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13-Year-Old Driver Runs Down Dad
News that a thirteen-year-old practicing driving in the Bronx ran down and killed his father has put all those “aww, how cute, a kid driving” stories in perspective.
The rash of recent stories of kids allowed behind the wheel – either for a joke or by drunk parents – have earned a lot of clucking and head-shaking but overall little cause for real outrage.
But a Bronx dad was teaching his thirteen-year-old son to drive (three years too young for a New York State driver’s license) when the child put their Porsche SUV into reverse and accidentally hit the gas. ABC News reports the father, who was standing beside the open driver’s side door, was dragged by the car, then slammed into a tree. Sadly, he succumbed to his injuries.
Authorities aren’t expected to charge the child over the brutal accident, but he now has to live with having killed his father. And the question comes down to why. Why was a thirteen-year-old behind the wheel? Was it an awful accident or an accident waiting to happen?
The person to crucify in this story is already gone, and I’d wager the rest of the family is already beating themselves up plenty.
But where a seven-year-old driving is shocking, is a thirteen-year-old practicing all that bad? Or that uncommon? In my rural hometown, children learned to drive the farm equipment as young as five or six. By ten, they were driving trucks around the family farm. I wasn’t a farm girl, but my Christmas present at fifteen (a year before I could legally try for a driver’s license) was lessons from my father. We did them on a dead end road with little chance of running into another driver. I was first introduced to a manual transmission in an empty field beside my grandfather’s mower shop.
It wouldn’t apply in the Bronx, obviously, but in neighborhoods where there is no public transportation, teaching children to drive early is a means to ensuring the day they’re eligible for their driver’s test, they’ll be ready. Parents, especially those in households where both work or in a single-parent situation, desperately need their child to have some sort of self-sufficiency in order to allow them to get from here to there.
And yes, accidents happen. They’ll happen to a sixteen-year-old too – hence the horrific stories of teen drivers who lose their lives in crashes. Would you allow your child to get behind the wheel at thirteen?
Image: Current (not the child in question – this is another recent child driving scandal)
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Rob commented on Aug 21 09 at 1:02 amI have been teaching my twenty-year-old daughter to drive in weekly lessons over the last year, and my first impression of this incident is to wonder WHY the kid was INSIDE the vehicle and the father was OUTSIDE the vehicle. I can’t imagine any reason why someone would even attempt to “teach” someone to drive from outside the vehicle EVER, but especially why someone would do so with a thirteen-year-old. I am also left wondering if this was their first “lesson”.
Unfortunately, the ability to reproduce does not mean that one is qualified to parent, nor does having a driver’s license mean that one is qualified to teach driving.
I hope others will use this unfortunate “lesson” to carefully consider whether they really are qualified to teach their kid(s) to drive, and perhaps opt for a driving school instead.
I mourn for the father, but especially for the child.
PlumbLucky commented on Aug 21 09 at 7:33 amI grew up in a similar situation – I didn’t learn to drive a car, I learned to drive a tractor, and not the suburban John Deere ride-around, either! That said, when I was being taught how to drive (which my Dad started when I was just shy of 15) Dad was in the car with me. And I know the reason that my Dad started teaching me was that he felt the local driver’s ed programs were sorely lacking in practical time behind the wheel, and though he didn’t doubt I could pass, he didn’t want me having that little time and experience. But again – he was always inside the car, and I sure as the devil didn’t learn to drive with a Porsche SUV.
Sue commented on Aug 22 09 at 2:03 pma 3000 pound vehicle is more dangerous than a gun. It is common on the streets and in the worng hands can do more damage than a bullet. To know the odds of reckless driving deaths and still hand a child a car is inconcievable to me. I think age is not always a good measure for maturity and readiness to be responsible for a car on the street. I think underage drivers who havent got a licence yet whould not be in the streets. I think we let our kids mow the yard and the line between a lawn tractor and a car blurs for the kids and sometimes the parent as well… By no means should the skill to ride a tractor be confused with driving a car, following road signs etc… I know we all drive and often dont put much though into it and had become easy for us with time. But remember the first time we all drove the things we had to remember to do the situations we had to gauge…the timely decisions we had to make to move or not move the distance we had to approximate between us and another car…it was not always easy and had their not been the age and a certain amount of maturity we could have hurt ourselves and others badly…I think this is important before we let our kids drive ANYTHING weigh the options. I think the moms on http://www.truuconfessions.com have a lot to say on thsi subject and have!
Kayt commented on Aug 23 09 at 11:33 amI grew up in the burbs, but I had friends that lived on a ranch. I was driving their old pickup around during the summer, helping them feed the horses from the time I was ten or eleven. I’m with Rob. How on earth do you teach someone how to drive from outside the vehicle, and in a place with obstacles that close? My first experience was in the middle of a field, and once I learned to drive a sedan for the road, we started in a huge, empty mall parking lot.
Sam Carollo commented on Feb 24 11 at 9:25 am“I hope others will use this unfortunate “lesson” to carefully consider whether they really are qualified to teach their kid(s) to drive, and perhaps opt for a driving school instead.”
Yeah, like someone who is too stupid to teach someone how to drive is smart enough to realize it. Even though there are a lot of stupid people in the world, how many of them really need to “consider if they are qualified”? There is no point in trying to be politically correct about this, or to tell people to err on the side of caution. Sometimes bad things happen. This is one of those things. This shouldn’t effect anyone else’s life. And 13 is not too young to start learning how to drive.
LavaLight commented on Apr 15 11 at 12:05 amIn some states, you can get your driving permit at 14. So no, 13 is not too young to start learning where the pedals are and how to see properly in the mirrors. Accidents happen, this could have happened no matter what age the person behind the wheel was.
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