Teaching Teens to Drive...Safely

Teaching your teen to drive may be the most nerve-wracking course you teach as part of your homeschool. Whether you opt to conduct the behind-the-wheel portion of your teens’ driver’s education yourself, or enroll them in a driving school, you will likely spend many hours supervising your child’s driving practice. Your preparedness for the task, as well as the example of your own driving habits, will have a lifelong impact on your students’ drivings habits and confidence. Check out this Homeschool Living for valuable information about your driving instruction options, tips for teaching your children to be safe drivers (and passengers!), preparedness and maintenance plans that begin long before driving age, and support and encouragement to help everyone handle stressful driving situations.

Teaching Teens to Drive

HEAV’s website provides information on driver education for homeschoolers, including a list of parent-taught classroom driver education courses for homeschooled students.

Family Education offers helpful information regarding how to help prepare your teen and determine when your teen is ready to start learning to drive.

This article from Very Well Family lists essential driving skills that all drivers must learn, and breaks driving lessons down into five basic stages.

Teaching Teens to Drive: Driving Safely 

Bad weather creates dangerous roads which greatly increase the risk of car accidents. Check out these bad weather driving tips for teens from KidsHealth.org. 

Eighty-nine percent of teenagers say that their parents are the biggest influence in encouraging safe driving. Check out this parents’ guide to modeling good driving behavior from DriversEd.com.

Teaching safe driving habits starts long before a child is able to start learning to drive himself.

Teaching Teens to Drive: Being Prepared

Having a plan for emergency driving situations is just as important as having an emergency plan for your home. Discuss potential emergency situations with your teens. Do they know what to do in the case of mechanical failure or weather emergencies?

The National Safety Council shares a list of supplies to include in an emergency kit for your car.

Part of being prepared is keeping up with regular vehicle maintenance and being aware of potential safety issues. Start with this list of ten things your teen should know about car maintenance.

These excellent step-by-step guides from Your Mechanic take you through the process of addressing two basic vehicle maintenance concerns–a tire change and an oil change.

Staying Calm Behind the Wheel

These seven tips for parents teaching teens to drive can help you prepare for the course and exercise patience.

If your teen is learning to drive or is a new driver, chances are he has friends who are also new drivers. Teaching teens to be safe passengers is just as important to preventing distracted driving as is teaching them to be safe drivers.

Interacting with an emergency vehicle while driving–whether moving out of the path of an ambulance or fire engine or pulling over at a police car’s signal–can be stressful, but is practically inevitable through the course of a lifetime of driving. Make sure your teen knows how to respond to such situations with the help of this information from Improv Traffic School.

Regardless of the time and effort you and your teen put into preventing a traffic accident, the fact is that the possibility is always there. Knowing what to do in the event of an accident is a vital lesson that any driver should learn before heading out on the road.

While your teen needs to know what to do in the event of an accident, you need to know how to handle it as a parent. This blog post from Luke1428 offers heartfelt information on how to handle this scary and frustrating situation compassionately and responsibly.Teaching