Behind the wheel tips:

As a parent or gaurdian of a teen in GDL, you have an important role in determining the type of driver your teen will become. Your coaching will work to reinforce the basic skills, driving stategies, and attitudes taught in driver education.

Once you are aware of your own habits, you'll be in a better position to coach your teen driver. Take a moment to assess your own driving behavior. Do you:

• Make sure everyone in the vehicle wears a safety belt?
• Know your car, especially the controls and safety devices?
• Always drive defensively?
• Control emotions during all driving experiences?
• Obey all traffic laws?

With your inexperienced drivers, it is important to begin slowly, and gradually introduce more difficult maneuvers and traffic situations. Your first coaching efforts with your teen should be in low-risk areas, such as a large parking lot, where your teen can practice and demonstrate basic skills such as starting, stopping, backing, turning, and parking.

Once your teen is comfortable handling the above basic skills you can begin increasing the level of difficulty by allowing him or her to drive on roads with light traffic. Look for situations that will give your teen experience with various types of intersections, left and right hand turns, one way streets, and single and multiple lane roads.

As your teen's skills develops with moderate traffic situations, you can begin to introduce more difficult situations such as driving during rush hour and on the freeway. Other high risk driving conditions which your teen will need to concentrate on including driving at night and in bad weather.

Keep the following points in mind:

• Everyone in the vehicle must wear a safety belt, its the law!
• Expect your teen driver to make some mistakes while driving. Use these experiences to help reinforce safe driving techniques.
• Speed is the most common violation made by teen drivers and a major contributor to traffic crashes.
• It is important for young drivers to search the "big picture" on the road, in front of and behind the vehicle - to look for other vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists.
• Make sure your teen understands how to correctly operate the brakeing system of the vehicle he or she is driving. Vehicles equipped with anti-lock braking systems (ABS) require different emergency braking procedures than those without.
• Todays roads are full of stressful situations. Help your teen learn to control emotions that lead to aggressive driving and road rage at all times.
• Remind your teen to never drive while tired. If your teen feels sleepy while driving he or she should pull over to a safe spot to nap, or call for help.

Download a helpful Graduated Licensing System chart HERE