Guess what we are doing at our house? HATING LIFE, yes.
I don’t think it makes ANY SENSE AT ALL that Rob is going to transform from “Someone who doesn’t know how to drive” into “Someone who knows how to drive,” even if it seems to work for tens of thousands of new drivers each year. I don’t think it makes any sense to LET him drive, either: driving is DANGEROUS. One false move and all that expensive orthodontic work is wasted.
It feels very uncomfortable to be in the passenger seat. I can do NOTHING if things go wrong: I have no steering wheel, I have no brake. All I can do is verbally direct: “Stop sign.” “Signal.” “See how this is two lanes here? You can barely see the paint anymore, but the center one is for left turns.” Every time he accelerates more/less than I would have, turns more/less than I would have, brakes more/less than I would have, I can FEEL it—and it feels like when the road is icy and you lose control of the car. Woooooooo sliding out of control.
I had imagined Paul doing the 50 hours of driving-with-a-parent required by our state, but Rob said he wanted me to teach him. This is flattering the way it’s flattering when a sick, crabby toddler only wants mommy: it’s nice, but mommy wouldn’t mind so much if that same toddler only wanted daddy, so mommy could go play on her phone or maybe take a shower.
Driving along now, I’m hyper-aware of everything I know to do without knowing I know it. How do I know it’s safe to go this time, and not safe to go that time? How do I know what to do when I make a mistake? How do I know what to do if I’m trying to merge and the traffic won’t let me? WHAT IF I FORGET TO TEACH THESE THINGS TO ROB?? Well. I suppose he will learn, just like we all do. *Alanis Morissette’s “You Learn” starts playing softly in background* NO MUSIC IN THE CAR YET, ROB.
Also, I would like to remark that 50 hours is A LOT OF DRIVING. We could drive from one side of the country to the other and still not be done, depending on the coastline at the start/finish lines. I’m seriously considering doing a road trip, just to get hours done.
My Mom made me drive in Cape traffic (legendary Massachusetts traffic gridlock on Friday afternoons going south to Cape Cod and north on Sunday afternoons from Memorial Day to Labor Day) when she was teaching me how to drive. 3 hours of gridlock do not make for happy drivers, especially new drivers. Then, a few weekends later she had me drive from Massachusetts to Maryland and back (8 hours each way), and then to upstate New Hampshire (another 4 hours each way). She navigated. I drove. Highways, toll roads, and everything else. A car full of younger siblings behind me, one of whom got carsick every hour or so.
I remember rolling right through a stop sign and my mom having a heart attack. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Stop! Stop!” while ramming her foot repeatedly on the ground. I thought you didn’t really have to stop all the way. And I needed that spelled out for me, apparently. So. You might want to spell out everything, including what seems obvious, is what I’m saying.
My thought was “I stopped behind that guy!” No, you have to stop your own time.
Ooooh, I feel you–we’re going through this right now with our oldest. She’s taking driver’s ed, which is SO WORTH the money I cannot even tell you, but we still have to let her practice with us and it is unnerving. Your very life is in the hands of a teenager! It takes everything I have in me to stay calm and not shriek “BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE!”
Fun story: one of her classmates was practicing driving with her grandpa, and he saw a car up ahead and told her to move into the other lane. When she didn’t do it fast enough to suit him, he GRABBED THE WHEEL and swerved over–right into another car, which she had seen coming up but he hadn’t. Thankfully no one was hurt.
Oh, good luck!!!! I can imagine that this is NOT a job I’m going to want to do with my kids either. 50 hours really is a lot.
My dad started out doing the driver’s ed for me, and for some reason he was obsessed with the ten-and-two position of my hands on the wheel. Every time they slipped, say to nine and three, he would SHRIEK, “HANDS! HANDS!” and I would be so startled I would nearly faint from the adrenaline surge.
My mom did the rest of the teaching, and we all lived happily ever after.
I’ve heard that 9 and 3 is now correct.
For shorter people it is, because otherwise deploying airbags can break people’s arms. Taller people should still use ten and two.
My dad did most of the teaching when I was learning to drive. He is absolutely unflappable and stayed calm the entire time. My mom, on the other hand, would grip the dash or door handle, shout at me to do/not do things, stomp her foot on the floor when she thought I should brake, and once even grabbed the wheel. Now, I am a pretty responsible, non-daring person and have always been a good driver — I was just new to it and didn’t always drive how SHE would have driven. After she grabbed the wheel, I pulled the car over and we switched and I don’t think I drove with her in the car until well after I’d gotten my full license. I love my mom dearly, but this was just something my dad needed to be in charge of.
So maybe if you want to borrow some of these techniques, Rob will ask if Paul can teach him instead, is what I’m saying.
I’m thinking that since I am never letting my children grow up and leave me, I don’t have to teach them to drive. Right? RIGHT?!?
Matt and I were in the same driver’s ed class.
The absolute worst for me was when my teens had to merge into interstate traffic. They HAD to learn and they HAD to practice, but it shaved years off my life every single time. I still feel the panic imagining when we were hurtling toward the end of the merge lane and there was no space to actually merge into the driving lane. “STOP! NO! DON’T STOP YOU’LL GET REAR ENDED! MOVE OVER, NO DON’T MOVE OVER, THERE’S NO ROOM!”
It’ll work out, but I sympathize with you because it isn’t easy. At least it wasn’t for us.
“remembering” not “imagining” I…it has been a long week already.
We have to do 50 hrs of practice, plus a certain numbers of hours (plus pass the class) in an approved class (paid for). My 16 year old is a good driver (his father has been letting him drive since he was about 12 – omg), but it’s nerve wracking being in the car with them!
And you do have control over it – if things go south, shift into neutral & (depending on the vehicle you’re in), pull up the hand brake.
Good luck!
I second PiperG’s sentiment: Explain EVERYTHING, even if it sounds obvious. My daughter went through Driver’s Ed, drove back and forth to her school bus stop for a year (we live in a rural area), and was driving on highways for a few months before I realized she didn’t know what driving lights were, or how to turn them on (!!). She thought there were Bright Lights and Not Bright Lights. When I found out this little nugget, we went through the whole vehicle inside and out, providing her with information I thought was explained in Driver’s Ed. So glad I did, and now I know for the siblings behind her.
I still vividly remember my mom shouting at me “If you can see me slamming my foot into the floor, that means you need to BRAKE!”
And because I was a 15 year old smart-ass I said “Um, shouldn’t I be watching the road? And not your foot?”
I was living with my mom when I had my learner’s permit, and she had a stick shift which I wasn’t expected to know how to drive. My actual lessons were drivers’ ed only and NEVER with my parents.
Lucky for me, my good friend had a job as a car jockey for a car rental company at the airport and I had lots of time to hang out with him on the weekends…
Behind-the-wheel training was the reason why I didn’t get my license until I was almost twenty. I HATED it. Not only was it stressful and boring, but driving didn’t come as naturally to me as it did to most other teenagers so I felt discouraged every time I made a mistake. I got my first permit at fifteen and a half, and when I first got it my parents made me go out and drive almost every single day. I remember finally telling them, “I don’t care if it takes me YEARS to get my license. I do not want to do this much driving.”
Does your state require professional behind-the-wheel training? If not, I’d suggest doing it anyway. It’s usually on the expensive side, but it was very helpful for me. The place I went to had an instructor who used to be a driving test examiner at the DMV, so he was able to tell me exactly what to expect for the test and whether or not I was prepared. Super helpful.
We live in the Boston area where the roads were designed by cows. It’s all curves, weird angles, rotaries, merges, one-way streets, and roads whose names keep changing as you drive on them. And top it off with dense traffic and notoriously aggressive drivers. I keep threatening that we’re going to move to Nebraska (where I imagine the roads are wide, straight and uncrowded, but what do I know?) before our oldest is ready to learn to drive. Because, yikes!
I grew up and learned to drive in Boston and I am so incredibly glad that my kids will be learning to drive all the way across the country in someplace MUCH less insane.
I have so much to say about this since I’m also doing the driver training at our house, but I’ll leave it at this: why are they allowed to drive before taking an official behind the wheel class at school ($180 investment btw)? I’ve never taught anyone to drive, and I am now tooling around town in a deadly weapon with my teenager who sometimes doesn’t even flush the toilet in the morning! He’s still on the simulator training at school with the official driver’s ed teacher at his safe desk in the cozy classroom (no road time yet in the school’s vehicle). And, we are getting honked at a lot so your previous post was very timely.
$180? I paid over $600!
My son took drivers ed, which included 6 hours of lessons. Those counted toward the 50 hours of supervised driving he needed to get his license, but we still needed 44 and I’m with you – that is SO MUCH DRIVING. We live 10 minutes or less from anything we could ever need. It took a year before we got all his driving in. Finally, we let him drive a big chunk of the way back from our Florida vacation to finish it off.
Our most frightening new driver story: He came up on the traffic light where we turn right to enter our neighborhood. Light was red. He just drove right up and turned, never stopping and only slowing enough to make the turn. All the while I’m yelling from the backseat “Red light. Red light! RED! LIGHT!” His answer? “I thought you could turn right on red?!” The lesson for that day was AFTER YOU STOP!
Oh! It was so stressful learning to drive with my own mother.
It was becoming slightly damaging to our relationship – so I ended up spending a lot of time practicing with my grandmother instead (somehow, surprisingly, she was much better than my mother).
I second the “point out obvious things!” Even though I KNEW things, once I was behind the wheel I was so nervous that I couldn’t remember anything: “can you really just go on green?? like without pausing or anything? just.. GO??”
Maybe try the parking lot for a good long while? I think the book suggested the first 25 hours be starting/stopping, parking, etc. in an empty lot. I kind of regretted skipping that step because I felt so overwhelmed at the beginning.
We were allowed to start Driver’s Ed at 14 years, 8 months of age. A lot of my friends’ parents made them wait until they were a little older, but my parents signed me up as soon as I was old enough. The first 4 hours of behind-the-wheel time were with an instructor, usually with no parent in the car. I was nervous and shy, but I liked it a LOT better than the next 36 hours that I had to do with my parents. My mom was a nervous wreck. Judging by how I already feel in the passenger seat of some of my friends’ cars, I’m going to be the same way when it’s my kid.
I will second what another commenter said about explaining EVERYTHING. I failed my driving test the first time (after getting 100% on the written portion) because I turned right on a red light. (I’m not sure about where you live, but here it’s legal as long as there isn’t a sign telling you not to do it.) As I pulled up to the light, I looked on the side of the road for a sign that would deny me the right to turn on red, and didn’t see one. I patiently waited for traffic to clear, and then I turned. As it turns out, there WAS a sign. Apparently, signs don’t have to be on the side of the road; they can also be above the traffic light, way out in the middle of the intersection. I didn’t see it, and no one had ever told me that it could be placed up there instead. Since what I had done was illegal (despite having driven very safely in the rest of the test) it was an automatic fail. I had to reschedule the test and do the whole thing over again. What a pain. I was really embarrassed, too, because even the terrible drivers in my class passed on the first try.
Other suggestions: teach him to parallel park (or, if you don’t know how to do it well, get someone who does to teach him). Make him go through the drive through. Make sure he knows to pull over for ambulances/fire trucks/police cars when they have their sirens/lights on. Teach him how to read road signs on the interstate. (I personally think they’re so intuitive I don’t know how people could fail to understand them, but my sister gets extremely anxious and doesn’t know what way to go even when the sign is clearly pointing a certain way. She also wouldn’t go through a drive thru until she was 22 because she was so scared of hitting something or doing it wrong.)
Good luck! I’m sure everything will be fine. Rob’s a smart kid and most other drivers are pretty smart, too, so it’ll be okay if he makes some mistakes.
THANK YOU for sharing the right on red gaffe because that is EXACTLY what happened to me with my first test, and I was mortified and devastated. That was 16 years ago, and I’m still just barely able to talk about it, but you truly made me feel a lot better about it. (For the record, I am an excellent driver.)
when I was 15.5 I got my learner’s permit. I told my parents and said I had to practice driving and they handed me the keys! They thought I was just supposed to go out and practice. I went around the block and went right home and said “SOMEONE HAS TO BE WITH ME”!!
That is hilarious!!
Driving with a new driver is torture! I went driving with my stepson soon after he got his permit. It was terrifying! He didn’t do that badly, but I kept realizing that if he just moved the wheel a tiny bit to the left, we would be in a terrible crash! Even a 35 mile per hour road seems like it is just way too fast to be going with someone who doesn’t know what he is doing all that well. We had the same “turn right at a red light without stopping because you can turn on red” discussion as others have mentioned, except I think my part was more shrieked in terror than calmly spoken. I wouldn’t let him drive with my son in the car because I figured I might survive a crash, but I didn’t want to risk my son’s life too. I may have been a tiny bit of a bad, nervous passenger. I can’t wait to do it all over again with my son in 8 years!
Once I knew the basics and was less a danger to myself and others (this included in car drivers ed), the rule was that if I had to go somewhere, I had to drive (with a parent in the passenger seat). I can only imagine it was colossally tedious for my parents, but I got comfortable with lots of different situations, and also learned to take into account how long it too to get a place etc. If I didn’t leave enough time, I was late, end of story. Accountability!
Yielding to a driver when making a left turn. Actually having to obey stop signs in a parking lot and not just on the road.
I took actual Driver’s Ed. Did well. And still, these were things I needed to be explicitly told. In actual practice, not just read in a book, before I internalized them.
Good luck with this. With my eldest daughter, I cannot even imagine the stress and impossibility of this task. Like, I want to hire someone to do it for me, even if it means I have to start saving now. She has such trouble translating verbal directions into body movements (gets this from her father), that it is almost astounding. Like, I’ve had friends, relatives, teachers who think I’m just making it up, or exaggerating, until they try to tell her how/what to do and she’ll just freak out. “What does that even mean?!” I’m getting high blood pressure just thinking about it.
My dad was the unflappable type, my mom gripped the door handle pretty much the entire time, yelled things, and was always dissatisfied with my lack of TURN INTO THE CURVE!
This is why Driver’s Ed cars do come equipped with the front passenger driving equipment. You need it!
I guess what I’m saying is bring on the driverless car Google!
My son has the same “trouble translating verbal directions into body movements”! It hadn’t even dawned on me that this would affect driving. Gah! He is 11 eleven tomorrow. I have 4.5 years to prepare.
I think there is something wrong having to ride in a car with a student driver who you gave birth. I survived three and each of them did something different from the others. I swear my son’s goal was to take out every mailbox while my older daughter tried to drive down the middle of the road. My younger daughter would turn almost completely around to check traffic, taking her eyes off of the road!!
If I remember correctly, I was able to get in all of my required driving hours from the official drivers’ ed class my parents signed me up for. But I don’t think my state required that many behind the wheel – 50 is a lot! Anyway, I got my permit as early as possible (pretty much the minute I turned 15) and was super-eager to practice so my mom let me drive pretty much everywhere in that year before I got my license. Small town though, and not nearly as many hazards as there could have been. We live in the city now and driving feels like a live-action version of that old Nintendo game Paperboy (dogs! bicyclists! pedestrians! crazy people with what appear to be knives!) and so I really cannot imagine being in the passenger seat with my kid behind the wheel. It’s bad enough with his father.
I’m so confused, do you not have driving instructors in the US? My driving instructor was very dubious about me practising with my parents until I told him that my dad is an ex driving instructor himself. He said that parents usually teach their children terrible habits, plus there are no dual controls in your parents’ car.
In the UK it’s unusual for your parents to teach you to drive completely by themselves, and there is certainly no requirement for a certain number of hours driving with a parent. Maybe it’s because over here we all learn to drive in a manual…?
Yes, we have driving instructors. The rules vary by state. In my state the student must do 10 hours of driving with the driving instructor, plus 50 additional hours with parents.
Ah, makes sense. And how are the hours driving with parents monitored? Do you have to keep a logbook or something?
In our state, the child must do 60 hours. I am not sure how many of those hours are with the instructor and how many are with the parents.
What I do know is that we have TRIPLETS. So even if it’s ONLY 50 hours per child, we will have to drive approximately THREE HOURS PER WEEK with THREE LEARNING DRIVERS.
And it goes without saying that I cannot take any self-medicating substances to make the experience more comfortable for me, right? Right.
We may do SEVERAL road trips, all the way to California, just to make this happen.
Fourteen months and counting. GAH.
Holy good lord I didn’t even *think* about the hours with multiples! We have a 5 year old, a 3 year old, and 1 year old twins so about 10 years from now it looks like we will be spending all of our time being driven around by amateurs.
The best advice given to me was that it was my job to do what other drivers expected me to do.
Before that, I was always trying to be nice and let someone else at an intersection go in front of me even though I had the right of way, etc. Once my mom pointed out that I was being unsafe by creating confusing situations, I stopped doing that and driving became a whole lot easier.
So when I was growing up (in MI) you could get your permit as soon as you turned 15 IF your parents paid for you to take a private driving class. Then as soon as you turned 16 you got your license, no questions ask, no written test, no road test just “here ya go!” But most parents didn’t want to pay for the class since the school did it for free in the summer. Which meant that a kid could turn 15 in, say August but would have missed the class that summer. So the following July he could take the class to get his permit and then get his license on his birthday the next month. My parents paid for us to take the private class because they wanted us to have as much permit driving as possible, and the rules changed slightly between my older brother and me which meant I had to take a short road test but he didn’t the year before. Neither one of us had any mandated driving time with a parent.
All this to say CAN YOU IMAGINE if Rob was just handed a license at 16 with no driving hours with you? No wonder they changed the laws.
This post mostly just terrified me, but haaaaaaaaa Alanis, yes.
I believe the rule in our state is that you have to take driver’s training, for which you must pay out of pocket, if you want a license at 16. Because of this, I had to wait until I was 18 because no way was my mom going to fork out extra money to buy extra stress. The upside is, I don’t think there are any mandatory driving hours if your learner is 18.
In my husband’s family, nobody has the money for the driver’s training, so nobody gets a license until they’re at least 18, usually much later. I can’t imagine being chauffeur until my kids are in their 20s, but I’m happy to wait two extra years. If they can pay for it themselves, I’ll do the practice hours with them, but otherwise, I’m happy to let those neurons mature a bit more before tackling this one.
Man Alive! – 14 year-olds behind the wheel of a car that I might be driving close to (albeit whilst on holiday!)? – no, thank you very much!
Here in the UK you can only start to learn to drive at 17 which seems much more reasonable (and even then….). As a previous commenter said, though, we all learn to drive in manual (stick shift) cars which adds a whole new level of terror and uncontrollability to proceedings. Coupled with our country-wide ‘Boston-style’ road layouts and on a narrower scale….. I am more than glad that both of my children are now over that particular hurdle!
Before my older two were old enough to drive I imagined I’d be the most best instructor EVER. Then I sat in the passenger seat as my oldest son drove for the first time. I lasted only about 2 out of the 40 hours he needed. I think it went downhill when I was worried the car wasn’t centered in the lane and I started yelling “MOVE THE CAR ONE INCH TO THE LEFT … HALF AN INCH TO THE RIGHT … TWO INCHES TO THE LEFT!” My husband had to take over — it was best for all of us for him to do so. Turns out I was the worst instructor EVER.
I live in Australia, and my state requires 120 hours of driving practice. I hope that makes you feel a bit better about the measly 50 hours you have to do with your kids ;-)
I didn’t pass my driver’s test the first time, but there was one guy in my drivers’ ed class that failed so spectacularly the first time that the tester had him pull over to the side of the road when he was all the way across town, took the guy’s learner permit from him, and walked back to the testing centre (it was a small town so not terrible, but still at least a 20-30 minute walk). This is the guy who we had found out in class had no peripheral vision. To top it off, he’d apparently run over a turtle during the test. That wasn’t a problem so much as the fact that he hadn’t even noticed.
I feel ya. Teaching my son to drive was definitely nerve wracking. I did more yelling than I’m proud of, but he is now a very safe, very careful licensed driver. Guess I must have done okay?
It’s easier than it sounds to rack up the required hours. I know 50 sounds like a lot, but once you’ve reached it, it suddenly doesn’t seem like enough. He’ll get a LOT better through driver’s ed, and will learn a lot of those things he doesn’t learn from you.
It’s really nerve wracking, scary, and weird (I still feel wrong riding in the passenger seat!), but he’ll get there, and so will you!! Hang in there!
I feel your pain, I’m a great driver and I taught my oldest son to drive. One day he hit the gas and not the brake at the mcdonalds drive thru (that he wanted to go through to impress his friends) and blasted over the curb, tearing up the landscaping and breaking cement blocks coming to a rest inches from the gas meter–needless to say his friends definitely noticed him, he was so upset he got out and threw up–after I screeched his name about 50 times and I realized we were safe I could not stop laughing–not AT him but at the insanity of trying to ram a suburban over the curb, the trees and the gas meter–mother of the year right here-we can laugh now that he’s almost 22 but holy cow what a crazy night that was
If we ever are responsible for teaching a child to drive, we will be paying somebody else to do it. No question. My heart is pounding from flashbacks!