The First National Bank of Dad by David Owen

Author:David Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Now, Back to Safety

In any family with young drivers, the most important car-related issue is not money, of course; it’s safety. But safety has economic implications, too. Safe drivers are much less expensive to maintain than unsafe drivers, because the cost of insuring them is lower, and they don’t cause as many trips to the body shop. Does it make sense to offer teenaged drivers an economic incentive for remaining safe?

I think it does. One idea: a safe-driving allowance bonus for every quarter of a year during which a young driver has no moving violations, accidents, insurance claims, or disturbing failures of automotive judgment (as determined by the parents). Here’s what you tell your child: if you maintain a good driving record, our family will save money, and to encourage you to do that, I want to share the savings with you.

Why a quarterly bonus instead of a yearly one? I think a year seems so long to a sixteen-year-old that an annual incentive might feel out of reach from the start. And paying up quarterly allows you to reinforce good behavior four times a year instead of just once. It also gives a new driver an additional incentive for refocusing after having the inevitable early-career fender bender—a useful type of accident, in my opinion, because it reminds cocky teenagers that they don’t know everything, after all, and that they need to pay more attention when behind the wheel than they may think they do, without threatening their lives.

Incentives usually work better than penalties, and, in addition, they are often easier to administer. If, in contrast, you make your children financially responsible for all their car-related mishaps, the threatened punishment is credible only if the kids have enough money to cover the cost of all the trouble they might get into. A more effective way to punish careless driving episodes, or other examples of undesirable behavior, is to withdraw personal driving privileges for some appropriate period of time, or to require a refresher course of driver education. Many sixteen-

year-olds view their driver’s license as their most valuable possession; you can take advantage of that fact.

Nevertheless, you have to be careful when you hand out punishments like this—as some friends of mine once discovered, under circumstances that they spent a long time trying to sort out. Their seventeen-year-old son had a minor accident, and they told him that he would not be allowed to drive again until he had paid for the damage to the car. Fine, he said; I’ll stop driving. And he did. As a result, his parents then had to take him everywhere he used to take himself, including to and from school every day (twenty-five minutes each way), and he was no longer available to serve as a chauffeur for his younger brother. Because the punishment was open-ended, there was no way that the parents could back down without appearing to have been beaten at their own game. Meanwhile, their son probably figured he could hold out for a few more months, when he would head off to college and be beyond the need of a car.

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