Try To Help Your Kids When Thier Learning To Drive
For every adolescent, learning to drive is much more than just a mechanical process. It is a time when the take a relatively small but hugely significant foray in to adulthood. As the long-suffering parent, it a time fraught with pressure. You have to sit next to them in the car and look on as your baby take their first steps away from you. You have to put up with the expensive sounds coming from your gearbox and the acrid odours coming from the clutch, and you have to endure it whilst being supportive and positive, and vigilant enough so everyone makes it home safely.
These things said, the role of the patient parent in every novice drivers lives is a crucial one. The art and science of driving on modern roads is ten percent technique, eighty percent experience, and ten percent sheer good luck! Practice does, indeed, make perfect and as an experienced road used you should be well aware of the various risks. It is your job to impart this crucial knowledge. Or pay for hundreds of hours of lessons!
You time with them in the car then, is to be expected to be pretty stressful! But the secret to minimising the amount of anxiety, for both driver and passenger, is careful preparation. Plan each session to cover a particular skill, and try to follow what they are learning in the proper driving lessons. This will give a valuable opportunity to reinforce what they have learnt.
As mentioned, experience is by far the best teacher so try to arrange your sessions to take in a range of conditions. This applies equally to road conditions, such as driving during rush hour start-stop traffic, as to weather conditions. Don’t forget the crucial lessons in night driving and multi-lane carriageways. Try to take in a range of different roads covering a range of different speeds.
My advice is to allow the driver to get as much experience as possible on the sort of roads they will be doing most of their early driving on. These are, naturally, the roads to be found around your home. Learn from my mistakes! Though I lived in a relatively rural location, I took my driving lessons in the heart of a neighbouring city centre, after work each week. The greater part of my early driving experience was on narrow country lanes despite never having touched on these in the course of my driving lessons.
I’m sure that the first place you will head for will be he nearest empty car park. Rightly so. These empty open spaces provide the ideal environment to learn some basic skills. You should be able to practice braking, gear changes, and turning here. With a little imagination you can lay out a course to give them some further experience of reversing around a corner and the dreaded parallel park! There are normally a few traffic cones to be found in car parks to help with this task.
As a car owner one area you can impart some invaluable knowledge is that of basic maintenance and the basic safety checks that are just as muck a part of driving. These things are never touched upon by driving instructors. Things like changing a wheel, where the tools are, and how to top up the oil should be covered.
To conclude, if you keep things organised and simple you really can’t go too far wrong. Provide some warm up time at the start of each session and turn the inevitable mistakes into valuable lessons. If you approach things with the right attitude you are sure to enjoy this valuable time with your pride and joy. You decide if I’m talking about your car or your offspring!
john robertson owns topgear driving tuition and offers information aboutdriving schools yoker
