How to Teach Your Child Highway Car Safety

Teaching your child highway car safety is part and parcel of responsible parenting. As a parent, it is your task to raise your child to be prepared for adult life within a complex society. Of all the facets of society, driving is among those that can have the greatest impact on others, so it is especially important to impart good driving skills to your child. Road and highway safety education starts long before they enroll in Drivers’ Ed classes or begin studying for their learner’s permit. It starts with you. As they grow up and notice more and more of the world around them, they will assume the way you drive is how is ought to be done. Thus, it is important for you to both show and tell them about being safe while driving.

Show Your Child How to Drive

The best way to teach your child about car safety is to be safe in the car yourself. Courteous driving is not just a theory. It is a practice that, if you engage in it, will rub off on your child. There is no need for a driver’s manual to show your child how to make a safe lane change. You simply do it, narrating as you do. Show your child how to obey light signals by obeying them when you drive. No matter how much you tell your child not to run yellow lights, if you continue to do it, they will subconsciously learn to imitate that behavior.

Tell Your Child How to Drive

If you show your child how to drive safely by doing so yourself, telling them the rules of the road will not fall on deaf ears. Some skills and maneuvers must be told to them, for they require a theoretical understanding before they can be put into practice. Proper signaling with hands is one such instance. Tell them how to use their hands to signal slowing, stopping and turning, and then show them. Backing a car up or parallel parking are other examples of skills that must be understood before they can be carried out. The point is, telling will have little effect if you are not showing them what good driving is.

The Rules of Good Driving

As your child begins to understand the basics of driving and cause and effect on the roadways, you will be able to both show and tell simultaneously. Explaining to them why you undertook such an action as pulling over for an emergency vehicle, yielding the right of way or slowing as you approached a red light will define the action. They will later associate your explanation with the action and implement it in their own way.

Safe driving on the nation’s roads and highways starts with parents. It is of little use to demand your child drive a certain way while not obeying your own dictate. "Do as I say, not as I do" might be a convenient excuse at the time, but deep down no child listens to it. If you want to teach your child highway safety, be safe yourself and really show them what it means.