Article archive / June 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 3, No. 10. Source pages: 1, 8.
In February, 2012, Dr. Robert Laird, associate professor at the University of New Orleans (UNO) earned a $515,000 grant from the W. T. Grant Foundation to study teen drivers and parent-adolescent interactions within the family. The UNO research team will look at the interactions regarding rules and regulations, among other factors, to learn what families can do to improve teen driving safety. Motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of death for teens.
Interested in adolescent development and parenting, Dr. Laird is currently the Director of the Families and Teen Lab at UNO. His new project, called “Parenting New Teen Drivers Study,” follows new teenage drivers over a period of at least 2 years to determine how families are impacted by the introduction of a new driver.
For many parents, nothing makes them more nervous than when their child becomes old enough to drive. Dr. Laird knows just how important the first months of driving can be. “The first six months when people start driving,” he explained, “is more dangerous than any other time. It is likely the most dangerous point in your life for most people.”
Dr. Laird acknowledges there are several laws currently enforced to make things safer, such as the graduated model where teens’ restrictions are gradually reduced over time. He also realizes that little research has been done examining these critical driving months from the perspective of the family.
“A lot of the formalized restrictions and the licensing policies may be being done by some parents,” he noted. However he said, “They only function as graduated laws if the parents are enforcing them in the home and forcing the kids to follow them.”
Laird’s new project is designed to answer some of the questions about the regulations parent’s place on new teen drivers. Laird and his students will follow teenage drivers enrolled in a driver’s education program over their first two years of driving.
Using question-naires, interviews, and observational tasks, Laird hopes to capture the ebb and flow of relationships and interactions that occur when adolescents become new drivers, and especially whether these interactions affect risky driving behavior.
“One of the challenges we have when we try to understand autonomy development or renegotiations of family functioning,” Laird explained, “is that it occurs very gradually on different time frames for different families. So I proposed that if we look at driving, it presents the family with a brand new test that they are largely unprepared for.”
Dr. Laird hopes this project will help lawmakers make informed decisions regarding teen driving laws. He told the Times, “The public safety perspective is ‘we’ll just raise the driving age.’ However, evidence shows that whenever you start driving, the first 6 months are the most dangerous part, regardless of age.”
“If we can understand if the parents are doing something,” he said, “if they are putting on restrictions and gradually letting them [teens] increase their driving, then perhaps we should make sure that they are getting their license at a time when they are in that safety net.”
According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, a February 2012 report points to an 11 percent increase in teen driving fatalities for the first six months of 2011.
Dr. Laird’s goal is for his research to provide another piece of information that can be used to make driving safer for all involved.
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