Denise Gallagher, a 46-year-old child care provider in Philadelphia, is paying a terrible price for not knowing more about the dangers of teen driving. She lost her 18-year-old daughter, Lacey, in a one-car crash a few hours after Lacey's prom in 2007.
Lacey, who wasn't driving, was in a car with six other teens that crashed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike around 2 a.m., ejecting five of them from the vehicle. All six were injured, but Lacey was the only one killed. Gallagher says the crash was caused by drowsiness or distraction, or both.
"There were a lot of things we should have talked about," Gallagher says. "Six kids are a big distraction to a newly licensed teenager. I thought drinking and driving was the highest teenage driving danger. It's not. This is something I have to live with every day of my life. I think about what I could have done differently."
For young drivers, May marks the beginning of the season of high peril. It's prom and graduation time, when many teenaged drivers ask for and receive expanded driving privileges. And it's the cusp of summer vacation, when the stakes are extremely high for young drivers.
That's why the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day has been dubbed by auto club AAA and Volvo as "The 100 Deadliest Days" for teen drivers.
Seven of the 10 deadliest days of the year for teens fall between those holidays, according to AAA. July and August are the deadliest months for 16- and 17-year-old drivers, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
This year, the deadly season for young drivers rolls around at a time when there is growing research by the AAA Foundation and others that the young drivers who engage less frequently in risky driving behavior are those who spend the most time talking about driving with their parents. The research also shows that more needs to be done to encourage those talks on safety: Vehicle crashes are still the leading cause of death for young Americans.
"The research and our experience tells us that the earlier we can get parents engaged in this dialogue and the longer we can keep them engaged, the more likely their teens will be safer drivers," says Peter Kissinger, president and CEO of AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. "But we live in an age where time seems to be at a premium. I'm sure a lot of parents find it difficult to allocate the amount of time to talk with their son or daughter that we would consider ideal."
He and other experts say there is no better time than this month for parents and teen drivers to talk about driving safely.
On an average day in the USA, more than 11 teens die in crashes. In 2010, the four deadliest months for teen crash deaths, in order, were August, July, May and June, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurance trade group.
So this month lends urgency to that discussion — call it The Conversation — between parents and their young drivers. "Parents' involvement and influence in the teen driving experience can literally mean the difference between life and death for their child," says Susan Duchak, who leads The Allstate Foundation's teen safe driving program.
So what, exactly, is The Conversation that parents should have with their young drivers? What should they say? And when and where should it occur?
It's not so much a single conversation as a series of conversations, experts say, and it should begin sooner than many think. Dennis Durbin, a Philadelphia specialist in the prevention of teen driver crashes, says he started talking about driving with his son, Jack, when Jack was 13.
"We started talking about driving when he started sitting in the front seat," says Durbin, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and co-scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "That's really a good opportunity to start the conversation about safe driving. They immediately gain a much better awareness about driving.
"I sort of narrate some of what I'm seeing so they begin to see what I'm seeing," Durbin says. "I narrate the driving situation — I think that guy is about ready to change lanes even though he hasn't signaled, things like that."
But before parents can have a meaningful discussion about driving safety, they should educate themselves about the realities of teen driving, experts say. For example, many parents think drunken driving is the main threat to teen drivers, Duchak says; driver error, speeding and distractions are bigger problems.
Lack of parental involvement can be painfully expensive, and the pain of loss lasts a long time.
Gallagher says she wishes that she and Lacey, who was not wearing a seat belt the night she was killed, had talked more about her daughter's post-prom plans. "When you put a group of teens together, they make different decisions," she says. "Normally, she always, always wore her seat belt."
Her daughter's death led to the passage last October of Lacey's Law in Pennsylvania, which limits the number of passengers that teen drivers can have and increases the number of required hours of behind-the-wheel driving experience before obtaining a license. It also makes failure to wear a seat belt a primary offense for young drivers, meaning police can stop them solely for that.
Gallagher hopes the law will spare other parents. But it doesn't bring Lacey back.
"So many of these accidents could have been prevented just by following some simple rules, talking to your children and giving them enough experience behind the wheel before they're out on the road on their own."
'That conversation is huge'
Rob Kudej, 50, of Norwich, Conn., says he had a conversation about driving with his son, Patrick, 16, the day Patrick got his learner's permit. They went over the rules, over what was allowed and expected and what wasn't.
"That conversation is huge," Kudej says.
Patrick, who got his license in January, remembers it well. "We were all together in either the kitchen or the living room. It wasn't just a casual, walk-by talk," he says. "It was a structured conversation. It made me realize the importance of safe driving. We think we know everything, but we don't."
Kudej says many of their rules followed the state's new graduated driving license (GDL) law mandating phased-in driving privileges: no passengers, an 11 p.m. curfew, for instance.
Experts such as Chris Mullen, director of technology research at insurer State Farm, say that parents can use their state's GDL law as the "bad guy" when they discuss driving safety. "They can say, 'It is against the law to drive around with your buddy in the car,' " she says. "That can keep them from being the heavy."
Faith Mock, 55, a teacher in Rushville, Ind., had the conversation with her daughter, Taylor, now 19, several years ago. "We really sat down and talked about the fact that driving was a privilege, not a right," Mock says. "And that there are a lot of responsibilities associated with driving. We … made a verbal contract."
Written parent-teen driving contracts, available from many insurance companies and elsewhere, are an excellent starting point for that initial conversation, experts say.
"The act of creating the contract will prompt a dialogue," says Henry Edinger, chief customer officer at the Travelers insurance company.
Parents' role doesn't end
Experts say it's critical that parents regularly revisit the safe-driving conversation with their teen, especially once the teen starts driving independently. Many parents assume that once their child completes the provisional licensing period — when they have to be accompanied by an adult — the parental role ends.
Not so. "There's nothing magical that happens to the teen once they get their license and can drive independently in a vehicle," Durbin says. That initial period of driving alone is when they're at their "highest lifetime risk."
Once the teen is driving independently, parents should continue the conversation. "It should be, at a minimum, monthly," Edinger says. "There's a slow degradation in the thought process if you don't revisit it."
Riding with the teen periodically — to assess how they're doing and make sure they aren't backsliding — is also a chance to have the conversation again, Edinger says.
However, it's important that the conversation itself doesn't become a distraction while the teen is driving, says Susan Baker, an epidemiologist specializing in injury prevention at Johns Hopkins University and a traffic safety researcher.
Setting a good example
Perhaps most important, experts say, is that parents actually model the behavior they're trying to instill.
Several studies, including ones by AAA and Allstate foundations, have shown that many parents take a "do as I say, not as I do" approach with their teen drivers. They acknowledge that behavior such as talking on cellphones, fiddling with the radio or even breaking the law is dangerous; but large percentages admit to doing these things while their children are in the car.
In an April AT&T survey of 1,200 teens ages 15-19, 77% said adults tell kids not to text or e-mail while driving, yet 41% reported seeing a parent text while driving.
The good news: Sixty-two percent of teens in the survey said that getting reminders from their parents not to text and drive would be effective in stopping them from doing it.
Surveys, such as one this year by Harris Interactive for insurer State Farm, consistently show many teen drivers use cellphones or text while driving. A recent study by the California Office of Traffic Safety showed cellphone use among 16- to 25-year-olds doubled from 9% to 18% since last year.
"The teens today that are doing this are the ones who watch their parents do it," says Jennifer Smith, an Oak Park, Ill., teen-driving-safety advocate and parent who puts on distracted-driving seminars for teens and others.
Smith says she talks regularly with her daughter, Emani, 16. "I still tell her, 'Don't use your phone while you drive,' " she says. "I know that they get more confident as they learn to drive. I told her I don't want her to start acting overconfident."
Ongoing conversations, along with strong parental involvement, might be the nation's best path toward a future where automobile crashes are not the primary killer of the USA's young, Kissinger says.
"The conversation is not one and done," he says. "It is a continuous dialogue over years, really. Certainly over many, many months."
