Prepare your Teen: Emergency Driving Courses

If you have a teenage child one of the great worries of your life may be wondering how safely he or she will drive. Handing a set of car keys to an inexperienced driver is a nerve-racking experience in the best of situations. Maybe you taught your teen to drive. Maybe you splurged and sent your kid to driving school. There's always that nagging worry about what will happen if your child encounters a dangerous situation on the road. Take heart, parents - a new kind of driving school has arrived to help your kids learn how to control a car in an emergency.

Emergency driving instruction classes are essentially driving academies in which students are given safety training in keeping or recovering control of a vehicle in an emergency. The training involves setting up controlled skids, spins, and other emergency situations in a controlled environment.

Drivers may, for example, be coached on how to bring a car into a minor skid so they experience the sensations first-hand. Instructors teach them how to recover, bringing the vehicle safely back under control.

Classes are often taught in unusual locations. In some circumstances local airports permit the schools to use an out-of-the way section of open tarmac or a temporarily closed runway as a classroom. Vast amounts of flat, open pavement provide a training ground where mild skids can be induced without fear of collision or danger.

Like any other emergency situation, driving emergencies are more readily handled with training. It's believed that students who know what a skid feels like and are not paralyzed with fear during one are more likely to keep their composure and get their vehicles under control safely.

One such school, in New England, is the aptly named SkidSchool. SkidSchool teaches teens and corporate drivers emergency driving skills. Other such institutions exist around the country.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) keeps statistics on how people get injured or pass away from many causes. One report showed that during the period tracked about eight teenage drivers a day were dying in car accidents. While not all are preventable, it's likely that at least some of them were situations where a collision might have been avoided if the driver had reacted better to the circumstances.

Classes on emergency driving techniques are often exciting and fun as well as life-saving. Speaking with one instructor brought to light an interesting fact about the classes for teens: The kids seem to have so much fun that the instructors are besieged by parents wanting to have a go on the skid course.

If you want to improve your child's driving skills, particularly the ones related to the most dangerous situations they are likely to encounter on the road, consider adding an emergency driving course to the teenager's instruction. Classes of this sort are meant to be additions to normal driver training, rather than a substitute for it. They may add skills that could save your child's life some day.