Tips to Teach Your Teen Driver

Teaching your teen driver can often be a frustrating experience, resulting in hurt feelings on both sides, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when teaching your teen driver.

Confidence

Your teen driver may feel or seem confident, but sliding behind the wheel for the first time is an intimidating experience for anyone. Probably the number one reason for a lack of confidence behind the wheel is the belief that the car will be hard to control, and driving it may result in at least a dent, if not an accident. You have to keep your teenager’s confidence up. Practice in an open space where the risk of damage is minimal, and keep tempers down. Encouragement, not punishment, teaches.

Patience

You may not remember, but it will have taken you a long time to get used to driving a car, and in the early days of learning every operation of any control inside the car will require a lot of concentration on the part of your teen. Once you have been driving for a while, everything begins to occur automatically.

You may turn the car through a corner and accelerate, which you do pretty much automatically. What your teen is thinking while doing exactly the same thing is, “How far do I turn the wheel, is the car is travelling too fast for the corner, is there anything in the way, are there cars approaching, when is the best time to push on the accelerator pedal, where is the accelerator pedal, how far should I push the accelerator pedal down?” And that’s just a simple turn.

The car is a very complex machine to drive. After you have been doing it for a long time pretty much everything comes naturally and your brain hands many of the mundane chores to what people term “muscle memory.” Repetition over the years means your arms, eyes, ears, and feet know how to co-ordinate themselves to keep the car on the road. A teen does not do this straight away, and a lack of patience on the instructor’s side will only undermine the confidence of the teen.

Repetition

Again, this is where muscle memory comes in. It may seem boring, but get your teen driver to do the same thing over and over again. Find a local car park that’s as empty as possible (your teen will likely be intimidated if there are other cars even parked nearby, as they will be worried about going out of control and hitting them). Practice simple turns and shifting gears (if you are in a manual transmission car) to give your teen an idea of how accurately a car can be steered. Progress through more complicated maneuvers, concentrating on control and not speed. Let your teen “walk” the car around at very low speeds. The idea is to teach your teen how a car responds to inputs from the steering, accelerator, and braking actions.

Patience and understanding

Yes, patience again, but also understanding. Your teen will reach stages where they will feel out of their depth. If something does happen – say damage to the car – shouting will not help, and it will in fact hurt the teaching process. You have to trust your teen and your teen has to know that you have confidence in them, and understand that learning does involve the occasional fall.