Distracted Parents Often Ignore Warnings from Teenager Children

As a parent, you are the first driving instructor that your child has, and the kind of driving examples that you display for your child could become permanently ingrained in your child’s psyche. The distressing results of a new study show that many parents often ignore warnings about distracted driving or intoxicated driving from their teenage passengers in the car.

According to the survey by Liberty Mutual, as many as 42% of teenage passengers admitted that they have found their parents texting while driving, and have tried to get their parents to stop, but their parents simply ignored them, or tried to justify their behavior. As many as 18% asked their parents to stop driving when they were high on weed, but in about 40% of the cases, they got the same reaction.

It’s appropriate to wonder whether parents should also be targeted with the same kind of safe driving initiatives, that we usually inundate teenagers with.

Many of the teenagers admitted that they have frequently been passengers in cars operated by parents, who were clearly driving dangerously or in no condition to drive. About 7% of them admitted that they had been passengers in cars driven by parents driving under the influence of pot. About 88% said that they had been a passenger when parents were using a texting device while driving, and 50% admitted that they had seen their parents texting while driving. 16%, said that their parents had operated a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, with at least one child in the car.

All of these are extremely dangerous behaviors that seriously increase the risk of an accident. They also provide very poor driving examples to young teenagers, who are only likely to believe that these behaviors are acceptable because their parents engage in them.