Time to Let Go

Drivers aged 75 and older are almost as accident-prone as 16-year-olds, but no one is proposing a blanket ban on elderly motorists. With kids, however, the prohibitionist impulse comes easily. The love Shakespeare celebrated in Romeo and Juliet is now statutory rape. Those aged 18 through 20 can fight their country's wars but are not to be trusted with a glass of chardonnay. And now, Massachusetts legislators are trying to change the age for a junior operating license to 17 1/2. I imagine teens must be feeling pretty beleaguered. The seeming solution to most every failing by a few is to ban it for all. When, these kids have to be wondering, will we be allowed to grow up?

When, indeed.

Kids remain kids, infantilized and tightly controlled, far longer than ever before. Playtimes are supervised. After-school hours are tightly scheduled. Summers are jammed with camps and courses. Parents demand hourly check-ins by cellphone; some track their offspring's whereabouts by GPS. And children go to school for many more years. We may trumpet freedom for Iraqis, but not for our adolescents. There's a cost to this. A survey by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence found a stunning 69 percent rise between 2000 and 2004 in the number of adult children who live at home. That puts a statistical gloss on the much-observed phenomenon of "boomerang kids." Yet unlike Matthew McConaughey in Failure to Launch, it's not their fault. It's ours. And the rush to push up the driving age illustrates why.

Start with the motivation behind the law's change. The last few months have seen some tragic and well-publicized fatalities among young drivers, leading to the inference that more young drivers than ever must be dying behind the wheel. Yet the numbers don't support that conclusion. Data tracked by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety show a marked decline nationally in teenage driving fatalities, from a 1979 high of 34.1 per 100,000 to a 2004 level of 19.1 - and no data suggest that the downward trend has suddenly reversed.

That's not to say teens make great drivers. Driving is a skill, and those new to it are worse than those who have been driving for years. Still, it is striking that even as we succeed in reducing fatalities among the youngest drivers, the pressure grows to ban them from driving at all.

It has more to do, I suspect, with our own fears as parents. Parents dread adolescence not only for the surliness of its occupants but also for the impending loss of childhood. The children who once saw us as demigods now want little to do with us. They reject our mores and our music and seek their own independence. And there is no more concrete symbol of that independence than a license.

Once they can drive, teens no longer need us for transportation to the movies or the mall. They can hold jobs. They can visit whom they want when they want. They can escape our ever-present gaze, feeling some measure of real freedom. It can be dangerous stuff, with risks so great that sometimes we wish it were possible to roll back the clock, envelop our adolescents in our arms, and delay, if possible, their budding autonomy. Which may explain why, according to a 2004 USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans want to take away 16-year-olds' right to drive.

I write this as the father of a 15-year-old who eagerly looks forward to receiving her learner's permit. When she does, my wife and I want to teach her how to drive. That means more than a few Sunday-morning spins in a deserted parking lot. It means talking about risks and responsibilities and setting limits on when and where she goes. But that wouldn't happen until she's 16 1/2 under the proposed law. And her first critical years of solo driving would be her college years. For kids living away from home for the first time, without supervision and in an environment with a dramatically increased prevalence of alcohol and drugs, college brings its own challenges. Add learning to drive to that potent mix, and the risks to her may actually rise.

Someone has to teach my daughter to drive, and I'd rather it be me. Sure, raising the driving age may help us sleep better at night. But our most important obligation as parents is not to keep our children dependent but to help them grow up.

Thomas M. Keane Jr. is a partner in a private equity firm and a former Boston city councilor. E-mail him at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.