<p>“It makes sense: even people whose parents are wonderful enough to buy cars for them need some source of income to put gas in that car. Teen unemployment up by 11 percentage points during the Great Recession period compared to other recent eras … Or maybe its even less complicated than that. The drop in teen drivers also correlates with more widespread Internet usage and mobile phone ownership. Maybe teens who can Facebook with their friends from home have less interest in having aimless face time with them at the mall.” …</p>
<p>When I was in high school many kids had jobs. ( in the suburbs) so you needed a car, often times to get to work, because your shift may not end until 10 pm or so some nights & it might be 3 or 4 miles away. ( as mine was)
I was working so that I had money for school clothes although I didnt have a car. I walked to school & then to my job, although I later started dating a boy at my work possibly so that I could get a ride home!
I remember many class periods just being exhausted and hoping we had a movie so I could take a nap.</p>
<p>Neither of my kids had paying jobs in school, although they were very busy with volunteer work, sports teams, homework, theater/music/dance rehearsals etc. We also chose to live in the city & use public transportation & carpools.</p>
<p>I wanted them to have the opportunity to pursue their interests outside of school and have time for that & for school work. If they had a job/car, they wouldn’t have had time for that.
They did have some friends who worked while in school. Their families often had a family business where they were expected to help out ( although they didn’t have a car)
Those that did drive, drove their parents cars.
I dont see any correlation anecdotally with technology, just that kids are too busy with other things to work if they don’t have to for money for school clothes and sports fees.</p>
<p>Cars are money-suckers, and I tell my kids to avoid owning them as long as possible.
A couple of my kids haven’t gotten licenses until 18 or nearly 19. We live a very short walking distance to schools, so they’ve always been able to walk to high school. I think of all I saved not paying insurance for 3 teenage male drivers. 25yo still doesn’t own a car-- He shares use of a vehicle with others.
I think fewer kids are working during high school, not because they can’t find jobs, but because school has gotten harder and college admissions more competitive. I’d rather have my kids getting AP credits/scholarships than flipping burgers. (Although my oldest two did work at restaurants during high school, I discouraged the next two from doing that so they could concentrate on academics). HS senior S still doesn’t have license. S’s best friend has a car. He gives S rides, S gives him gas $. Win-win.
My neighbor bought both his teenage kids nice cars when they turned 16. They both wrecked them. One of them may have wrecked two cars already before age 19. No thanks.</p>
<p>I think it is a very good thing that this generation is comfortable with alternative means of transportation.
Walking, carpooling, public transportation, riding a bike & tele- commuting.
Costs of maintaining automobiles is not only expensive monetarily to the individual, but to the community & the country.
Wouldnt it be great if we could reduce fuel consumption, wear & tear on our roads & bridges, improve our air quality as we reduce traffic?
Many families are choosing to live closer to where they work and play. Who wants to spend hours commuting?
Not me!</p>
<p>I have two kids, and the first (my son) was in the category of being broke, being happy with being broke, and not caring about having a car. The second is the kind of kid who likes having money, likes having the freedom a car provides, and will do whatever it takes to get it. She planned for years to get one when she turned 16, and she did–by pooling all her Xmas/birthday savings and working a part-time job. She has a very complicated schedule with two major dance commitments (dance team at school and dance company at a studio 10 miles away) and another job five miles away. </p>
<p>I am a single parent working full-time. Her having a car makes a HUGE difference in our lives. We simply could not accommodate her commitments if she didn’t have her own transportation. In fact, we just picked up a new (used) one for her today–her original one was totaled in an accident that was not her fault. The new car is a stick shift and she plans to spend the whole weekend figuring out how to drive it. </p>
<p>I don’t see anything wrong with flipping burgers if that is what a kid wants to do. A work ethic is a work ethic. </p>
<p>ETA: Both my kids are active public transportation users as well. So am I. Just because someone needs a car does not mean they are not environmentally conscious or that they don’t walk/bike/bus it when they can.</p>
<p>If you’re lucky enough to live in a sizable enough city with good public transportation, I don’t see the point of teens having cars. Neither of my older kids did, nor did they get a license before they were under 18. None of their friends did either. I think its also less about money/working than other things such as the insane pressure kids today have regarding school and EC’s, coupled with the hardcore restrictions on teen driving just about anywhere.</p>
<p>Growing up none of us had a car of our own but we all drove and took turns driving our parents’ second cars. But that’s when gas was about 50 cents a gallon and we’d chip in quarters to fill up at the end of the night, and for that matter, were ALLOWED to drive around together. Why would any teen even want to drive today unless they HAD to?</p>
<p>Youngest may end up with a car to get to school once she turns 16 but I have a work schedule that would allow me to keep doing it. She’s out of district and a 2-hour, 3-bus ride away or she’d be taking the bus.</p>
<p>from what I can see, some kids just aren’t interested in driving. They don’t ask their parents to take them for their learning permits. Those parents tell me they aren’t in any rush to increase their car insurance costs so they do push it.</p>
<p>Other articles also suggest that social media has a big role on this disinterest. Kids can ask multiple people for rides at once; but even important, that has become their main social milieu. They’re okay with being online. Has anyone seen twitch.com (I think that’s the site) where you can watch someone else play a game (I saw Pokemon) and comment on it?</p>
<p>In hs, my kids have/had access ton one of MY cars because it makes my life easier. Last night, bus got home from an away game after 1am. That’s past city curfew, so no driving around town hauling other kids home or being hauled home by someone else. Sure is nice not to have to sit up that late or wake back up and go meet the bus myself! </p>
<p>Teens driving or not is not a decision made by a single determinant.</p>
<p>I love studies!!! and I am not even a statistician. LOL </p>
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<p>So they go from that - noting a correlation between 2 factors - to this, drawing a conclusion… what? why? how did you figure that?</p>
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<p>“It looks like teens just can’t afford to drive…”</p>
<p>Wait a minute… to me, it looks like teens don’t HAVE to drive, because they aren’t driving to work because they aren’t working. Could you at least tell me how much of teen driving is driving to work before you leap to the conclusion that they can’t afford to drive?</p>
<p>In our neck of the woods it is a necessity to be able to drive and not necessarily to own a car for a teenager. The main expense is the car insurance and many parents don’t allow their children to get their permits until 18 or later. We decided driving was a lifetime skill better learned early, under parental control and supervision so we allowed both children to get their restricted license at 15. If things were going well in school they earned the privilege of being allowed to drive our cars (privilege that could be lost anytime). Older son didn’t get a car until after he graduated from college and youngest one got one when he started college and had to commute which is part of his college COA.</p>
<p>There was a similar article in our local paper a few weeks ago, but I’m still not sure I buy it. I earned my driver’s license at the first opportunity I could, which was a month after I turned 16. Both of my daughters applied for their learner’s permit on their 16th birthday, and took their test exactly 6 months to the day later.</p>
<p>No one in my immediate family can understand why kids would not want the independence that a driver’s license brings. Yet several of their friends did not pursue a driver’s license until age 17 or 18. Of course, it was alright for my kid to go out of their way to pick them up for social outings.</p>
<p>I might be wrong, but in the cases of my daughters’ friends, I saw it more as a parental control issue than a kid monetary issue.</p>
<p>I’ll throw in my own personal anecdote. We are in Texas, even outside the city limits, which is as “car country” as one can get. I was a teen about 40 years ago living outside of another city in Texas, and I could not wait to get my license and some wheels. Getting that driver’s license and getting that old used car were two of the greatest moments of my life. So when I told my son last year, just before he turned 16, that I could help him get a license and give him my car (which would have entailed the painful sacrifice of my having to buy myself a new one), I was flabbergasted when he showed no interest whatsoever. I told him that he could see his friends and do things with them much more often, and he said what amounted to: “Silly Dad, I interact with my friends all the time through the Internet and through my phone, and a couple of them have cars if we really need to get together, so I have no use for a car.”</p>
<p>I don’t understand this new, increasingly virtual world. It frightens me. I want to say “Give me back my 20th Century and get off my lawn!”</p>
<p>Kids are “smarter” about cars because they know they have to work a couple hours for a gallon or two of gas. I know parent-age people who will drive 4 blocks to pick up something at a store. My kids all drove at 16 and had access to a car. They were responsible for the gas and we had the car on our insurance. They absolutely used a car to get places that were 20-30 miles away, but when something was a couple miles away they rode a bike. My youngest saved money and bought a moped. They also never go anywhere without filling up a car if a bunch of them were going to the same location. They might be driving less, but they are smarter about it than we were when gas was 28 cents a gallon.</p>
<p>So people do realize that if the kid doesn’t drive and needs to go places where carpooling is not an option, the parent is actually DOUBLING the miles/gas when they have to drop the kid off, go home, and go back to pick him or her up later?</p>
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<p>Here’s the other side of the “not needing to drive” thing (and why I get annoyed when people become smug and self-righteous over their kids’ ability to get by without a car). My daughter, in her nine months of driving, has essentially subsidized all her friends and their parents who can’t or refuse to drive their kids. The “new thing” with parents of 16-year-olds who COULD get their licenses seems to be to say “well, you can go (to the football game/party/whatever) but I am not driving you.” So what happens? The kids with cars, like my daughter, go house to house picking up the friends so they don’t miss out on whatever is happening. I actually find this pretty manipulative, and so does my daughter. She has had to ask a few friends for gas money because they just have no concept that someone is paying for the well-maintained car/gas/insurance. Rarely do they help, but she doesn’t want to damage her friendships by nagging them about it. It puts her in a tough and unfair position, IMO.</p>
<p>I bought my teen kids brand new cars. Why? I wanted them to drive reliable cars with the latest safety features, such as stability cobtrol, side curtain air bags, etc. And the used cars were not much of a bargain compared to new cars, especially when considering financing is much cheaper for new cars. My kids also go to public high schools and universities saving me a ton in tuition. And these cars were less than 20k each… I feel this is money well spent instead of tuition at a private university. We are spending money on us instead of enriching college administrators somrwhere.</p>
<p>All of my kids were knocking on the DMV’s doors ASAP after they turned 16. They were very lucky in that their grandmother offered to match whatever they saved for a car, so 3/4 bought cars fairly early. Our youngest is very thrifty and opted to use a very old car that we were going to sell and save his money. We have almost zero public transportation here and are pretty spread out, so getting around w/o a car is difficult. Our youngest went to school out of Dist. and played soccer on a team 25 miles away, so it really helped me that he could drive. Our kids are spread over 12 years and we have watched the cost of driving increase drastically over that time. While the majority of our 3 older kids friends drove at 16, we have noticed that a significant number of our youngest’s friends waited until they turned 18. They are not required to take a classroom or in-car Driver’s Training class after 18 which costs several hundred dollars. In addition it was easier to find part time jobs after 18 to help them pay the costs</p>
<p>I knew I’d be car-less if it wasn’t for my mom! </p>
<p>1)How would I have saved up the money?
I needed a job to earn money. A car to get to work.
2)How would I have earned all of that money?
To get the car I have now on a minimim wage budget…I’d still be working to get my car. </p>
<p>Amen and hallelujah to my mom buying my car. </p>
<p>Cars are expensive. Even though I only have to pay for gas, cars are still expensive for a (now non working) college student. Parkin to get to places. Gas to get to places. It goes on and on and on. I simply am greatful I don’t have to work to keep my car nor can imagine how hard I would have to work to pay for my car myself!</p>
<p>Both daughters have cars. We pay insurance and subsidize #2Ds gas (she’s still in college). #1D works a split shift at a school that isn’t accessible by bus and in the middle volunteers at another school. Having a car gives options that she wouldn’t have without one. </p>
<p>Like a PP said, she is tired of driving others around who insist they don’t need a car. </p>
<p>Both got licenses at 16, just like mom and dad. I did a dance on both days. :)</p>