Mourning Parents Act, known as !MPACT, www.mourningparentsact.org, is an organization started by three mothers who lost teens in car crashes here in Connecticut. Their mission is to bring to high school students a message about the consequences for families and communities when teen drivers make bad choices and kill or injure themselves or others.
Sherry Chapman and her group of speakers don’t show photos of mangled cars or bloody bodies. They talk about losing a child. I have been to several of their presentations, in packed high school auditoriums. When Sherry and other mothers, and a few fathers, recount their searing personal experiences, you can hear a pin drop. The teens in the audience pay rapt attention. I have long considered this the sound of teens confronting their own mortality, probably for the first time.
!MPACT recently sent out a newsletter, recounting its just-concluded program year, and it was a remarkable one. Just in Connecticut and Massachusetts, from September 2011 to June 2012, !MPACT made a presentation to 35,000 students at 49 schools. (That is not a typo – thirty five thousand teens.) One of !MPACT’s regular practices is to collect comment forms from the teens in the audience. The newsletter quoted from some of the best. I was so moved that I thought I should reprint some of them (with !MPACT’s kind permission) here. Among the teens’ comments (my emphasis added in bold) were these:
“Before the assembly, I didn’t care. I drive without my seatbelt and speed. Now I want to be a lot more safe for not only myself , but for my family and other drivers/passengers with/around me… The stories really made me open my eyes and see that cars are serious.“
“The assembly was much more powerful than a mock crash. Actually seeing that woman still grieving was a big reality check.”
“I won’t be playing chicken in the car anymore with my sister.”
“I usually don’t relate to anyone in these assemblies, but I felt like I knew these people…. This program has changed my behavior.”
“I think every teenager must see this because it really impacts your life and it’s so important for kids to realize what happens. I would like to thanks the presenters for giving such a memorable presentation. I don’t think they could realize it any better — the dangers, the tragedy and horror of all this….”
!MPACT’s speakers are simply parents with a microphone, talking about the day their teen — or in the case of one mother who lost both her children, teens — didn’t come home.
I focus on !MPACT for two reasons. The first is the breathtaking number of students they reach. The second is to emphasize that personal stories of loss and the human consequences of teen driving are more powerful than videos or photos of bloody scenes or twisted metal. On this second point, I recently received from a company in Minnesota a new video (which I was asked to endorse) in which a traffic engineer takes a group of teens into an auto salvage yard and shows them the cars in which people were seriously injured or killed, often because of not wearing seat belts. The video was certainly innovative in its perspective. However, as I watched the faces of the teens in the video, I wondered if at least part of their minds was fascinated — not in a good way- with the mangled automobiles. In other words, many people pay money to watch movies in which cars crash. Popular culture not only desensitizes us to crashing cars, but also in some cases glorifies them. I am just not sure that showing teens crashes gets their attention as much as piques their interest. I have written about the infamous Gwent video from England, which tries to warn teens from texting by showing snapping necks, breaking limbs, and rivers of blood.
Which is why it has been my opinion for awhile — now reinforced by !MPACT’s recent newsletter, — that personal stories of loss are a better way than crash scenes to reach teen drivers and get them to change their behavior — to realize that cars are serious.
Congratulations to everyone at !MPACT for an amazing year, and keep up the good work.
