I just did my first session with my stepdaughter where she practiced driving. How many hours did your kids need to feel comfortable? My kids did drivers ed so this is new to me.
She did great by the way!
Really depends on the kid. My son had a really hard time & even though he got his license at age 16 he later told me he never really felt comfortable driving until he was in his 20’s and had a job requiring him to do a lot of driving. My daughter took to driving very easily — I really enjoyed our early lessons because she always drove so smoothly, and as soon as she had her learner’s permit I let her take over most of the driving, not just for practice, but because she was also such a good driver.
I think our state law required that there be 50 hours of practice time with a parent or other adult while they have their permit for teenagers under age 18.
@calmom is correct for California teens. And even then they get only a provisional license with restrictions. I would recommend giving them as much experience as you have time for. D generally drove home from high school with Mom. She could have driven to school in the mornings as well, but then she would have had to get up earlier rather than eating her bagel in the car. :))
My kid had to do Driver’s Ed to get her permit, and then also log 45 hours of practice driving (with 15 of those nighttime) to get her license. She just got it last week. My husband was in charge of supervising that @-) and he made her drive every minute of those hours. She feels comfortable driving. Not sure I do because we live in an area with very heavy and dangerous traffic. She’s almost 17.
Since she’s under 18, she can’t drive with more than one person under 21 in the car or after midnight without a parent or other “real adult” in the front passenger seat.
She also told me that, in our state, it was against the law for drivers under 18 to use phones as GPS devices (and for any other purpose for that matter). Doesn’t matter if it’s not handheld. Young drivers are supposed to pull over if they need to use a phone. Otherwise they are to be turned off.
This is all good info – thanks all. I think we need to log some more hours. Appreciate it.
We didn’t really worry about the hours, just the demonstrated mastery. Granted, we’re all nerds so comfy with this approach.
I set goals and when he’d master the goal we were working on, then we’d move to the next step. Some took longer than others. Don’t remember the exact steps, but some of them included:
Done in an empty parking lot:
- In a manual car, starting from a stop and moving forward at a slow, controlled speed without stalling.
- Maneuvering between tightly set obstacles (first it was just painted lines then raised curbs then taller objects like hedges)
- Backing into a parking space
- Demonstrating 100% compliance with all stop signs, stop bars and safety signals. When encountering other cars, showing he understood how to anticipate others’ actions and drive safely around other cars
Stuff like that. We spent about 4-6 hours in the parking lot (spread over 3-4 separate practice sessions) before I let him drive on sparsely driven, low speed public roads where there was a new set of objectives to master. It took longer because he had to learn the manual transmission first; I suspect in an automatic car the parking lot time would have been much less.
@Classof2015 Have your daughter do most of the driving on any summer road trips you may be planning. She’ll rack up those hours in no time.
We had to have both classroom and road experience for our young drivers. I think they had to have 60 hours behind the wheel, and I made them do the hours. Neither of mine were particularly excitied or concerned about driving. They got their permits soon after they could, but neither actually drove until senior year of high school.
So in California, the whole process works like this:
- at some point after 15 1/2 years of age, make an appointment with DMV for the written test. Spend a couple of days online studying for the written test.
- assuming s/he passes, s/he will get a learner’s permit to drive. That means they can drive with an adult on the passenger side. They theoretically need 50 hours behind the wheel, of which 6 of the hours is through professional instruction. In Northern California, all the behind-the-wheel driving schools all charge approximately $240 for 6 hours. The driving schools usually tell you NOT to give them any driving lessons - their first time should be with the school so that they don’t pick up any bad habits. So the very first time they should drive is with a pro.
- I was pretty meticulous about keeping track of the 50 hours of driving. Luckily for my kid, we had a road trip to Las Vegas and LA that ate up a lot of the hours. I don’t think he actually had 50 by the time he went for his driving test, more like 35 hours.
- we signed up for the driving test soon after his 16th birthday. Ordinarily I would have wanted to wait until he was at least 17, but being a single parent at the time, he needed to be on his own a lot. He failed the first time when he blew through a stop sign. Wasn’t familiar with the area was his excuse. So Lo and behold, I Googled up DMV driving test for the particular DMV location and found a ton of people who documented not only the exact routes but had YouTube videos. So I went through the routes with him thoroughly.
After he got his license I made him do two torturous things - parallel park on both sides, and then drive up and down the Union Square and Pacific Heights areas in SF including Lombard Street. Hehe I don’t think he’ll want to drive in SF again for a while.
Big kid was soooooo determined to get her DL on her 16th b-day. She took the driving test a week before turning 16 and passed, but had to go back to DMV to get her piece of plastic when she was already 16. She was devastated when the DMV office was closed for some stupid reason on her 16th. Bummer. 
Little kid had zero desire to get hers but we forced her. She passed on the third try… guess which one of the two has not got a moving violation ticket yet?
I didn’t track hours with D, just rode along with her until we were both comfortable with her skills. IMHO unless you have to meet an arbitrary number due to a state law, wouldn’t you focus on mastery as a minimum requirement regardless?
Let’s say your kid hits the required 50 hours but they still drives slow as molasses, lacks confidence, and isn’t very accurate at judging oncoming traffic when pulling out. Wouldn’t you continue with training under those circumstances?
@milee30 – good point – focus on skills, not hours. She’s learning on an automatic (I only learned stick after I learned automatic – I would have been kind of overwhelmed with shifting on top of everything else).
@katliamom – good idea – we definitely have some time to kill on relatively open roads. I know people learn to drive in Manhattan but I’d be too scared.
She had done some hours with her dad, so I was positively impressed by her turning and braking skills. I know what I’ll be doing this summer!