Parents have a big impact on the safety of teen drivers, according to an article in Healthday which highlights two recent studies published in the journal Pediatrics last month.

Parents who set rules and boundaries, and follow up on these rules, seem to raise teens who are better drivers. The first study observed the connection between parenting styles and teen driving behaviors/attitudes, and the second looked at teen behavior based on access to a vehicle.

More than 5,000 teens in grades 9-11 were surveyed and their responses show that teens with authoritative (high support along with rules and monitoring) or authoritarian (low support with rules and monitoring) parents are half as likely to speed. They also wear seatbelts twice as often as teens with uninvolved parents (low support and low rules.)

Compared to teens with uninvolved parents, teens with authoritative parents were about 70 percent less likely to drink and drive, 50 percent less likely to get into a car accident, and about 30 percent less likely to talk on their cell phones or text while driving.

The second study surveyed about 2,000 teens, and found that teens with easy access to a vehicle — meaning that they had their own car or didn’t need to ask for permission to use the family car — were twice as likely to get into a car accident, and about 25 percent more likely to speed, as well as use their phone while driving, compared to teens who have to ask to use the car.

Car crashes are the biggest threat to teen safety, says the lead author of the studies, Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, who is an adolescent medicine specialist at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
(More…)

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The Partnership recently joined with two other organizations — the National Military Family Association and the National Association of School Nurses — to announce new resources to help military families keep their kids healthy and drug-free.

Science shows that transitions are particularly stressful periods for kids and they are more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol at those times. Kids in military families face more significant transitions than kids in most other families –- from moves and new schools about every three years to having a parent deployed, injured or even killed. We wanted to create resources specifically for military moms and dads so that they were aware of the risks that these kinds of transitions can pose and so that they’d have a simple set of tools to use to help them talk to their kids at these vulnerable intervals.

At our launch event on Capitol Hill September 30, a mom told the story of her son’s drug use and subsequent addiction which started when his dad was injured in Iraq. He has struggled for the last five years and is now in a 12-step program. Last year their family spent $138,000 on treatment for him at a private hospital. She said, “would talking with Jim about the transitions he was experiencing have made a difference? Possibly. Probably. Our children do listen and we had not taken the time to talk about those particular issues.”

Our service men and women put their lives on the line for all of us in this country. I’m proud that the Partnership is taking action to offer guidance to military families who are facing tough transitions in their lives.

The new resources for military families are available at www.TimeToTalk.org/Military.

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