On December 2, 2006, my seventeen-year-old son, Reid, the driver, died in a one-car accident. On a three-lane Interstate highway that he probably never had driven before, on a dark night just after rain had stopped, and apparently traveling above the speed limit, he went too far into a curve before turning, then overcorrected, and went into a spin. While the physics of the moment could have resulted in any number of trajectories, his car hit the point of a guardrail precisely at the middle of the driver's-side door, which crushed the left-side of his chest.

• Driving is the leading cause of death for children.
  
  
• There is no such thing as a safe teen driver. We can train teens to operate a vehicle, but we cannot overcome the facts that their brains do not yet fully appreciate risk and danger, and that driving continually requires judgment, which requires experience, which new drivers do not have.
  
  
• When teen drivers crash, they almost always injure or kill not only themselves, but also passengers, other drivers, and pedestrians.

Father of Reid S. Hollister, age 17, a driver, who died in the early morning of December 2, 2006, the result of a one-car accident on the evening of December 1, at Exit 34 on Interstate 84 East in Plainville, Connecticut.

I am not an adolescent psychologist, but I don't think I'm risking my credibility by observing that, in general, teenagers often operate in their own little world, focusing on themselves and how they fit in with their peers, regarding themselves as immune or invulnerable to life's dangers.  "The bigger picture" and "teenager" rarely belong in the same sentence.             And we, as parents, are asked to entrust car keys to these limited-vision beings.             So how do we get t...