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Most Teen Drivers Pick up Poor Driving Habits from Parents

BIKLaw Medical Malpractice Lawyer > Personal Injury > Most Teen Drivers Pick up Poor Driving Habits from Parents

Teen drivers look to their parents for examples of safe driving to prevent motor vehicle accidents.  Sadly, a new survey shows that most parents aren’t living up to their responsibility to set a good example of safe driving.  According to the survey, most teen drivers see appalling examples of driving behavior by their parents.

The survey, conducted by Ford Motor Company, found that 82% of teen drivers regularly witness careless driving by their parents.  What’s even more dangerous is that many parents are probably not aware that their driving behavior is undesirable.  An overwhelming majority of the parents rated themselves as “good” drivers, but more than 50% of the children had found occasion to warn parents for bad driving, including speeding, distracted driving and other undesirable behaviors.  This seems to suggest that there’s a disconnect between parents’ perception of their own driving skills and reality.  This can be dangerous because young impressionable minds could be picking up unsafe driving practices from parents who are blissfully unaware of it.

This disconnect between what parents think and what they actually do is also seen in driver’s education programs for children.  Eighty two percent of the parents in the survey said that they were interested in having their child attend a safe driver education program.  However, only 20% of them actually got their child to enroll in a driver education program.

Motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of death for American teenagers.  That is the terrifying reality, and unfortunately, it seems to California catastrophic injury lawyers like many parents are unaware that they have it in their hands to change this fact simply by setting a good example for their kids.

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