“Practice like your life depends on it, because it does!” I say this at the end of pretty much every video I make, and you see this phrase quite often in our course materials. Clearly, I think practice is important when a student is learning the techniques of collision-free driving. I hope you do, too.
Your teen doesn’t practice driving just to get good enough, to get the driver license, or good enough to handle everyday driving. Your teen practices driving so that those techniques of collision-free driving aren’t just skills that she knows, they’re habits she has. Because, let’s face facts: when it comes to driving, “good enough” is not good enough. Just being “good enough” is being just good enough to handle the normal things that happen, but it’s the things that don’t normally happen that will most likely end with you in a collision. It’s those things that surprise us, that catch us off guard.
So practice with your teen driver. Give her lots of opportunities to practice driving while you’ve got them. You won’t always be there in the seat next to her to help her along, so take advantage of those opportunities while you have them.
Watch this video to see Patrick Barrett, the Driver Education Guru, explain more about why practice is so important to making your teen a safe driver.