A strange thing happened when I became a parent. I started to get upset when I saw stories like the one of the five young men who were killed in a motor crash at the weekend.
I’ve also found myself saying ‘in my day’ or worse, ‘when I was young’. I’ve already made decisions about a computer in my child’s room and whether she will have a mobile phone.
Sometimes when the entrepreneurial gene comes out, I wonder if I could get a mobile phone made that simply dials home and does nothing else. I would market it as not having a camera or video function, wouldn’t be able to surf the net and it wouldn’t rack up bills of many hundreds of dollars. (That’s where the entrepreneurial gene fails me.)
Most days, particularly at the end of the year when all the fresh red P platers are on the road, I feel grateful I had a girl, not a boy. The ABS figures (Causes of Death, 2007) indicate that boys are almost twice as likely as girls to die from an external cause. This includes car accidents, in which males are almost three times as likely to as females.
Males are three-and-a-half times as likely as females to die from self-harm, which is a nicer way of saying suicide.
Males are more than three times as likely to die from alcohol poisoning and four-and-a-half times as likely to die from psychotic drugs.
Statistically, if you’re a parent of a boy the odds are tragically against you.
Over the weekend, five young men died in a road smash, and this has left the Victorian government at a loss as to how to convince young people that they must stop speeding.
Perhaps this isn’t a matter for young people, but their parents. I’m not blaming the parents for this particular accident, and I’m certainly not aware of who the owner of the car was.
But the car in question was a Ford Falcon. It was large enough to seat five (and another female passenger) and fast enough to get to a speed of 140km per hour.
It used to unnerve me to see P plate drivers in nicer cars or more powerful cars than mine, like the sporty version of a Peugot 206 or the latest Honda Civic. In fact, I remember filling up my Hondamatic ’79 when I was 24, only to see a girl who finished school three years after me drive up in the newest Ford Laser.
One day, when I worked in Kogarah in Sydney, I was in the bank and watched as a father co-signed a loan for his son for a $35,000 motor car. The boy looked as if he shaved about once a fortnight.
One of the great things about the Global Financial Crisis is I’m seeing more 18-24 year olds driving beat up old bombs like I had. They can’t go any faster than 95kmh because the doors will fall off or the wind resistance will deafen them.
But that doesn’t stop kids borrowing dad’s car and doing something foolish with it. It’s been this way forever, they probably even did it with horses. The 1980s movie Risky Business is based on the premise of ‘doing something stupid with your father’s high powered car’.
The Victorian government (in fact all Australian governments) might take a leaf out of the New Zealand government’s book and remind parents that they’re an example to their children. You don’t learn how to be a bad driver sitting behind a good driver.
As parents we need to understand that our children will watch us tailgate, abuse other drivers, cut people off or not let merging traffic in, and think this is normal driving behaviour, when it’s not.
I am as guilty of swearing at another driver as the next parent, and it’s a daily challenge to keep to the speed limit and keep my temper when my little girl is in the back seat, and she’s only 17months old.
A few months with a driving instructor is not going to undo 18 years of indoctrination of abuse and bad habits learned from a passenger seat.
In the meantime, parents might consider getting their young drivers an old four cylinder car and removing the back seats. It seems this is the only way to ensure we minimise the loss of young lives on our roads.
*Source: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/9B8B1A46FD3B9FBACA25757C001EF6A8?opendocument
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@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
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