Teenage Accidents, Not Their Fault?

Last week, when four Coatesville teenagers were killed in a tragic automobile accident, I asked recent Octorara grad Maggie Stuehrmanm to research why so many deadly auto accidents seem to involve 16 and 17 years old kids and what, if anything, parents and the community could do to protect teenage drivers.

After a lot of research and rewrites, her thoughtful answer is below.

Money quote from Maggie's article:

There are few solutions short of raising the driving age to 25 that would alleviate this problem. However, proper restrictions on teenage driving including graduated licenses, curfews and junior license restrictions can help keep teenagers safer. Even with these precautions, the best we can do is hope and wish for luck to keep them safe.

Teenage Driving – Why sometimes, as they claim, it wasn’t entirely their faults.

By Magdalena Stuehrmann

For teenagers in the United States, the leading cause of death is car accidents. For every mile driven, teenagers are four times as likely to be in a car accident than an adult driver. Teens speed, don’t wear seat belts, and often drive while distracted. As a result of poor decision-making and inexperience, teenage driving often ends in tragedy. But why does this happen? Why is it that even academically smart teens make decisions like children while driving?

One of the main reasons that this behavior seems to occur is that the teenage brain is not fully developed. The frontal lobes of the brain, particularly the pre-frontal cortex, are not fully and properly “wired up” to the rest of the brain until a person is in her mid-twenties. 

It’s a little like having a vacuum only loosely plugged into a wall socket – there are times when the plug pulls out just enough that the vacuum stops working occasionally.   

The wires in this metaphor are the axons of the neurons, or brain nerve cells. The axons are the long, thin “wires” along which nerve impulses travel, passing information from one area of the brain to another. Each axon is coated with a myelin sheath, a kind of organic insulation that allows impulses to travel swiftly and smoothly between neurons, increasing the speed of communication between the neurons. 

So what does this have to do with teenage brains? In a human brain, the frontal lobes control judgment and decision-making. In a teenage brain, which is not yet fully developed, the myelin sheaths that coat the axons that connect the neurons of the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain are not completely formed. 

This means that the essential insulation that allows neural impulses to travel quickly between the brain and the frontal lobes is incomplete; therefore, the decisions in a teenage brain are not made as quickly or as carefully, efficiently, and often as logically as in an adult brain. This manifests itself as the often poor and impulsive decisions teenagers make while driving. 

There are three other important aspects of poor decisions that teens make while driving. The first is the general teenage aura of rebellion. Teenagers generally want to feel as though they are rebelling against their parents and sometimes against the general rules of law. Teenagers are often teased when they choose to follow rules, being called “goody two shoes” by their friends. 

This combination of rebellion and a desire to show off in front of friends (who are often in the car with them, adding to the distractions), lead to dangerous actions while driving, which often result in accidents.

Additionally, the sense of freedom and being part of the adult world both come when teenagers are allowed to drive on their own, a distinctly adult action to which they had, up until that point, been only spectators to. The freedom to go to places at will without direct adult supervision gives teens a feeling of independence that can result in poor driving decisions. 

When coupled with the general feeling of invincibility (the “it won’t happen to me” syndrome) that teenagers seem to have, this independence helps cause reckless decisions to be made while teens are on the road.

The last aspect of this, the one that is genuinely not the fault of teenage drivers, is their sheer inexperience compared to adult drivers. Young drivers may encounter black ice for the first time, for example, while driving alone and not recognize the danger that it poses. 

This is compounded when something happens, like the car skidding, that the teen has never experienced before and thus often does not know how to get out of safely. More experienced drivers would recognize the dangers of black ice and, if they did choose to continue to drive in such dangerous conditions, would know how to, and therefore be better able to, navigate such situations safely. 

School administrators, teachers, the rescue workers and the undertakers who have to deal all too frequently with the tragic results of poor teenage decision making while driving have noticed the same thing – teenagers just won’t stop doing the stupid things that can end up getting them killed. 

And, as long as the human brain development stays as it is, they won’t. Even the most responsible, careful teen can fall victim to inexperience and tragedy can occur, and those that are less conscientious can end up in the same situations. 

There are few solutions short of raising the driving age to 25 that would alleviate this problem. However, proper restrictions on teenage driving including graduated licenses, curfews and junior license restrictions can help keep teenagers safer. Even with these precautions, the best we can do is hope and wish for luck to keep them safe.