There may be plenty of tips available from experts for parents looking to teach their children how to drive, but they often leave out the single-most important piece of advice to consider: don't.Gene Chutka/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Probably the most positive thing I can say about teaching my eldest daughter to drive is that no one was killed. No pedestrians, cyclists or other drivers were killed and we did not kill each other. This fact should not be taken for granted. There were many moments sitting in the passenger seat of our Dodge Grand Caravan (and later our Mini Cooper Countryman) that I believed all those calamities were inevitable.
It’s not that she was a particularly bad driver, though she was not, at the time, a good one. Rather, it was the father/daughter dynamic played out in a moving vehicle on chaotic city streets, in some of the worst traffic imaginable, that made it such a nightmarish ordeal. Place us in front of a television watching a San Franscisco 49ers game and we can spend a delightful four hours. Put us in the front seats of a car in a student/mentor relationship and we will last four seconds.
Experts offer advice online for those who wish to teach their teens and other family members how to drive. There are tips aplenty: start in low-speed traffic areas; give lots of notice before giving directions; ask questions rather than reprimands. Unfortunately, these experts leave out the single most important piece of advice for those fully licensed individuals considering teaching their teens or family members to drive – Don’t.
Not that I have ever followed that advice.
I’ve been telling people how to drive for decades. According to my mother, who got her license in 1970 in the Bay Area and took driving lessons from an Oakland, Calif. cop in a Volkswagen Beetle, as a four-year-old I would yell “Step on the clutch” from the backseat as she struggled on San Francisco hills. Getting my license was easy. Ottawa streets in the 1980s weren’t exactly congested. I went to driving school the summer I turned 16. The school provided time in the classroom and some driving lessons in an automatic car with a likeable curmudgeon who told dirty stories. Outside classes, I practiced on a stick shift with my father. How was the experience? I do not know. I guess you could say it was so much fun that I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever.
I failed the first test (for driving too slowly on a merge). My instructor dubbed the examiner “crappy.” I aced the second test.
Getting my license broadened the world. It improved my dating life and made it easier to carpool to Nepean Norsemen football practice. Little did I imagine, during those carefree times, that I would one day be in the passenger seat next to a family member I loved with all my heart, trying to determine a means by which I could throw myself from the vehicle without incurring injury.
Teaching a family member to drive, or merely being the co-pilot, dredges up the dysfunction that simmers underneath everyday life. The combination of poor teaching and bad listening, played out in an arena in which a mistake can result in a crash, pushes the limits of human endurance. My eldest daughter struggled to pass. On her first test, the examiner docked her a point before even getting into the vehicle because we had not backed the car into the parking space. This examiner was what my old instructor would describe as “crappy.”
The low point in her quest arrived an hour before her second exam when, with me in the passenger seat, she hit a car parked in a lot. We informed the owner and later paid for the damages. Needless to say, she did not pass. She eventually got her license after moving to British Columbia. She aced the first exam. I do not think it coincidental that she passed easily once she put 3,800 kilometres between us.
The dog days of August are here. Teens have gone to driver’s education while school is out for the summer. They have had to practice and that meant conscripting a family member (or equivalent) willing to sit shotgun. Their driving exams are on the horizon. All across the country, parents and children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, are experiencing levels of stress so high that, were he alive today, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” would be exploring ways to turn that brittle anxious energy into a weapon of mass destruction.
That’s just the family members who teach family members to drive.
I have not even mentioned boyfriends, girlfriends and spouses teaching each other how to drive. That is a whole other column and a whole lot more drama.