Teen drivers hit the road as soon as school lets out for the summer. They’ve been stuck in classrooms the entire school year and now they’re tasting freedom. We get it—we were all teenagers once upon a time—but as parents, we are naturally concerned for our teenage drivers’ safety. And with good reason. According to the CDC, motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of teenage deaths.
With teens out driving in force, the danger only increases. Parents have good reason to be concerned for their safety. But how great is the threat our teenagers face? What exactly is the risk to our children from fatal car crashes?
The breakdown looks like this:
The greatest number of teenage deaths (48 percent) are due to unintentional injury. Motor vehicle accidents account for almost three quarters (73 percent) of those deaths. Fatal car crashes, meanwhile, spike over the summer months, putting teen drivers at even greater risk.
Summer Car Accident Trends
While the numbers vary from state to state, the upward trend of teenage deaths due to summer car accidents holds steady. In an assessment of teenage drivers in New York for example, of the 473 teen drivers killed in car crashes from 2010 to 2019, 176 of them, (or a full 37 percent) died during the summer months.
Is it any wonder then, that the days spanning from Memorial Day to Labor Day have been dubbed the “100 Deadliest Days of Summer”?
Teen Drivers Feel Empowered
Getting behind the wheel of a car, and going where they want to go, feels empowering to teen drivers. But the joy of freedom can lead to joy-riding. And that’s something that we, as parents, just can’t tolerate. Perhaps that’s why more and more, parents are turning to driving tracking apps to keep their teens safe and instill good driving habits.
A recent teen driving survey by insurance company Progressive, suggests that while most parents feel good about their teenagers’ driving abilities, more than half of them still take precautions to ensure their children’s safety. Some key findings:
- 70 percent of parents feel confident in their teens’ ability to drive safely.
- 54 percent of parents are using driving tracking apps to monitor their teen drivers, which contributes to greater peace of mind and reinforces safe driving practices.
- Despite a low percentage of parents (3 percent) reporting aggressive driving by their teens, 9 percent of teens themselves admit to such behavior, indicating a gap in perception between parents and their children.
Apps to Monitor Teen Drivers
The Progressive survey tells us that the most popular teenage driving monitoring app is Life 360, which is used by 51 percent of parents who track their teens’ driving. Other apps used by parents include MamaBear, Automatic, TrueMotion Family Safe Driving, RoadReady, and Bouncie. With these apps, parents can see the following details about the way their children drive:
- Location
- Speed
- Cell phone use
- Seat belt use
- Hard braking
- Rapid acceleration
- Crashes
The information that driving monitoring apps provide, can show parents where their children might need improvement in their driving in order to keep them and others, safe on the road. At the same time, details provided by these apps may serve to reassure parents that their children are taking necessary safety precautions from behind the wheel. Of course, the first step to keeping our teenagers safe, is awareness. The long summer months should be filled with fun and freedom, but ensuring the safety of our children is paramount.
