In Montana, the legal age at which teens are allowed to have a drivers ed permit is fourteen-and-a-half, with an official learners permit being legal at fifteen. This law varies by state with Montana being one of nine states that allow kids under fifteen to have a permit. That is ten years before the prefrontal cortex of the average human brain has fully developed, which means that we are allowing mentally undercooked, pimple-faced, school-skipping tweens who are incapable of parallel parking to be operating a machine that kills an average of 40,000 people per year.
Every day as I leave the Sentinel High School parking lot, I watch as inexperienced drivers become overwhelmed by the rush of traffic. The panic encourages them to make life-threateningly rash decisions that risk the lives of themselves (as well as their fellow drivers and pedestrians).
I’ve been in the car with people I would have called trustworthy…before riding with them as a passenger. It is only after watching them make illegal U-turns, drive straight through a roundabout, and violate the law that restricts new drivers from carrying more than one person who isn’t related to them do I realize that they never should have been allowed a license. I find myself gripping the overhead bar tight enough to turn my hand white. I climb out of the car thanking every cosmic being from every religion that I didn’t lose my life during the fifteen minute drive to Albertsons.
Rare is it that I find a driver my age or younger that I trust to drive me around without the threat of bodily harm or the involvement of the police.
Whenever I have brought up these concerns to an inexperienced driver, I find myself faced with the same responses every time. They brush off my concerns, tell me to calm down, to trust them. They reassure me about my safety after we just cut across four lanes of traffic and narrowly avoided getting T-boned because, hey, they got their license somehow.
I do occasionally find myself tempted to believe them, to throw caution to the wind and focus on having fun. This feeling doesn’t last long, however, as I find it more tempting to wave my metaphorical cane at passing cars of teens yelling at the kiddies to “slow down, gosh darn it!”
There is a place for the argument that the difference in brain development between a fourteen-year-old and sixteen-year-old is too minor to make a difference in how teens drive. However, when you take into account that fourteen-year-olds are also trying to manage all the struggles that come with high school, it makes sense that taking that stress and fear and putting it behind the wheel of a car may not be the best decision.
Now I myself am pimple-faced and incapable of parallel parking; however, I was kept from getting my license and permit until I was sixteen. Even with this additional year and a half above my fellow mentally underdeveloped drivers, I still felt incredibly nervous going behind the wheel for the first time. Despite this, when I saw how younger drivers were behaving, I realized how much of a difference that year and a half had given me in terms of developing my decision making skills.
Something is always better than nothing – I guess it depends on whether you’d rather have no teen driver on the road, or the remains of a teen driver on the road.
