Teaching young children to drive

Teaching your children to drive can be stressful for even the most patient of parents, so it pays to do lots of preparation very first.

Study by the AA discovered that one in 20 individuals consider getting into the passenger seat with their learner youngster behind the wheel is a lot more stressful than providing birth, receiving through exams or dealing with illness.

Home service

Tempting as it could be to hand your youngster over to a professional instructor, numerous people basically can not afford to fork out for lots of lessons, which signifies house tuition could be the only option.

According to the RAC, the average learner demands 20 hours of practice to pass the driving test, in addition to 45 hours of driving lessons, which cost up to £25 an hour.

Remember that to supervise a learner driver, you should have held, and nevertheless hold, a full UK licence for the car you are teaching in, for a minimum of 3 years.

You need to also be more than the age of 21, so if your youngster learner’s brother or sister volunteers to take them out for lessons, make confident they meet these legal needs.

Be prepared…

1st and foremost, make certain you and your youngster are effectively insured. Get in touch with your insurer and let them know you will be taking your child out for lessons. If you don’t, you danger having your cover invalidated in the occasion that anything goes wrong whilst they are behind the wheel.

After you’ve got your cover sorted, the very first factor you ought to do if re-familiarise yourself with the Highway Code.

Probabilities are if you passed your test many years ago, you’ll have forgotten some of your driving theory, so it pays to do a bit of swotting up.

Your child will have to sit a theory test before their practical driving test, so the far better you know your Highway Code, the a lot more you will be able to assist them with this.

Back to fundamentals

Always speak by way of the basics with your child just before letting them take the wheel, and emphasise the importance of staying safe.

You will require to let them know that you might require to act decisively to avert an accident, but this does not imply you are angry with them.

Why not see if you can locate a large and close to-empty auto park where they can initial expertise getting in manage of the automobile?

And if you’re venturing onto the road, feel about your route and the time of day – quiet roads outside rush hour seems a excellent beginning point.

Killing machine

I would, nonetheless, advise against my father’s opening gambit when he was teaching me, which was “A automobile is the most potent weapon you will ever have in your hands. If you are ever going to kill any person, it will be with this.”

Although this may well be accurate, twenty years on I’m still a nervous driver.

Preserve calm and carry on

Even although it may be extremely frustrating when your teenager doesn’t look to be listening to your guidelines, do your very best to hold your cool.

1 of the biggest issues parents face is that they don’t have dual controls, which means a lot of foot-pumping on imaginary pedals when items don’t go as you’d like them to.

Temper, temper

Your natural instinct might be to grab the wheel from your kid, but losing your temper while they are behind the wheel could be very dangerous. If they are making errors, get them to pull more than so you can discuss where they had been going wrong.

The calmer you are, the a lot more profitable your lessons are most likely to be. When you start off to feel your stress levels rising, it is consequently a very good notion to attempt and think about how you would really feel in your child’s shoes – a little bit of empathy can go a extended way.

Practice makes perfect

Attempt to commit to typical lessons that aren’t spaced too far apart. This means there will not be the opportunity for your child to forget what they’ve learnt.

You need to also try, once they’re competent and confident, to take them on as many diverse roads and routes as achievable so that they have as broad an encounter as possible.

Remember that finding out to drive is a slow method, so you will want to give lessons over a period of several months ahead of your youngster is likely to be prepared to take their sensible test.

Have you any knowledge of teaching your offspring to drive? Or certainly, have been you taught by your mother or father, or an older sibling?

We’d love to hear your encounter and suggestions in the box below…

Teaching young children to drive