A teen, at home, suddenly realizes that she is late — for school, sports, an activity, a community event, a family gathering, a date, whatever. She races into the kitchen, grabs the car keys from the basket, jumps into the car, starts the engine, and starts backing down the driveway.

And doesn’t look to see if anything or anyone is behind the vehicle, and so doesn’t see the toddler playing in the driveway.

This stomach-turning scenario is not too difficult to envision, is it?

At the recent Lifesavers Conference, I stopped by the KidsAndCars booth. The mission of this marvelous organization, www.KidsAndCars.org, based in Kansas, is to educate all drivers about the risks to children of driving, with “blindzones” being one of its main focuses. Blindzones are essential information for teen drivers, but of course the rest of us need to be reminded of it also. Blindzones are one of those safety risks, that, I think, lie just below the surface of our consciousness as drivers and parents, and so reminders are critical.

Every week in the US, at least 50 children are backed over by vehicles because they could not be seen by the driver. In some cases, the driver carefully checked the blind zones before getting into the vehicle but then a toddler wandered into the zone just as the car started rolling. In other words, not every backover is the result of carelessness, but all are a result of the fact that there are places that drivers cannot see.

Linked are a photo and an illustration that explain the danger. Every vehicle has blindzones in front of and behind the vehicle, with a bigger blindzone behind. The exact length, width and height of the zone varies with the height of the driver, the height of the driver’s seat, and the nature of the vehicle, but the area can be anywhere from 20 to 60 feet long. Obviously, SUV’s and light trucks, and cars with low suspensions, have the biggest potential blindzones. Among the information I picked up from KidsAndCars was statistics showing that in recent years, the number of blindzone incidents has increased dramatically, which I assume is the result of more SUV’s and light trucks being driven by the American public. The KidsAndCars basic fact sheet is found at www.kidsandcars.org/userfiles/dangers/backovers/backover-safety-tips.pdf .

Technology is becoming part of the answer here. My new car has a back up camera, and it is expected that such cameras will become standard on most cars in the next several years. Also, existing vehicles can be retrofitted with backup cameras. As I have already learned, however, even the back up camera doesn’t see everything, and it can also be distracting, but it certainly helps.

There is no magic solution here for parents of teen drivers. Explain to your teen what a blindzone is, and point out approximately how large it is in the front and rear of each car your teen may drive. Then take your teen to the KidsAndCars.org website to view the illustrations, and to read some of the horror stories of drivers who started their vehicles rolling without checking the blindzone.

My thanks to the folks at KidsAndCars.org for the information and the illustrations, and my salute to them for pursuing this important safety issue.

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.

I received an email from Jessica Tirta of Onlineschools.com, with an infographic about texting - which the graphic calls “driving while intexticated” - which I think is very clever! I am pleased to pass along the infographic:

http://www.onlineschools.com/in-focus/driving-while-intexticated