A drive out of control
Three car wrecks have made the news this week in Massachusetts. Speed is implicated in all of them. Death resulted in two of them. A 16-year-old was driving in none of them.
A police officer escapes with minor injuries when he hits a house and his cruiser overturns during a high-speed chase. A 4-year-old is orphaned when his 27-year-old mother slams into a tree, killing herself and the boy's 29-year-old father.
A 17-year-old dies with her 10-year-old brother when she loses control of the car and hits a tree.
Teenagers are not the only drivers who speed, who fail to wear their seat belts, who can't control a car that has gone off the road.
Raising the driving age might make us feel better, but delaying from 16 1/2 until 17 1/2 the age at which our children can get behind the wheel will not save them from the errors in judgment that plague drivers of every age. Only better education and more experience can do that.
There are sensible proposals already pending on Beacon Hill to impose new restrictions on teenage drivers that would go a long way toward reducing the accidents that are killing our kids, but raising the driving age is not one of them.
In Massachusetts, an astounding 43 percent of all first-year drivers and 37 percent of all second-year drivers are involved in car crashes, according to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Those statistics do not indicate that teenagers are too young to drive. It proves they are inadequately trained to drive.
For months, the Legislature's Joint Committee on Transportation has been wrestling with how best to keep our kids safe on the road. Some of the ideas in play make sense: increase the number of hours of supervised experience that everyone, regardless of age, needs to get a license; make all would-be drivers pass an advanced driver's education course that teaches how to pull out of a skid, as well as how to parallel park; insist that everyone applying for a license knows how to negotiate a highway, a school zone, and a snowstorm.
Requiring parents or another adult to supervise teenagers behind the wheel for 50 hours, including 10 hours at night and 10 in the winter, as is being proposed, would reassure the rest of us that a young driver did not pass his road test by the skin of his teeth. It would also address the real problem: a lack of experience, not a lack of years.
Teenagers are easy targets for regulatory excess, because the impulse to restrict their freedom is born of parental love and fear.
If we were honest with ourselves, we would admit that there is no age at which we would feel totally comfortable seeing our children pull into traffic. It is scary out there beyond the driveway.
If we wait until teenagers are 16 1/2 to grant them a learner's permit and 17 1/2 to confer a junior operator's license on them, they will be high school seniors coming up on graduation before they can take the family car on their own.
That does not give them a lot of time to accumulate independent driving experience, and the confidence that comes with it, while living under our roof.
The prospect of sending a freshly minted 18-year-old off to college or to his first job or to military training without his ever having been allowed to drive a car full of friends to
It is one more example of the ways in which we are infantilizing our children.
This is part of a larger problem for my generation of parents. We tell our teenagers that they are young adults, but we resist testing that proposition by actually letting them go off to make judgments on their own. Why? Because we know they are going to make mistakes, some of them whoppers.
They will make those mistakes at 16, at 17, at 22, just as we did.
But if we impose more exacting standards and substantial supervision before a driver's license is issued, fewer of those mistakes will be fatal ones.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 