Sharing Your Wisdom

Anyone who has a teen knows communication isn’t easy! But there are some strategies you can use to help make your practice driving time less stressful and more helpful for your teen:

• Try to keep calm and avoid raising your voice. New teen drivers can easily become stressed or overwhelmed. Try to keep the driving environment calm and relaxed.
  • When your teen does make a mistake, help them safely correct, then later – when there’s time and less stress – talk through what happened and use it as a learning experience.
• Use “I” statements. For example, instead of simply telling your teen they need to slow down in heavy traffic, you can share what you notice and think about when anticipating that you’ll need to slow down. (“I like to look for brake lights a few cars ahead to help me anticipate when traffic will slow down.”)
• There will be times you need to communicate immediate direction, like if an ambulance is coming up and you need your teen to pull over.
  • In cases like this use calm, simple and direct language that tells them exactly what to do without making them panic.
  • For example, in this case telling a teen to “pull over” could be confusing if they don’t know exactly what that means or where it’s safe to do so. Instead, you could say something like “slow down, put on your turn signal, and steer over to the side of the road”
  • Like before, when there’s time and less stress, take some time to talk through what happened and use it as a learning experience. Emergency events are thankfully rare so it’s important to learn from them when they do happen
• Keep the atmosphere in the car positive. Don’t forget to compliment your teen when they do something well. For example, say something like, “That was a really smooth turn you made” or “good job noticing that pedestrian and slowing down.”
• Be mindful about talking too much. Driving takes a lot of concentration for a beginner. Sometimes saying nothing is best.
• Think a few steps ahead and tell your teen what to expect so they are prepared in advance. For example, “We need to change lanes because we’ll need to go right at the second light.”
• Of course, you know your teen best, so feel free to modify these suggestions to suit their communication style!

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