.

And I think maybe parents, first of all, need to check their own driving behaviors and see how they're doing.

Are they being good role models?

But then the second thing is, you know, you're in a big vehicle.

You might pose a risk to yourself or to somebody else, a pedestrian, a driver, and another car.

And going back to what you just said, it's a responsibility to do that in a safe way.

I think this month's report just points out an opportunity for parents to reflect a bit and maybe have a conversation.

Well, I must admit, I was on the tail of a few cars on the drive in this morning.

So you're right.

It does start with us talking about driving habits of teens and young adults.

The new mop pole is out.

You can check it out at moppole.org.

That's M-O-T-T-P-O-L-L dot org.

Sarah, always great talking with you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

That's Sarah Clark out of the University of Michigan, the mop pole co-director from the CSMOT Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan Health.

And this is Ann Arbor's talk station, 1290 W-L-B-Y.