5am report: Safety tips for teen drivers and their parents

6am report: Safety tips for teen drivers and their parents

(WVLT) -- With so many temptations, like texting and talking to a friend while driving, car accidents still remain the primary cause of death for adolescents. In fact, young drivers (ages 16 to 19) are involved in deadly collisions at four times the rate of adult drivers (ages 25 to 69). And each year, more than 5,000 teenagers are killed in motor vehicle crashes.

In order to prevent these tragedies, Congress is supporting parents in teaching their teens to drive. It includes spending time practicing with them as well as keeping a close eye on them as they begin driving alone. According to research, those who say their parents set rules and monitor their driving in a helpful and supportive way are half as likely to crash and twice as likely to buckle up as teens with less involved parents.

In 2010, Safe Kids USA and the General Motors Foundation launched a program called Countdown2Drive which focuses on building a foundation with teen pre-drivers to prepare them to be safe passengers today, responsible drivers tomorrow. James Bell, Head of Consumer Affairs for General Motors says, "It's talking to 13 or 14-year-olds well before they're banging at the door wanting to get their driver's license and it's establishing a line of communication between parents and these children to say, 'you're going to be going into this very important and dangerous world of responsibility when it comes to driving so let's set some guidelines, let's set some understanding and let's make sure that we can talk about these things well before you're actually going out and taking your test before you head out on the road.''" This is an easy, web-based program that helps parents and teen pre-drivers (ages 13-14) to negotiate on a "Passenger Agreement" which will contain an agreement on behaviors. Education and preparation will help these young drivers be safe when he or she can drive legally. Lori Walker with the Safe Kids Buckle Up program says, "One of the first things we want to do is make sure that parents and kids are talking and our program has an opportunity for parents to go and put in what they think is going to happen when the child drives. The child goes in and fills out his survey and talks about what he thinks is going to happen and then it merges their two answers so that they know where they have room to talk, and so that's the program. But we want parents being with their kids at a four-way stop sign and saying, 'Hey look at this, what do you think we should do here?' or a round-about or a merging when they're getting onto a highway so we want the discussion to start very early on so parents and kids have that dialogue already in place when they become drivers."

Something many parents get concerned about is with today's technology and distractions. "I think that you can't really legislate that teenagers are gonna drive right and ignore their technologies - iPods, phones, texting...we're all guilty of using some of those things in the vehicle so what we can do at General Motors is try to mitigate the impact of those things so you can't legislate that they won't be using them but you just make sure they're aware of the risks involved and know that they can talk to their parents about that," says Bell.

Remember kids are always thinking about driving. Walker reminds us "Kids are thinking about driving when they get to be about age 11 or 12 - that's their next big milestone. Many parents put it off until the last minute and what we want parents to do is to begin talking about it at an early age, so that it's very familiar, it's very comfortable -- go to countdown2drive.org, get in there - see what it's all about, see what you talk about and then we know that parents and kids can get it started at an early age. They're not waiting for the day that a child already has the license."

For more information:
countdown2drive.org
safekids.org