Parenting Four Teenage Drivers

Sharing can be a surprising and stressful sacrifice, especially when you live with four teenagers who have driver’s licenses but only three cars filling the driveway.

Sometimes sharing means reluctantly handing over the keys to your personal vehicle so a newly licensed driver can shuttle a sibling to band practice, football workouts, or the grocery store for mushrooms needed in the stew bubbling on the stove.

This simple act of transferring the start button should not cause one’s blood pressure to spike or reduce a grown adult to fearful tears. Obviously, if you don’t react this way, you have never been a step-parent to a houseful of raging, hormonal teenagers.

In our family dynamic, I was the one who received the phone calls when a driving “incident” occurred. I owned a business, which meant I could bolt out the door to a crash site without asking permission or getting my pay docked. This quick response was required so often I realized I needed a plan.

I gathered the three girls and one boy around the dining room table and presented a well-thought-out way forward, designed to preserve my sanity and emotional balance whenever the phone rang.

My proposal was simple. Each driver would be allotted three accidents, for a total of twelve emergency calls. These could include flat tires, crashes with city buses, gear-shifting failures, cars lodged in hedges after taking curves too fast, or ambulance rides ending at the hospital with one of my so-called bulletproof drivers.

The list was extensive, but twelve felt generous. Surely it would provide a cushion before my pending nervous breakdown became official.

I asked the four young, inexperienced motorists to keep a tally of their incidents so they would know when their accidents were supposed to stop happening.

It was a brilliant plan—if you are naïve, optimistic, and unfamiliar with teenagers.

The system failed quickly. One child logged five accidents, another racked up four, and one counted two and a half. That left only half an accident for the fourth driver, which felt deeply unfair. How many people actually have half an accident?

That was the lesson. Step-parenting does not operate on plans, logic, or math. You simply suck it up and accept that sharing your ideas will not keep you from crying, sweating, or memorizing your cardiologist’s phone number.

Another slice of life—burnt edges and all.