You’ve adopted a sibling group and now one of the children is old enough to drive. Do you allow your child to get a driver’s license as soon as legally possible? Do you let the older sibling transport the younger children? What type of problems might arise from the driving privilege?

We definitely encountered some unforeseen difficulties when we allowed our daughter to get her license. She took up smoking for a while, which she could easily do away from home in her car. She once threatened her younger sister with severe bodily damage if she exposed her secret.

We had asked birth relatives to make arrangements for visitation through us. We had explained to them that the children don’t always know our schedule and as a courtesy, we would like them to ask us first. The birth relatives didn’t like that idea. Once our older daughter could drive, they began making private arrangements with her.

Of course, this encouraged her to lie to us about her whereabouts. They also wanted her to bring her younger sister along, which she refused to do. Our daughter wanted them to invite her younger sister through us, which they refused to do. Then, when she would show up without her younger sister, her relatives would get angry with her. She was stuck in the middle, with no way out.

In Michigan, a child can get an operators license at the age of 16. Our oldest daughter didn’t get her license until she was 17, which ended up being a blessing with all the problems it created. The summer she was registered for driver’s training, she decided to run away from home. Consequently, she forfeited driver’s training until the next summer.

She turned out to be a terrible driver, so she needed a lot of practice before she could take her road test. (It runs in their family, we later realized.) It was a long time before we allowed any of the children to ride with her.

An older sister, whom we couldn’t adopt, thought she should be able to pick up her sisters whenever she wanted to, once she got her driver’s license. The problem was she wanted to take her sisters to her own apartment to visit with them. One of my daughters warned me that the apartment was full of empty liquor bottles and that her sister was drinking quite heavily. Thankfully, she has now passed through this phase, however at the time; I couldn’t allow my daughters to visit there. This caused a great deal of animosity between the birth family and our family.



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