I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers (14 page)

When more than one teenager occupies a vehicle, there are bound to be arguments over music selection and who gets to ride shotgun. Those arguments can get physical. Bodies may be tossed over the seat or shoved out the door. I shudder just thinking about those long, late-night road trips to the lake and beach. Also, teenagers always leave about ten minutes later than any mature person in his or her right mind. They are unconcerned about traffic jams.
They are completely confident that they won't encounter any detours, accidents, or delays. They leave the
exact
amount of time needed to drive to their destination, with no wiggle room or margin for error. Then they have the audacity to be outraged if they are delayed in any way.

“It's not my fault I'm late! I left in plenty of time! It takes eleven minutes to drive there from here. Why did they pick that street for roadwork? It's totally unfair!” they screech, as if the Department of Transportation goes out of its way to make life difficult for teenage drivers.

I never thought I would say this (yet another item in the long, humbling list of things I never thought I would say or do), but music may be the most dangerous driving distraction for teens. Don't panic. I haven't joined a new anti-music cult. It's not that I think kids who listen to loud music are headed to hell on the expressway. It's not their souls I'm worried about here. (Although if you haven't gone through the playlist on your kid's iPod, you need to do that ASAP. I had to ask my husband to explain some pornographic lyrics in a rap song one time. Once I grasped the anatomical references, it made me blush, and I've been married for nearly twenty-five years. Stay on top of the music they download on the computer. You will likely discover some potty-mouth songs that would embarrass a sailor. I can only assume that rap singers have very limited vocabularies. Otherwise, they would not have to resort to such vulgarities as space fillers in their songs. Profanity is the stuff of small minds, I always say.)

The problem is that teens can't hear anything else going on around them when they crank up the tunes. If teenage drivers cannot hear ambient noises, they can't respond to auditory warnings in a timely manner. If they can't hear the police siren, they don't
know to pull over, and that can't possibly end well. If they don't hear the tornado siren, they don't know to abandon the car and dive in the closest ditch. If they can't hear other drivers and pedestrians—as well as see them—they'll miss out on important clues to help keep themselves and other people alive.

When a pedestrian crossed against the light one afternoon and came within a hairsbreadth of being mowed down by my teenager, my son was outraged—not at the close call with death but by the fact that the pedestrian had clearly flaunted the rules for safe passage across the street.

“It's not his turn to cross, Mom! He can't do that!” my son said in righteous indignation.

“You're right,” I said. “He should definitely have waited for the light. However, that doesn't mean it's okay to run over him just because he jaywalked. It's not a death-penalty offense.”

If the music is so loud that people can hear it outside the car, it's like voluntarily making oneself deaf, I tell my kids. I promise you that if a teenager pulls up to my house with the car windows rolled down and the stereo blasting, he or she is responsible for babysitting any neighborhood children who are awakened from their naps. My bet is that spending an afternoon with a toddler who missed his or her nap will turn a music-blaring teenager into a monk with a vow of silence in a matter of hours.

This car-stereo discussion brings up another important question: why do teenagers always turn the music in their rooms or cars up so loud? It's one of the great mysteries of teenage life. Their ears are still sharp, so it can't be that. Is it the assumption that everyone else wants to listen to what the teenagers want to hear? That is quite erroneous, I assure them. How often do you enjoy the same music your kids listen to? Sure, it happens sometimes,
but not often. First of all, if we grownups like the music they've chosen, that is almost enough of a reason right there for the teenagers to find fault with it. If I like the Avett Brothers and Amos Lee and needtobreathe (I do) just like my kids, I think that probably makes them question their own taste in music. Bottom line: since when do teenagers care what we think about anything?

I believe the reason for the loud music is probably the same one behind almost everything else teenagers do. There isn't a good reason. It's a whim. It feels good at the time. It's fun. These people have poor impulse control.

Teenagers' brains aren't fully baked. Studies by serious academics have tried to determine the exact age when human brains fully mature and become capable of wise decision making. (I could have informed those scientists that teenagers aren't ready for prime time, no matter what they tell you. I don't know why we spend vast sums of money to prove theories we already know are true. What a waste of green!) Guess what those studies have uniformly concluded? Teenagers are physically incapable of making decisions in the deliberative manner we ask them to. It's a lot like yelling at a one-year-old for wetting the bed. Your kid may have the IQ of Albert Einstein. It doesn't matter. You can't potty-train a one-year-old. They're not ready. (Yes, I've read about some of those competitive parents who potty-train their kids like precocious circus monkeys. There are freaks in every species. I do not have time for those people. I am writing about regular people in this book.)

One of the reasons we need young men and women in the military (besides the facts that their reflexes are amazing, they can eat anything that doesn't bite back, and they recover quickly from injuries, of course) is that their brains allow them to do dangerous things without reining them in. We call this behavior “bravery” in
wartime. In peacetime, we call it “being a teenage idiot.” “Hey, wait a minute, now,” is a cautionary trait we develop with maturity.

One look at insurance rates will clue you in to the statistics. The first time you see how much your insurance premiums will increase when your teenager gets his shiny new driver's license, the sticker shock will make you sit down and put your head between your knees to avoid keeling over in a dead faint. It would be cheaper to buy tickets to Disney World and ride the monorail to the Magic Kingdom every day for the rest of your life. More fun, too.

Like many parents who want their kids to learn driver's education from a professional, I signed my oldest child up for a class at school. What a crock! Imagine how pleased I was to learn at the end of the first day's instruction that the teacher had ridden to class on a motorcycle (we call them “donorcycles” in our house) without a helmet. He also bragged that he could “get it up to ninety-five on the open road.” My son was gleeful. I was peeved in paisley.

In my ongoing campaign to scare my children into being safe drivers, I reported my insurance agent's claim to my son that there is a 100 percent chance he will be involved in some sort of accident as a teenage driver.

Naturally, he responded by explaining how that statistic is mathematically meaningless. (Those stupid AP math courses make me look dimwitted. I do not do math anymore. I'm over it. I am above all that boorishness now.)

I explained to my son that I was indulging in a little hyperbole to make a point.

His comeback: “Only you would turn this into a conversation about a literary device, Mom.”

My response: “I'm pleased you recognize the term, son. I believe my work here is done.”

While it is true that I was trying to make a point about the perils of driving, I was happy to make a U-turn into a conversation about hyperbole. I hardly ever get to do that.

I have also been known to show my children gory accident-scene photographs, commercials, and PSAs. They certainly scare me to death, and I hope they scare my kids, too. I firmly believe that a healthy dose of fear is a good thing. It's one of my parenting premises. Guilt and fear have been used by countless generations of mothers to successfully parent their children. I am under no illusion that I am any better than the mamas who came before me. Bottom line: my primary goal in life is to keep my children alive to adulthood. I'll do almost anything to make that happen. Along the way, I want them to become educated, responsible adults, but ultimately those are just frills.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with an emergency-room physician at 2
A.M
. when my son was having his first asthma attack.

“I'm worried about the side effects of that steroid,” I told the doctor.

“If he can't breathe, he's going to die,” the doctor responded.

I thought he made a darn good point.

I don't go about things quite like the Tiger Mom you've heard about in the news, but we certainly have common goals. I am living proof that being a mean mom works. My kids are turning out well. They have plenty of friends, but I'm not one of them. I'm way too busy being the mom. I am the first to admit that it is not always a fun job. If fear of me (or death) makes my kids think twice about speeding through neighborhoods, following too closely behind other cars, or talking and texting on their cell phones while they are driving, it will have been worth it.

I know full well that my teenagers have to make their own choices and live with the consequences. What I tell them over and over is that they should not let thirty seconds and one poor choice lead to a lifetime of regret. Our prisons are full of people who wish they'd made different decisions in the heat of the moment. It's so easy to do or say something that you can't take back! Teenagers face consequences for their actions that are beyond anything that we parents can protect them from. The penalty for one bad choice is sometimes death. I say these things over and over, as my kids will be quick to tell you. They know the standard lectures by heart. They often finish my sentences with me in a singsong voice. The gist is, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We hear you.” This is followed by bathroom doors slamming, earphones whipping over heads, and cars squealing away from the curb.

I once printed out the Alabama criminal statutes governing vehicular homicide and glued them to a poster. That's right. I made a visual aid and taped it on the mirror in my boys' bathroom.

That night, I overheard my middle son ask his older brother, “So, do you think she's calling us murderers now, or what?”

I barged right in to set the record straight. “No, no,
no
!” I said. “It's
potential
murder. This is what
could
happen to you, and your life would be ruined. And mine.”

“And the person who died, Mom. They'd be in pretty bad shape, too,” my older son pointed out wryly.

“Well, yes, of course. That, too,” I admitted.

My boys stared at me after this exchange. They were obviously perplexed. In that particular parenting moment, we had no meeting of the minds. Some conversations go better than others. I'll be the first to admit that. The important thing is to never give up, no matter what. It's like working on a permanent peace for the Middle
East. You can't give in. You have to continue searching for the most effective way to motivate your teens. I am constantly rooting around for carrots and sticks in my Mary Poppins bag of tricks. Occasionally, I'd like to reach for a baseball bat or a two-by-four. What can I say? I'm human.

I taught one teenager to drive. He's still breathing. So far, so good. I'm in the process of teaching another son to drive now. Like everything else I have experienced with my sons, teaching each of them to drive is a markedly different adventure.

My older son is overconfident, convinced he needs little supervision. “I got this,” he often says to me. “You need to relax. You make me nervous when you cling to the dashboard with your fingernails like that.”

My middle child is more cautious, as is his nature. He once woke us up in the middle of the night to confess, “I'm worried about something.”

“What?” we asked, bleary-eyed with fatigue.

“I don't think I'm going to be a very good driver.”

“Well, we've got some time to work on it, since you're only ten years old. But what makes you think that?”

“In my racecar video game, I crash all the time.”

“It will be different with a real car,” we promised him.

He wasn't totally convinced. I could tell.

When it came time for him to drive a real car, he was more cautious than his brother. When he tucked his six-foot-one frame behind the wheel, he hunkered down like he was afraid of being crushed by a meteor at any moment.

In a few years, I'll have to teach my daughter to drive, too. It's in the parenting contract. You have to teach
all
your kids to drive unless you can come up with a convincing reason not to. I haven't
been able to think of anything to merit my excused absence. I've tried. The older I get, the more I dread this particular parenting job. I am more fearful with age. I want to warn my kids about tornadoes and credit card debt and cheating spouses and pyramid schemes. I feel like they are growing up at warp speed now, and I need to cram in every useful life lesson I've ever learned. I know it's not possible to do that. I just can't seem to help myself. I admit that it's not a pleasing dimension to my personality. I find myself taking every opportunity to teach my kids something, rather than simply enjoying experiences with them. The real problem is that I'm afraid I'm going to forget to teach them something they need to know to navigate the world without me.

I once told my husband that I thought I would be better at teaching the kids to drive if I could just have a quick toddy first. He thought that might not set the right tone for our lessons. I love the man, but sometimes he is such an Eagle Scout. It gets on my nerves.

One of the first things I do when teaching my kids to drive is to point out the differences in the general driving population. Teenage drivers assume everyone has twenty-twenty vision and quick reflexes simply because they themselves do. Of course, this isn't the case, not by a long shot. One simply must drive defensively. It takes time to develop those instincts, to just “know” when a car is about to pull out in front of you.