For the past week I have been reading in the Hartford Courant, as you have in your newspaper or news source, about one high school after another celebrating its graduation. The school year is over. Summer is in full swing, weatherwise (it’s 94 here in Ct today) and in all other dimensions of the most fun season of the year.

And most likely, it is this week when parents are begged by their teen drivers to allow them to drive with passengers or to take the car to “hang” with friends.

Anyone who has been remotely following the news about teen driving this year knows that it has been horrifying - one multiple-fatality teen driver crash after another, each involving a teen driver with multiple passengers. Four crashes in four states in four days in March took 20 young lives.

So, it seems like a good time to go all the way back to one of my first posts on this blog in 2009: the critical difference between purposeful driving and joyriding. In summary, when teen drivers have a destination, a route, a timetable, a reason to arrive safely and on time, and a safety check with a supervising adult before leaving, they are likely to arrive and return safely. It is when teens are allowed to carry passengers and to drive for fun or recreation, so-called joyriding, that we see peer pressure, risk-taking, speeding, and distraction, all of which take a teen driver from the category of “at risk” to “a crash waiting to happen.” As but one example, a few weeks ago here in Connecticut, five teens in an SUV on a Saturday night decided to travel at high speed over a locally well-known bump, to “get some air” with their vehicle. The first time they did it was apparently thrilling, so they tried again — and this time two of the five in the vehicle died.

Without meaning to put a damper on summer fun, let me remind parents that in the next 90 days it is essential to know where your teen drivers are, and to set a mandatory, zero tolerance rule: no joyriding, no illegal passengers. Put another way, consider how a crash would put a real damper on the summer.

The AAA Foundation has released a new report about distracted driving, one that measures the relative distraction of hand held vs. hands free electronic devices in cars. The study can be found at https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/MeasuringCognitiveDistractions.pdf. The unsurprising but well documented conclusion: not much difference in the level of distraction. The gist of the research is that talking on a phone with someone not in the vehicle is distracting, causing what is called “cognitive blindness.” The driver may think he or she is multi-tasking, but human awareness is more of a zero-sum game; when a driver is engaged in conversation requiring any type of thought, it’s not multi-tasking that’s going on, but switching from one task, driving , to another, participating in the conversation. And while drivers are conscious of the distractions when they take their eyes off the road or hands off the wheel, cognitive blindness is insidious because drivers do not comprehend that they are being distracted from the traffic situation.

I recently wrote about distracting electronics and safer teen driving in an op-ed published in the Hartford Courant last month, http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-hollister-electronic-devices-should-be-banne-20130531,0,2727873.story. My points for parents: First, electronic distraction of teen drivers adds to the already substantial risks they face, and a zero tolerance family policy for not only texting but use of electronics — yes, easier said than done - is essential. Second, adults who supervise teen drivers need to consider whether they can send an effective message to teen drivers about texting and other distracting behavior when they themselves use more and more distracting elections in their own cars. Third, each state would do well to look at simplifying its electronic distraction laws, which often go on for pages and pages with definitions that try - but fail — to keep up with evolving technology, and are laden with exceptions for things like navigation/GPS and audio, which with the array of buttons and number of steps required in many vehicles are as distracting as texting. In my view, distraction is distraction; pushing buttons and reading screens is mind-off-the-situation, no matter what the device. The new AAA Foundation report seems to provide empirical evidence to support this view.

Ok, that’s a bad pun in the title of this post. Just want to get your attention.

Researchers at the George Institute for Global Health in Australia, writing in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics, report the results of a large study about teen drivers crashes and the number of hours of sleep the drivers got on average during the month prior to the crash. They found that those who slept on average less than six hours per night were 21 percent more likely to have been in a crash. They also found that the crash rate was 55 percent higher on weekends.

These results are consistent with studies by the AAA Foundation, which found that one in seven drivers aged 16 to 24 admitted falling asleep at the wheel in the past year, and a NHTSA study of all drivers concluding that one in six crashes with a fatality is caused by a drowsy driver.

These studies suggest several important, mandatory best practices for parents of teen drivers. First, fatigue is the obstacle to safe driving that can hit anyone - even the most careful, well trained, well-meaning teen driver. A high school student who is a straight A student and determined to keep his or her grades up, and will stay up late to finish a project, should not get behind the wheel the next morning. This is a very difficult circumstance for parents to monitor and counteract, but as with all things in teen driving, the consequences of an error in a parent’s judgment are injury or death. Next, these studies show that any teen who has gotten less than six hours of sleep on any given night should be scrutinized carefully by the supervising adult for readiness to drive, and the default parent practice — as inconvenient as it may be — is to err one side of caution and not let the teen drive. Yes, this means the parent must do the driving. Third, the most stunning statistic in these studies is that parents need to be on full alert for fatigue on the weekends. Lastly, needless, to say, high caffeine energy drinks are not the answer.

Getting teens to stop texting involves not just warnings but creative and memorable ways to get teens focused on the problem (that is, use social media!). I highly recommend a new campaign prepared and promoted by the folks at Impact Teen Drivers in California, www.impactteendrivers.org. The program is ”Be Thumbody,” which is explained at www.bethumbody.com. This campaign is for people with a bit of artistic talent, so I’m out …, but I encourage everyone else to follow the link, learn, marvel at the creativity, and get involved with this cool program.