Some parents cannot wait for their children to reach driving age. They either need help carting other kids around or they’re simply eager for the freedom of no longer having to play lone taxi driver.I wasn’t one of those.

Though not prone to worry, I’ve received a few of those calls–the kind that merely send your heart to racing, or the tragic one in the middle of the night that leaves you reeling…. I can’t stop myself from saying Be careful every time I’m with my children and they walk out the door with a set of keys in their hand. This even goes for the two in college.

A car in the hands of an inexperienced driver is a loaded gun. Throw a cell phone in the car and you’ve just cocked the trigger.

As parents, we do what we can to instruct and equip our children to minimize risk – to them, certainly, but for everyone else on the road, too.

I’ll never forget the day a neighbor couple showed up at my front door to ask if they could speak with my son or whomever just pulled in our driveway; turns out, this couple’s young children were playing in their front yard at the time my son’s friend was speeding through the neighborhood to our house.

The dad wanted to speak to our children and their friends to appeal to them to slow down. Why was he willing to do a potentially embarrassing thing like that? This dad had killed his best friend in a speeding accident when he was a teenager.

He paid an unimaginable cost to learn the truth of my words. Loaded gun….

Thankfully most of us will never face a severe accident, but I’d wager many of us have experienced a fender bender at some point in our lives. It’s likely that if you have a teen driver, he or she will, too. The question that needs to be asked:

Click to continue reading today’s post at The Art of Simple.
Oh, parents of up-and-coming or current teen drivers, THIS is a must read – and must-share – post!!