How To Stop Teens From Texting While Driving

I just read about something that I think will put a lot of parents at ease. It's a new application for cell phones that won't allow you to text when you're in a car that is moving 5 mph or more. (Read here.)

The application is called iZup (Get it? Keep your "eyes up!"), and although many adults should probably install this app on their phones, it was really created for teenagers by a mother in Boston who was scared to death about her teenager getting distracted by texting while driving. (You rock, whoever you are!)

Let's face it, teens and driving don't always mix as it is. And when you add text messaging to that formula, well, the combination can be deadly.

My teenager is a few short weeks away from taking the wheel of my car. I plan to download this super-brilliant iZup application to her phone as a sort of "Welcome to the world of driving" gift.

I already gave her the gift of life. So I guess I'll be re-gifting.

Photo by Dan Gill for The New York Times

And She's OFF!!

The dreaded day has come. The driving instructor came knocking on our door this morning at 10:05, and after 15 minutes of instructions at the curb, my first-born daughter accelerated off into the dark unknown. OK, maybe I'm being a little dramatic. It was bright daylight. But for all you parents of teens or soon-to-be teens who think that you have all kinds of time before you have to worry about your children driving, well, you don't.

If you read my blog at all, you know that my teenager driving is my worst nightmare. Something I've been stressing over for the past year or so. Why? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that car accidents are the leading cause of death for kids ages 16-19.

I should relax and trust the process a little more. Driving laws are a lot tougher now. Ever since they enacted the Graduated Driver's License Law in California in 1998, the first state in this country to do so, traffic fatalities in teenagers have been reduced significantly. In the first two years after passage of the law, teen passengers killed and injured in crashes involving 16-year-old drivers decreased by 40 percent in this state.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I should remember that I was sitting where she was once, A VERY LONG TIME AGO. And look at me . . . I've stayed alive long enough to be able to write neurotic posts about how scary it is for teenagers to be driving. Truth be told, I think my teenager is already a safer, more cautious driver than I was when I was 16. The first day I got my license, I ran a motorcyclist off the road because I didn't know that he had the same rights to the road as cars. I could have SWORN that I read in the driver's manual that motorcyclists were supposed to drive in the bike lane. They ARE bikes, right?

It's been about an hour since my daughter pulled away from the curb. My cell phone hasn't rung and I haven't heard any sirens off in the distance. So far, so good. I feel a little more relaxed, I guess. Writing this post has helped. And I keep hearing what my oldest sister said, "Lynn, you're going to have to let her grow up sometime."

Now I can move on to my next neurotic episode . . . buying more car insurance so she can practice driving with me.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tips: Help Your Teenager Drive Safely (abcnews.go.com)
• Losing a teen (timesunion.com)
• One in three texting teens has texted while driving (seattlepi.com)
• Parental Talks Can Make Kids Safer Drivers (time.com)

Return Of The Bad-Luck BFF

Hello, again . . . been MIA for a while in accordance with some of my top New Year’s resolutions: Get off my butt, move my body around more, and instead of blogging so much about life, actually get out there and enjoy a little of it.

But I’m back on my butt, where it feels oh-so-comfortable, to talk about a few teen things. Over the holidays, my 16-year-old daughter’s friend from Wisconsin came out to visit us. Again. (But this time in NorCal instead of SoCal.) They’re good buddies. They met on the Disney Cruise last year, talk regularly on the phone, text nearly daily and have seen each other three times since the cruise. Did I mention this friend is a “he?” Chris is his name. VERY nice boy, respectful, comes from hard-working, family-centered, honest parents. You know, the kind of people you’d meet on a Disney Cruise.

Now, some of you might think it’s inappropriate to allow a teenaged boy to fly all the way out to the Left Coast – alone! -- to visit my teenaged daughter for a week, especially given the fact that we live in an all-female home, with no man around to intimidate a 16-year-old boy who might have “other’ things on his mind. (In case you’re wondering about the sleeping arrangements: Chris slept in my daughter’s room, she slept with me, and I slept with one eye open.)

With or without a dad in the house, Chris being here felt so right to me. There is NOTHING but friendship between them, trust me. They didn’t even kiss on New Year’s Eve. She’s been telling me all along, “Mom, Chris is my best friend.” And after observing them for a week, I see what she means. Those two really have a very special, NON-SEXUAL bond between them. They talk. They laugh. They kid each other. They lie around on her bed like two BFFs, shoes kicked off, sharing a bag of chips and pictures from their cell phones.

I can’t help but wonder that had I spent time building a similar friendship with my ex-husband, we might still be married. Nope, we were too eager to jump all over each other, and look how that ended.

Anyway, Chris’ visit wasn’t without its mishaps. Again. When he came out to visit us last year in Orange County, he fell ill and spent the entire weekend on my couch. His mom called it The Wisconsin Plague ( http://tinyurl.com/y886x9m). This trip, the dark cloud hovered once again. First off, his plane was delayed out of Milwaukee and he almost missed his connecting flight. Had he sprinted to the gate 10 minutes later, out of breath and in dire need of the asthma inhaler he forgot to pack, he would have had to spend the entire night in the Houston airport. Thankfully, he made it in time. But it was a nail-biter, let me tell you.

While we did enjoy a lovely daytrip to San Francisco one day, the flu came knocking on our door once again, only this time it hit all of us, starting with my youngest daughter. (I really don’t think you’ve earned your parenting stripes until you’ve cleaned up your child’s vomit.)

Between flu days, my daughters and Chris were well enough to go jump on some trampolines at a local hotspot. That’s where Chris fell hard, hitting his head and causing a massive nosebleed. We spent the evening on Concussion Watch. The next day, I was cleaning up my daughter’s room and tripped over Chris’ suitcase, landing hard on my tailbone, where I am now sporting a rather beautiful purple bruise.

It’s probably a good thing that my teeanged daughter caught the flu the day we were supposed to go skiing in Lake Tahoe. I shudder to think what might have happened to Chris on the slippery slopes with that bad-luck cloud following him.

Traffic School 101

One of our primary responsibilities as parents is setting a good example for our children – especially when our teens are riding with us in the car. I have failed miserably on that count, I’m afraid. Case in point:

Last week, I was driving my teen and two of her friends to the beach. While they were taking goofy pictures of each other in their sunglasses and bathing suits in the back seat, my cell phone rang. I put it up to my ear to answer it just as a Highway Patrol officer pulled up alongside me.

CRAP!

Now, I’m one of those mavericks who refuses to buy a hands-free device simply because the law says you have to. I’ve read one too many reports about the possible link between cell phones and brain cancer, so I try to keep the radiation away from the vicinity of my head by using my speakerphone.

OK, that and because I’m too cheap and lazy to buy a Bluetooth.

Anyway, up until that moment, civil disobedience had worked well for me. But I knew I was toast, and I had to at least TRY to get out of the ticket. So here’s what three teenagers learned from me – good or bad, you decide -- about how to weasel out of a traffic ticket:


1. Play Dumb (very effective when you really are blonde): I pretended I didn’t know why he pulled me over. I had just bought my car, so as he walked up to my window, I said: “I know . . . I don’t have my plates yet. I just bought this car three weeks ago, so the plates are coming.”

Did it work? Hardly. “You were on your cell phone without a hands-free device, Ma’am,” said Mr. No-Nonsense. DAMN! And what’s this “Ma’am” stuff??


2. Act surprised and admit fault, but rationalize it: “Oh, of course! Yeah, I was just answering it. But I put it on speakerphone right away!”

“The law requires you to have a hands-free device, Ma’am.” He wasn’t budging. And there’s that “Ma'am” reference again!


3. Remain calm and try to sound intelligent (the dumb-blonde thing wasn’t working): “To be honest, Officer, I am afraid to use a Bluetooth. I’ve read a lot of reports about how the radiation from cell phones and cellular devices has been linked to brain cancer and could cause the rapid growth of cancerous cells.”

What’s that?? . . . he nodded! I think I had him. “I understand, Ma’am, but there are ways around that. You can buy the plug that goes from your ear to the cell phone.”


4. Play dumb again, but be gracious: “Really? I never heard of those. I’ll have to get one. Thanks for the tip, Officer.”

Uh-Oh! He started to pull out his ticket pad. Flattery was getting me nowhere. Quick! Think of something!


5. Beg, plead, cry and lose all sense of dignity: “Officer, please, please, PLEASE don’t give me a ticket!! I just finished traffic school a few weeks ago and I can’t afford another ticket or a ding on my record. I’m a single mom, trying to take care of two daughters, and I just can’t afford this ticket or higher insurance rates. PLEASE!

He started to soften. OMG . . . he was human, after all! He glanced at the teens in the back seat of the car and said, “OK, Ma’am. Please drive safely.” Off he went, and this time I didn’t care that he called me “Ma’am.”

While I’d like to take full credit for engaging my irresistible feminine wiles to get out of this traffic ticket, I also think it helped GREATLY that I had three teenaged girls dressed for the beach, wide-eyed and smelling like coconut oil, in the back seat of my car.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Using Cell Phones While Driving Increases Car Insurance Rates (refinanced.blogspot.com)


• Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking' (textually.org)

Ask . . . And You'll Be Surprised What You Learn

Image by Mark Sun via Flickr

I hear so many moms of teenager complain that their children never tell them anything. I wonder what exactlyis "anything" and I wonder if their children wonder the same thing.

Well, I'm hear to challenge those information-starved moms by asking, "When was the last time you asked for anything?" No, really. When was the last time you asked your child something specific and engaged in a way that told them that you really wanted something in return? You don't do this when you are driving and talking on a cell phone or fighing traffic with a younger sibling in the backseat. No, as a parent of teenager, you must find the right time, the right place and engage with 110% interest and presence of mind.

Granted these times are difficult to find when we are shuffling kids from school to basketball to ballet and trying to fix dinner and complete homework all in the same hour. But that's what makes parenting teenagers such an adventure. It's as much about finding the perfect time to chat, as it is getting the teenager to open up and share.

I found one of these rare moments recently in a pool in Costa Rica. There's a lot to be said about leaving the country to find time to talk to your teenager in a place where they cannot communicate with anyone in English and their iPhones don't work. You might say, it's an experience worth paying for! I not only got a tan, but got to hear about my daughter's teen experiences -- lucky me!

We were in the pool floating through the labyrinth of canals, just my 15-year-old daughter and I. Suddenly, I brought up the fact that she is currently the same age that her birth mother was when she first gave birth. Peering around my umbrella drink, I surprised her with a simple factoid. "Do you realize that you are the same age that your birth mother was when she gave birth to her first baby?

I had a difficult time determining whether it was the factoid or the randomness of the conversation that startled her most. She was very surprised, so I went for the grand slam. "How would you feel if you were pregnant right now?' It was a great conversation starter but one I am sure not many teen moms have asked.

She described how she would feel scared, worried and confused, which was my opportunity to make it even more relevant. We talked about how understandable it was for her birth mother to give her up for adoption, and how difficult it would be if she were a mom right now. Clearly, we wouldn't be floating in a pool on an exotic beach in Central America sipping non-alcoholic umbrella drinks.

Factoid #2: If my 15-year-old were pregnant, I might need alcohol. The conversation took many turns -- from friends who were actively having sex to feelings about abortion. In the short 10 minutes of conversation, I learned more about my daughter on a deeper level than an hour riding in the car exchanging yes and no answers.

I believe being a mom of teenagers makes us take a step back and approach parenting a little differently than when our children were toddlers or preschoolers. It's a time of evolution not only for our teens, but for us as mothers. It's time a time not to want just anything, but to want everything.

BY MARIA BAILEY