Every so often I see something in writing from a parent, such as a letter to a newspaper editor, that makes me want to get in the car, go to the writer’s house, sit him or her down, and explain teen driving. I saw such a letter recently. I will spare the writer identification, but here is what she wrote:

“If our country were as small as most European countries, making kids wait until they’re 18 to get their licenses might be more reasonable. Europe has better mass transit. But to expect parents to drive their little darlings to and from school, to and from work, and to and from all social activities is not reasonable.”

Do you agree? Does the attitude sound similar to your thought process? I hope not. The writer does not appear to be aware of the reality that “there is no such thing as a safe teen driver,” and the reasons why. There is no recognition that if the minimum driving age were based on the science of brain development rather than tradition and political pushback from parents, the starting age would be in the range of 22 to 25, not 16 to 18. This writer is also putting convenience ahead of safety. Her words signal an impatience with teens not getting their licenses because of the imposition on parents’ schedules. Finally, these words imply a willingness to force a teen who may not be ready to drive to do so so because “It’s time to grow up.”

The attitudes expressed in and underlying this letter are what this blog and the safe teen driving community try to counteract. If you find yourself thinking this way, please think again.

On December 6, 2010, those who have been working on safe teen driving in Connecticut during the past few years gathered in the ornate Old Judiciary Room of the State Capitol, to mark the success of the state’s 2008 overhaul of its teen driving laws and the public awareness efforts that followed. The results were summarized in a Connecticut DMV press release: “The state in 2009 saw a 62 percent reduction in fatal crashes involving [16 and 17 year old drivers] when examining a 12 year average since 1997. In the 2009 calendar year the number [of crashes involving a teen driver that resulted in one or more fatalities] dropped to 6 for all of that year.” While nationally highway fatalities have dropped in recent years, Connecticut’s reduction outpaces the rest of the country. While success in public safety is difficult to measure because achievement is accidents that did not happen, in the room that morning, the feeling of accomplishment was palpable.

Twenty-four hours later, on the afternoon of December 7, after school had let out, four teens, aged 15 to 17, three boys and one girl, died in a one-car crash in the eastern Connecticut town of Griswold. Apparently, the 16 year old driver had only a learner’s permit, and thus his driving and his passengers did not comply with the teen driving laws. A fifth passenger was hospitalized; as I post this, his condition has been upgraded to stable.

In the 48 hours following the accident, I had the privilege of appearing on the Connecticut TV affiliates of NBC, CBS and Fox, to talk about how parents, schools, and communities can address the apparent circumstances of the Griswold tragedy - the recurring situation of several teens in a car after school. Here are links to two of them:

http://www.wfsb.com/news/26068030/detail.html

http://www.ctnow.com/videobeta/?watchId=f8a87b63-2cf4-4707-847c-b490453e1fa1

But here on the blog, I can be a bit more expansive and personal, which I am moved to be because of my family’s 50-year association with Griswold. Below, for our friends in Griswold and by extension you who are reading, some thoughts on this incomprehensible tragedy and how we can avoid similar ones.

Dear Griswold,

You ache, and my family aches with you. Like you, we lost a teen driver in a one car accident in early December. When I heard the news of the accident and the location, I could envision the road and the tree, because I have been in and around Griswold for most of my life. For more than 50 years, my parents have been in the neighboring town of Voluntown. My childhood memoires include milk shakes at Pine Cone Dairy Bar, watching planes land at Pachaug Airport, buying vegetables from Frank and Margaret Chinigo, my Dad’s car being repaired at Patrylo’s, watching the cows get milked and apples picked at the Brewster Farm and Orchard, hanging out with the Breen family, and riding a horse at the Apthorp Farm. Today, we buy vegetables at Campbell’s and eat dinner at River Ridge.

I do not know the four families who have lost, and I have no place to comment on the specifics of the December 7 tragedy, because I only know the generic situation, teens in a car after school. I can only offer some thoughts on how communities can try to go forward and prevent similar tragedies, and how you can care for these devastated families.

In earlier posts on this blog, I have talked about ways we can deal with the hours of the day directly after school, which are the most dangerous for teen drivers. At the exit from school parking lots, signs can be posted at the exit from high school parking lots, something like: “Ready to Drive Safely? Seat Belts Buckled? No Illegal Passengers? Great, See you Tomorrow.” Another way to use this strategic location is to post a student volunteer to check on cars as they leave.

Schools can do two things that can be very effective. The first is to post on the school’s website and bulletin board a list of the students who have had their licenses long enough to carry passengers legally and who have not had any serious driving violations (serious means anything more than a parking ticket). This would be simple to prepare and post, and it would give both students and parents an easy way — as easy as opening the browser on their phones — to know at least who is legal. A second task for schools is to be sure that “Parent Permission Forms,” where parents are asked to give permission for their teens to ride to and from school or events with other teens, make specific reference to the state’s passenger restrictions.

Parents have two ways to join in: educating teens about the dangers of passengers, and filling out a teen driving contract that spells out a time period for driving privileges to be revoked if their teen carries an illegal passenger.

These steps will help.

For those caring for these families, I have no magic answers and no professional qualifications, but I do have four years of my family’s own process and the benefit of conversations with hundreds of parents, including those who have lost a teen driver. First, “sympathize with strength, not weakness.” When you try to comfort the families, focus on positive memories of the kids, not the enormity of the family’s loss. Second is to listen. For the most part, those who have lost want to talk. Try to get those who are not talking to do so; shared pain gets distributed and thus easier to bear. You are, literally and figuratively, a shock absorber. Finally, be infinitely patient. Don’t ask these families to “be strong.” Each of the family member is now in shock and this will morph into despair, and then will begin the long process of trying to get to the point where the teen they have lost is an agreeable memory instead of a daily burden. This process will take a very long time. The good news is that I know that the kind-hearted people of Griswold will step up. These families are lucky to have you.

Let’s work together to remember these teens who lost their lives, and to use this tragedy as a reminder that, notwithstanding our recent success as a state, we still have work to do.

Your friend, Tim

Elizabeth Edwards, who died earlier this month, was and will remain one of my heroes. She lost her teenage son in a one-car accident in 1996, and she wrote about it in her 2007 book, Saving Graces. She was one of the prime inspirations for my manuscript, His Father Still (I am still seeking a publisher). Below is an excerpt from my book, about my admiration for her life and example.

As soon as Senator John Kerry picked Senator John Edwards as his running mate in the 2004 race for President, the news media began to report the story of how John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth lost their sixteen-year-old son in a car accident in 1996.

As I read about the Edwards’s tragedy and how they were faring eight years later, I entertained the same initial, cynical thought that others no doubt had at the time – that Senator Edwards was exploiting his son’s death in aid of his political career. (The events that later ended Mr. Edwards’ political career had yet to unfold.) But I eventually concluded that that was not the case. Senator Edwards rarely if ever talked about his son, yet freely admitted that Wade’s death in part propelled him into public service, that he ran for Senate and then sought the presidency in part to honor his son’s memory. It was then his wife Elizabeth who spoke candidly and publicly about their grief, which she did at length in her 2007 book, Saving Graces.

In late December 2007, The New York Times profiled the impact that Wade’s death had on his parents. In 1996, John was a successful trial lawyer and Elizabeth, also a lawyer, was accomplished in her own right in a variety of ways. What the article said I immediately and intuitively understood:

In an instant, a world in which everything seemed right suddenly seemed all wrong. John and Elizabeth Edwards’s 16-year-old son, Wade, their first-born, was dead, with nothing to blame but the gust of wind that had flipped his car off a wide-open road.

As the couple walked down the aisle of the church for his funeral, they braced each other, friends recalled, as if they could not stand alone.

In the bleak months that followed, the Edwardses looked for ways to keep Wade’s name alive. Determined to honor their son publicly and fill their life with meaning, they created a learning center named after him. They chose to have more children. And they decided Mr. Edwards would enter politics.

But to the Edwardses, their decision simply showed a sense of purpose and a lesson learned a decade ago from crushing pain: If you can’t control life, you can at least embrace it more urgently. [My emphasis.]

Friends say Mr. Edwards probably would have gone into politics even if Wade had lived. But his death provided a catalyst.

In her book, Elizabeth eloquently describes her relationship with her son, ten years after his death, in two respects that also describe my experience and Ellen’s so precisely that we could substitute “Hollister” for “Edwards.” She explains visiting the cemetery and talking to Wade and tending his grave and those of other children nearby. I quote her at length because her words illustrate better than anything else I have read the notion that in the stories of other parents I have found the most comfort, whether the details of our tragedies matched or not. Saving Graces says:

I went every day to Wade’s grave until our second daughter, Emma Claire, was born, because that was what felt right to me. Whatever we do – going or not going to our children’s graves, sleeping with a toy, or closing the door to their rooms – has only to be what we each need, what we require to make it through each day without them. There is no other yardstick. It served me best to visit Wade’s place daily . . . .

I went to Oakwood then, and I go now – though less often – because the rest of the living world ends at that cemetery gate. There his body lies, surrounded by the bodies of families, by stories of lives long and short, and there the inevitability of death seems like but another chapter. And there I could not help but speak to him . . . . I would speak to Wade and pray and read aloud. And I planted and tended and cared for the space that now surrounded his body. I cleaned around Wade, like cleaning his room, and I cleaned around the graves of the children like Oliver and Gerald, since next to each child were his or her parents, who died after them and were unable to tend the graves themselves.

It doesn’t matter to me whether all this sounds odd. I did it because it made it easier for me, easier for me to think that there were mothers who would come after me and tend to Wade’s grave when I no longer could. Easier to think that we were all in this together, that we formed a bond, a community – these long-dead mothers and I, and the mothers who would come later – and the creed to which we all subscribed was the sanctity of the graves of our children.

Elizabeth and John Edwards’ observations stay with me now in two ways. She is correct that, when all of the upheaval and tumult that follow a teen’s death has abated, we parents are left, ultimately, with landscaping: a rake, a hoe, and other gardening tools are the implements by which we tend the memory of our kids. Second, I remain inspired by the idea that if we cannot control life, we must embrace more fervently what we have. What use I will make of this inspiration remains to be seen and will be judged by others, but I certainly feel it.

Today marks four years since Reid’s accident. I miss my son more than I can ever explain, and I still have days when I disbelieve that 12/2/06 really happened. But I can also report that 15 months of blogging, unexpectedly, has transformed Reid into a more regular presence in my life, a cyber companion if you will. In a way, he has become an editor of these posts. The feeling is at times so strong that I expect him to demand a raise.

In my presentations I often say that my message to parents is not so much that I made an obvious mistake in supervising Reid’s driving, but more that I didn’t, yet my son still died. During 2006, I considered myself an informed, plugged-in, hands-on parent who was doing what I saw most other parents doing: providing lots of on-the-road training, keeping a close eye on everything, coming down swiftly on misbehavior, but slowly letting out the tether. Then, a year after his accident, I served on the statewide Task Force that overhauled Connecticut’s teen driver laws and learned that I had been, in fact, not well-informed about the dangers of teen driving in 2006, and that in this respect I was not much different from many other parents.

I have stopped beating myself up over this revelation. I have come to realize that the type of parenting that I advocate on this blog is a real challenge, because of factors that blind us to the risks involved when our teens get behind the wheel. I suppose that I now view this blog as Reid and I exposing dangers that lie just below the surface of teen driving.

One reality we confront is that for parents, the day a teen gets a license is one of achievement, independence, relief, and pride. Achievement because a child has passed a very adult test. Independence because she can now drive herself. Relief because we don’t have to. Pride because our hearts and heads swell as watching our kids literally in the driver’s seat. This rite of passage and the convenience it brings can lure any parent into forgetting about crash and fatality rates.

Much of our culture reinforces this pride. Tossing car keys to a teen can have the feel of bestowing part of the American dream and passing the torch from one generation to another. Meanwhile, we are desensitized to speeding and accidents. Companies sell cars by showcasing acceleration and high-risk maneuvers. We pay to go to the movies to watch smashing cars. As a nation, we agonize over several thousand troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we accept more than 200,000 deaths on our highways during the same time period as part of the price of our mobile society. Parenting our teen drivers, in a sense, requires us to shield ourselves from the media and the news.

Even the strictest of our teen driving laws can subtly abet bad supervision by parents. Parents assume that if the state’s minimum driving age is 16, the state must have determined that everyone achieving that age, if taught to operate a motor vehicle, will be a safe driver. We forget, for example, that laws that allow teenagers to drive ignore the current science showing that the human brain does not fully appreciate risk and danger until a person reaches 22 to 25 years old.

Equally misleading to parents is most of the literature available: articles, books and websites that work from the assumption that it is inevitable that teens will drive, and therefore mention the dangers but focus most on teaching teens to handle a car safely. These resources leapfrog over the critical decision, which can only be made day-by-day, of whether, in the first place, a particular teen should get behind the wheel of a particular car.

The challenge confronting parents of teen drivers is to become informed in spite of these forces, to think of teen driving not as an assumption but as a strictly supervised, one-day-at-a-time choice. Parents have the power right now to reduce teen driving crash rates and fatalities. It need not be inevitable that an average of eleven teens die each day.

Which leads me back to Reid’s role in this blog. Shortly after receiving NHTSA’s national Public Service Award in April 2010, I said this to a group of friends in an email: ” I wish that all of you who have walked with me in some way since Reid’s accident could have been with Ellen, Martha, and me in Philadelphia. I suppose that what motivates parents like me to become advocates for safety is the thought that our child did not die in vain. When the masthead of my blog, with Reid’s photo, was displayed on two big screens in front of a national audience of almost 2,000 traffic safety professionals, I indulged the thought that Reid was still making a difference.”

That thought now lies at the heart of everything I post on this blog. As with many efforts to improve safety, success is accidents that don’t happen, so faith that we are doing the right thing and hope that people are reading the message, taking it to heart, and passing it on to others, keeps us going.

I used to go to the Fairview Cemetery, where Reid is buried, almost every other day. It was what felt right to me at the time. But since I started this blog, I have felt less drawn to his gravesite and more attracted to my — our - keyboard, a place where he and I can strategize about the formidable challenge of saving teen drivers and sparing their families. Through this blog, the IMPACT billboard that includes Reid’s photo (http://mourningparentsact.org/photoalbum.html), and readers forwarding this blog to others, Reid’s name and photo are becoming nationwide symbols for the cause of safe teen driving. Reid has joined me as an advocate. Four years after he weaved out of his lane, overcorrected as inexperienced drivers sometimes do, and then went into the spin that caused the blow that killed him, he now collaborates, helping me explain why there is no such thing as a safe teen driver and all of the cautions for parents that flow from this basic message. In a very real sense, I am the scribe but Reid is the face and soul of the message.

Thanks for listening and reading. Don’t sacrifice safety for convenience. Don’t be misled by the literature. Don’t confuse legal with safe. Don’t force a teen who is not ready. Keep in mind the difference between purposeful driving and joyriding. Do everything you can to avoid what happened to our family. Sign a contract with your teen, and look out for other people’s teens. Be safe.

Reid and Tim