Your teenager is learning to drive, and you have had a sleepless night. You are now sitting bolt upright beside them as they inch their way along the road. Your teeth are clenched, and your white-knuckled hand is gripping hard on the door handle — as if that could make any difference — while your foot keeps involuntarily pressing down on an imaginary brake. Sound familiar!
Learning to drive can indeed be as nerve-racking for the parents as it is for the learner, if not more so. However, you have to bear in mind that if you are that nervous during a driving lesson, your nervousness is likely to communicate itself to your child, who will become even more nervous as a result, and probably make more mistakes — which creates a vicious circle. If you want your kids to end up as safe and confident drivers, they need to enjoy the learning process and find it fun. For this reason, it is probably a better idea to enlist the help of driving school professionals to prepare your teenagers for the brave new world of roads and traffic.
Driving School Cars Are Equipped To Provide The Safest Experience
Make Learning To Drive A Fun Experience
There are actually plenty of good reasons why it is preferable to have a professional driving instructor teach your children to drive, rather than do it yourself. In the first place, obviously the instructor will stay cool, and this helps the learner to drive more confidently. When it is your precious car, and your even more precious son or daughter, it is much more difficult not to panic — especially as you don’t have dual controls. This means that if the learner is steering straight into a parked car, the instructor can just stop the car in its tracks, instead of covering his face. The instructor can explain calmly to the learner, at a suitable moment, why, rather than taking both hands off the steering wheel to point at a small child running out into the road, it is a better idea to use the brake. You would probably yell “Don’t do that!”, which would not be as helpful.
Rightway Driving School instructors, unlike yourself, have the experience of anticipating all the problems that could occur. Traffic is unpredictable, so learner drivers can often get into a situation which is more than they can cope with. They will panic, and you will panic too. It can be as simple as stalling the car and not being able to figure out how to start it, with traffic hooting behind. Just as simple, but even more scary, it can involve mistaking the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal, or vice versa. The learner can get stuck on a hill start and begin rolling backwards, have a close shave with a very aggressive driver, or suddenly encounter a violent change in weather conditions. The driving instructor has seen all these situations hundreds of times, and knows exactly how to talk the learner through them without either party getting flustered.
It may also be true, of course, that it is some time since you learned to drive, and road laws and driving school methods may have changed since then. Nowadays there is a lot more emphasis on teaching defensive driving — that is, developing habits of anticipating what could happen, rather than just reacting to what has happened. It also includes identifying potential hazards on the road ahead, and learning to control psychological factors that could affect your driving, such as stress, fear, impatience and road rage. Learning to drive nowadays is about a lot more than just getting a licence — but it can make your child a safer driver.
They say you learn faster when you are having fun, and this is certainly true of learning to drive. Under the tuition of a calm, experienced driving instructor, learners will see each lesson as an adventure. With plenty of positive feedback and reasonable explanation, they will feel encouraged, make steady progress, and be safe.
Check out our special driving lesson packages. You can book online or give us a call 07 5564 9988 .