Dealing with Insurance When You Have a Teen Child

The advent of having your teenage child start to drive can have a devastating affect on your insurance costs. There are many things you can do to reduce the additional cost such as putting your daughter or son on your auto insurance policy and listing him or her as an "occasional" driver. Of course, the only way to be sure that those rates will stay as low as possible is to assure that your child drives safely and avoids accidents or terrific violations. Only in this was is it possible to hope for reasonable rates so it is also a good idea to consider ways to keep down the possibility of having to pay the higher rates. To assure that you need to look into the subject of the way that your teen drives.

Improving Teen Safe Driving Practices

When you concentrate on avoiding crashes, you are making an effort to keep down the cost of repair and medical costs. There are five good ways to help your teen avoid crashes:

It is important to teach your teen certain driving practices that are designed to reduce rear-end crashes. For example, you can teach your teen the best method for emergency braking and to always keep a four-second following distance from behind the car in front of you.

Teach your new driver youth to learn to reduce or better yet, to eliminate distractions. Statistics show that for each teen passenger added to a car that is being driven by a teen the risk of crashing increases by 50%. Studies have also shown that the act of talking on a cell phone call while driving is equivalent in impact on mental focus to having a .08 blood alcohol level, which is considering by legally intoxicated.

Insist that your child uses his/her seat-belt. It has been shown that as many as forty percent of teen drivers don’t use them, and a large number of deaths and injuries could be avoided by their use.

You should make it a point to spend at least 50 to 100 hours with your teen behind the wheel in a number of different driving and weather conditions during the first 6 to 12 month after they receive their license.

Make it a point to act as a great role model. Remember that they are watching (and also imitating) you. For example, if you make it a practice of rolling through stop signs, exhibiting road rage, or speeding, this will make an impression on your kids.