Though 3^rd party driver training is not required, the more training your teen can get, the more prepared they will be. Furthermore, trained professionals have a greater toolbox of techniques to guide your teen through the learning process.

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Whether you choose to teach your teen to drive yourself or seek outside help, the following tips can help you keep your teen driver safe:

1. Know and understand your teen. Not all teens are ready to drive at the same age. Teenagers mature, develop emotionally and become responsible at varying rates, which parents need to gauge as they determine when their teen is ready to drive.
   
   
2. Be a positive and responsible role model. Teenagers learn from their parents' behavior. Parents' actions behind the wheel influence the driving behavior of their teens.
   
   Research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that, when using the number of collisions and traffic tickets as criteria, the parents of teens involved in crashes were more likely to have poor driving records than the parents of collision-free teens.
   
   

3. Choose a quality driving school.  Driving is a risky activity for teens and warrants professional instruction. Driving schools that feature cutting-edge curriculums, high degrees of interaction and professionally trained instructors are suggested. Parents should select a quality driving school for their teen's driver training. Click here for a list of AAA approved driving schools. 

4. Practice might not make perfect, but it can make for better teen drivers.  As an important supplement to formal driver education, supervised driving sessions with parents provide teens with opportunities to enhance learning, reinforce proper driving techniques and skills, and receive constructive feedback from the people who care most about their safety and success.

5. Keep teen drivers free of teen passengers and off the road at night.  Extensive research indicates that a teen driver's chances of crashing increase with each additional teen passenger. Parents need to make sure they know who is driving with their teen at all times. Research shows teen crash rates spike at night and that most nighttime crashes occur between 9:00 p.m. and midnight.

6. Encourage teens to get enough sleep.  Teens need about nine hours of sleep every night, but many teens fall short due to the combination of early-morning school start times and homework, sports, after-school jobs and other activities. A lack of sleep can negatively affect vision, hand-eye coordination, reaction time and judgment.

7. Eliminate the distractions.  Cell phones and text messaging have rightly received significant media and legislative attention as hazardous distractions for teen drivers. With surveys reporting widespread use of distracting technology by teen drivers, more than one-third of states have recently banned cell phone use by new teen drivers. Parents should make it a strict rule in their households, too.

8. Create a parent-teen agreement.  Having rules, conditions, restrictions and consequences of teens' driving written down in advance establishes driving as a privilege, and not something to be taken lightly or for granted. Parents should look to state graduated driver licensing programs as the minimum they should be enforcing. Establish rules and consequences that you and your teen agree upon and that extend beyond state laws. If your teen breaks a family driving rule, consequences should be enforced and the situation should be used as an opportunity for learning and discussion. Conversely, proper driving behavior should be encouraged and rewarded with additional liberties. AAA offers a parent-teen driving agreement. (70KB)

9. Set a time each week for discussion and review. Parental involvement and communication is critical in the prevention of teen-related crashes, injuries and fatalities. Designate a time each week to address concerns (both parent and teen), review the teen's driving performance and chart the progression towards established goals and benchmarks.

10. Make a smart vehicle choice for your teen.  As the family member most likely to crash, a teen should drive the safest vehicle the family owns. Things to consider are vehicle type (sedans are generally safer than sports cars, SUVs and pickup trucks), size (larger vehicles fare better in crashes than smaller vehicles) and safety technology (front and side air bags, anti-lock brakes and stability control systems).

11. Don't do it alone.  The more experiences a teen gets, the safer they will be. Don't be afraid to seek out a variety of ways to train your teen. AAA offers a variety of teen driver training products that can give your teen some of the valuable experience they need.

Driving Practice

Is 30 hours enough to learn the piano or to play basketball? Of course not! Yet this is all that is required to become a driver. As with anything, the more practice you get the better you will be. Just because 30 hours is required, doesn't mean that it is enough experience to become a safe driver. Inexperience is one of the primary causes of teen crashes. Teens show the greatest improvement in their first 1000 miles behind the wheel. Using a driving log can help keep an accurate record of how many hours and conditions you have logged behind the wheel. Download a Driving Log (2.8MB)

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Parent-Teen Contracts

Learning to drive can be both exciting and stressful for a teenager — and his or her parents. AAA has developed this parent-teen driving agreement (68 KB) to help families work together to safely navigate the learning process. The agreement helps establish rules and consequences for teens, but also places responsibilities on parents. Safe driving generally requires much more than what state laws call for, and signing an agreement before the teen starts driving can be helpful in establishing expectations for the whole family. By working as a team, parents and teens can accomplish their shared goal — a safe, successful teen driver.

Parent-Parent Contract

AAA encourages parents to work as a team to ensure teens gain driving experience in the safest environment possible during that first year. AAA also encourages parents to talk with one another about the driving rules in their respective homes and encourages them to develop some common rules. That way, teens who are friends have the same or similar rules, which helps remove some of the peer pressure to break parental-imposed rules. Families are joining forces by creating voluntary parent-to-parent agreements (84KB) between families that define acceptable driving behavior. Some high schools and community organizations also are encouraging these contracts to create a support system for parents and greater protection for teens.

Find a driving school

Though convenience and price are the major factors most parents look for in a driving school, quality is truly the most important characteristic to look for. You spend endless dollars on braces, lessons, sports, and toys. When it comes time to choose a driving school, a decision that could help your teen avoid a crash, make sure you choose carefully.

Schools in AAA's Approved Driving School Network

Driving MBA 

Desert Driving School

Arizona Traffic Schools

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