TAU study suggests new ‘golden rule’ for parents

It probably won’t come as a surprise to parents of young drivers – but a new study shows that kids drive more safely if someone is keeping an eye on them while they are behind the wheel. But just “spying” on kids isn’t enough; to keep them on the straight and narrow — on the road, and in general — parents need to offer nurturing support, while allowing their kids to act independently and make their own choices.

It’s a bit tricky to pull off, say the Tel Aviv University researchers behind the study – but learning the techniques for the method, called Vigilant Care, is worth it. “We have shown that it is possible to reduce dangerous driving in young drivers by increasing parental involvement in a positive way, said Prof. Haim Omer, the study’s lead researcher. “Our program is based on a model of parental involvement which has been shown to be effective in reducing risky behavior exhibited in other fields.”

The research, published recently in the Journal of Adolescence, was led by Omer of TAU’s School of Psychological Sciences and conducted by Dr. Yaara Shimshoni, in collaboration with Or Yarok, the Association for Safer Driving in Israel. The research proves what many parents know anecdotally, said Omer. “We recommend that parents remain non-invasively involved in their youngsters’ activities, but remain poised to increase their level of involvement at the first signs of danger.”

Omer is one of the world’s foremost researchers of the Vigilant Care model, which posits that parents need to be involved in situations that are stressful or difficult for their children – while allowing them to maintain control of the situation. Often, Omer wrote in a separate study, parents tend to intervene too heavily when their children are facing a problem, especially when they are “excitable.” In order to “help” their children, parents of such children often try to shield them from situations that will induce anxiety, creating a pattern of dependence.

Eventually, though, children grow and need to stand on their own – at which point parents will send them to therapy to learn how to cope with everyday problems. But the intervention – called “parental accommodation” – prevents the child from making progress. “Parental accommodation is a strong predictor of the chances of an individual therapy for the child – with high accommodation leading to treatment failure,” wrote Omer. “ Our model systematically reduces parental accommodation, helping the parents to support instead of protect the anxious child. This is also the first treatment approach that allows for treating children who are not willing to cooperate with any form of therapy for their anxiety.”

Allowing children to act independently, while maintaining a caring background presence, numerous studies have shown, leads to a measurable reduction in the number and severity accidents and unsafe behavior in small children, fighting and violence, falling grades, truancy, smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and more.

As such, vigilant care has great potential for reducing the incidence of car accidents, by encouraging positive habits among young drivers, according to Omer and Shimshoni.

For the study, 242 families of adolescent drivers installed In-Vehicle Data Recorders (IVDRs) that monitor driving in real time and offer feedback on risk patterns in the cars, with the results reported back to parents.

The families were then assigned to one of four test groups: Those whose teens were provided with IVDR feedback and whose parents had been trained in Vigilant Care techniques; parents whose teens were provided with the IVDR devices but not the training; parents provided with training but no devices, and a control group that was given neither.

But just keeping an eye on drivers through data recorders is not sufficient; Vigilant Care requires that parents establish a nurturing environment and a strong remote relationship with their kids. Thus, in the study, young drivers were required to send a text message to their parents upon arriving at their destination and once again before midnight – ensuring that their parents were on the minds of the kids, an important principle of Vigilant Care. The parents would also hold “driving chats” with their kids on a weekly basis, sitting together to plan trips to new destinations. As a result, the novice driver was constantly reminded of his parents while driving. As one of the teens said, “I felt as though someone was sitting by my side, even though I was alone in the car.”

While the normal Vigilant Care techniques helped reduce the rate of risky behavior by more than half, as reported by the drivers themselves to researchers, the addition of IVDR technology reduced such behaviors even further; the combination of surveillance along with the nurturing relationship, said Omer, was an ideal way to keep young drivers safe. “The combined technological monitoring plus intervention was found to be most effective for drivers who exhibited the riskiest behavior,” he said.

“In past studies, ‘Vigilant Care’ has been shown to reduce risky behavior in many areas of child development,” said Prof. Omer. “However, the difficult challenge here was to amend and apply the model to an older and normative population of young adults.”

According to Shimshoni, “We have shown that the combination of technology and ‘Vigilant Care’ can meet the challenge of dangerous teen driving. This is the first study in which a systematic, theory-based intervention for parental involvement in teen driving was found to be effective.”