As a parent, I often wonder if I should let my younger children ride with their older teenage siblings. This is sometimes difficult to prevent because we currently have four teenagers in our home. Teenagers always want to be on the go, they are frequently going to the same location, and it seems silly to drive two vehicles to the same location. Our 15-year-old son just finished driver’s training last week so this article on teen death in auto crashes caught my eye. Especially since our 18-year-old son just totaled his second vehicle, and of our four adult children, three have totaled vehicles. The other daughter just smashed the side in on her car. The article said that teenagers, who are passengers in automobiles that crash, are more likely to die than a younger child involved in a similar crash. The new study reveals that this is especially true if a young inexperienced driver is driving the car. The researchers looked at 45,560 crashes that involved passengers from eight to 17 years old.

Researchers were surprised to find that there was an obvious point between the ages 12 and 16 where a dramatic rise in deaths to passengers in cars occurred. Before the age of 12 there were a fairly constant number of deaths per year which rose suddenly between 12 and 14 and then rose dramatically and continued to rise all the way through the teens. Among the deaths of teenagers in automobile crashes, 54.4 percent of the teens were riding with a driver under 20. Almost two-thirds of the teens who died were not wearing seat belts and drinking was a factor in 21.2 percent of the fatal car crashes.

The lead researcher of the study Dr. Flaura Koplin-Winston is the founder and co-scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The report was published in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

I wonder, do you ever ask what kind of a driver a friend is before you let your child ride in their car? When my oldest adopted daughter finally got her license at 17, I wouldn’t let any of my children ride with her, including her younger birth sister. She was a terrible driver. In fact, her birth grandfather ended up teaching her to drive because I usually had children with me and considered her driving too dangerous.

One summer at camp, some girls from church wanted to drive into town with my daughter. One of the moms, a friend from church, asked me if my daughter was a good driver before letting her daughter go. I honestly answered, “Absolutely not, I won’t let any of her siblings ride with her.” The mom said, “Oh,” and then let her daughter go anyway. I never did understand why she bothered to ask.

Photo Credit Julia Fuller 2008