The leading cause of death for teenagers in the US is car accidents. Teenage drivers are involved in about thousands of vehicular accidents. Drivers and passengers die in car crashes every year. Some are injured and some requires hospitalization. It looks like keeping a teen drivers and passenger’s safe is the most challenging task for a parent.

Parents are usually good at teaching those basic driving skills such as steering, parking and controlling the car but many fail to teach on how to avoid accidents. Sources reports that parents are failing to focus on teaching their new teenage drivers what to do in a risky situation.

Be a parent with a plan who teaches their teens with useful and life-saving tips like driving in different weather conditions, night and day and navigating in a heavy traffic etc. The most important tips a parent can teach to their teen drivers are developing hazard recognition which is making turns into oncoming traffic or how to merge on and off roads at high speed.

Do not play it safe just by teaching them easy ways to drive. Instead, help them gain their confidence, skills and knowledge they will need for their lifetime driving career. Teach them also on how to deal with sudden obstacles. Talk to your teen on what to do incase there is a sudden obstacle in the road. Look for an “exit points” if the obstacle is too big to hit.

Do not allow your teen to carry a teenage passenger and drive with same age as his/her. According to one study, the risk of a teen driver being involved in an accident increases about 40 percent with one teen riding, doubles with two teen passengers and quadruples with three or more teen riders aboard.

They say that boys are bad even as passengers. Focus more attention to your young men, since boys are about twice as likely to get killed in car accidents as girls. Tell them not to use distractions while driving, especially cell phones. Distractive driving is one of the reasons of car crashes.

More than half of teens killed in accidents were not wearing seat belts. Make sure your teens are wearing them when driving. Their vehicle should meet the up-to-date crash standards and have airbags, emergency brakes and other safety measures a car must have.