Teaching youngsters to drive

Teaching your kids to drive can be stressful for even the most patient of parents, so it pays to do a lot of preparation 1st.

Investigation by the AA discovered that one particular in 20 people consider receiving into the passenger seat with their learner kid behind the wheel is more stressful than giving birth, receiving by way of exams or dealing with illness.

Property service

Tempting as it might be to hand your kid more than to a expert instructor, a lot of folks simply can not afford to fork out for lots of lessons, which implies residence tuition might be the only choice.

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

Don’;t forget that to supervise a learner driver, you have to have held, and still hold, a full UK licence for the car you are teaching in, for a minimum of 3 years.

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

Be prepared…

Initial and foremost, make confident you and your kid are effectively insured. Contact your insurer and let them know you will be taking your youngster out for lessons. If you do not, you risk possessing your cover invalidated in the occasion that something goes wrong even though they are behind the wheel.

After you have got your cover sorted, the initial factor you need to do if re-familiarise yourself with the Highway Code.

Probabilities are if you passed your test many years ago, you will 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 better you know your Highway Code, the more you will be able to assist them with this.

Back to fundamentals

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

You will want to let them know that you may well need to act decisively to avert an accident, but this doesn’t imply you are angry with them.

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

And if you’re venturing onto the road, consider about your route and the time of day – quiet roads outdoors rush hour seems a very good beginning point.

Killing machine

I would, nevertheless, advise against my father’s opening gambit when he was teaching me, which was “A car is the most effective weapon you will ever have in your hands. If you’re ever going to kill anyone, it will be with this.”

Although this may possibly be true, twenty years on I’m nevertheless a nervous driver.

Keep calm and carry on

Even though it may well be incredibly frustrating when your teenager does not look to be listening to your guidelines, do your greatest to keep your cool.

One of the most significant issues parents face is that they do not have dual controls, which signifies a lot of foot-pumping on imaginary pedals when items don’t go as you’d like them to.

Temper, temper

Your natural instinct may possibly be to grab the wheel from your youngster, but losing your temper while they are behind the wheel could be extremely unsafe. If they are producing mistakes, get them to pull over so you can talk about where they were going wrong.

The calmer you are, the much more productive your lessons are likely to be. When you commence to feel your stress levels increasing, it is as a result a great concept to attempt and consider about how you would feel in your child’s footwear – a tiny bit of empathy can go a lengthy way.

Practice makes best

Try to commit to regular lessons that aren’t spaced also far apart. This signifies there will not be the opportunity for your child to overlook what they’ve learnt.

You need to also attempt, as soon as they’re competent and confident, to take them on as numerous different roads and routes as feasible so that they have as broad an knowledge as attainable.

Remember that finding out to drive is a slow method, so you will need to have to give lessons over a period of a lot of months just before your youngster is most likely to be ready to take their practical test.

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

We’d adore to hear your experience and recommendations in the box below…

Teaching youngsters to drive