mazdeuce wrote: ...my job is not to make them happy, it is to teach them to be good productive human beings. Part of that is to teach them skills that give them the most choices in life. If you can't drive, you immediately give up a lot of career options and places you can live.
THIS.
+1 to just don't drive them anywhere.
I can understand the lack of desire to drive, especially if they are footing the bill for it. I wish I didn't have to drive as much as I do. Being able to get more places via simple public transit or biking with decent bike lanes/paths would rock.
Performance driving is fun. Commuting or running errands is not and never will be. But I put up with it because its the most convenient way to get where I want to go.
Friend of mine's step daughter. 17 or 18 now. Spare 'Rolla sitting in the driveway for her. Won't get her driver's license.
I'm dealing with the opposite. My niece is 18 and graduates this month. She has had her permit for 2 1/2 years now but her mother stopped teaching her once she bought her new van almost 2 years ago.
The story with my M-I-L is worse. She was such control freak over her older 3 children that my wife is still the only one with her DL, and she didn't get that until she was almost 21. Thankfully she has relented with her youngest son and he should have his DL in a few more months, but most of the teaching will be done by my wife and myself.
My Son got his DL when he turned 16. Not much arm-twisting on our part. He went to school the next town over so Mom had to drive him before that. It was nervous times for me when he first started driving to school by himself. Before he got his DL, when his Mom picked him up after school, once they got home, she would let him drive around the block before pulling in the driveway. His Grandma has a 4cyl 5sp Jeep he learned to drive. He picked it up quickly, but I couldn't teach his Mom to save my life...twice. He also learned how to drive a Kabota tractor with a small backhoe when he was about 11 yrs old. Since we've moved to the town he's been going to school in, he walks to school or the skate park if his truck (105,000 mile 1995 Chevy) is broke. Surprisingly, he doesn't complain about walking when he has too. He hasn't got the maintenance thing yet, but we're working on that. But I told him if he ruins that truck he's walking permanently. I made it clear that we won't be buying him a car. The next vehicle he gets is on him. He only has it because it was his Grampa's truck, but we 'inherited' it (nobody else wanted to deal with it) when he passed away.
My daughter just turned 23. She did get her license at 16, but only because her mother made a decision not to carry her around anymore - especially back & forth to work. Didn't help that we lived in Atlanta Metro. The Interstates scared her to death.
Complicated thing was that when she was 18, I began a relationship with a much younger woman than I. We had been pretty good friends for five years before the relationship actually started, and she had been an influence upon my daughter when my daughter was a young teen. Some of that influence was "good", but not when it came to driving. Except for one ride with me in an autocross, a couple of trips up the backroads to Helen, GA, and a brief flirtation with a Jaguar..the GF hated having to drive. Add in that the Hyundai Sonata grandma bought for my daughter has had serious (expensive) problems, and she's done with it. She understands why other people enjoy driving for recreation, but gives me that same old "That's for rich people!" young people do when I bring up the subject.
Breaks my heart that she sees all these impending "self driving car" news stories with such joy, but at least she's still not expecting to find a chauffeur in her 20s. It's always been a compromise, I suppose.
I read an article recently how Greyhound and other city-city bus services are seeing increased ridership because so many young people are living in cities and don't drive or own cars.
my youngest brother is about to turn 21 and I think he still doesnt have his license. just his learners permit which I think he didnt get till after he was 18.
mom would drive him to work during high school, and mom or dad helps him move to/from college. he catches rides home with friends for the holidays and such, and i think he walks to work at college.
supposed to be getting his license this summer, already has grandma's hand me down buick waiting for him.
probably correct with technology these days with social networking (and xbox live) that he never seemed to really care about needing to drive.
My other brother is a mechanical engineer and never had much interest in cars but at least appreciates being able to drive. He recently expressed an interest in starting to work on his own car (which I think is awesome, haha), having found a website/forum with all sorts of instructions/videos on how to work on his Mazda 3.
I wonder how dangerous these kids will be when the finally are forced to drive? My cousin got his license when he was 26. I've never seen him reverse. He'll drive around the block so he doesn't have to.
Financially it is a lot harder to drive now.
In 1991, gas was ~$1.00 per gallon and minimum wage was $4.25/hour
in 2014, gas is ~$3.65 and minimum wage is $7.25/hour.
So gas is twice as much time for the typical kid...even if they can find a job. Throw in the fact that gas price volatility is rather insane and I can see why the allure would go right out the window with cheaper alternatives.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?f=W&n=PET&s=EMM_EPMR_PTE_NUS_DPG
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/minimumwage/a/history-minimum-wage.htm
http://www.gasbuddy.com/
I'm thinking the reverse psychology thing may be part of it. I don't have kids, but I have a brother who's five years younger than me. He didn't seem to care about getting his license until he was almost 18 (and he's a social guy, and we lived in the country, and our parents damn sure weren't chauffeuring us anywhere). HOWEVER...he's also the only person in our extended family who is completely, utterly, totally not a gearhead.
By contrast, my folks bought me a fixer-upper at age 13 when I started to get interested in cars, got my license two days after my sixteenth birthday (birthday was on a Saturday), and then got in big argument with my folks that afternoon when I said "Welp, you've told me I've got to pay my own way on this car thing. Going into town to get a job." For some reason they thought I should wait a couple weeks. It's the first time I ever beat my parents in an argument with logic.
This is the only post I needed to read on this thread. Getting a license in my family wasn't a choice.
mazdeuce wrote: My kids don't have a choice and know it. You learn to cook. You learn to do laundry. You learn to pay bills. You learn to drive (which includes changing tires and basic maintenance) I constantly have the conversation with my kids, mostly my son, that my job is not to make them happy, it is to teach them to be good productive human beings. Part of that is to teach them skills that give them the most choices in life. If you can't drive, you immediately give up a lot of career options and places you can live.
My kids are too young yet but I agree that kids of age now are much less likely to drive. Here's the issue - there is a difference between choosing not to drive because you can take the bus, don't need the mobility, etc. and purposefully not having the ability to drive when needed. Driving is a life skill, as is cooking, laundry, etc. I couldn't agree more with Mazdeuce. They have to learn to drive. It would be like choosing not to learn how to write coherent sentences because you can get by texting. But once the kid learns, is licensed and practices, I'd be okay with them choosing not to drive so long as they weren't expecting a chauffer and it wasn't otherwise impairing their development financially and socially. Choosing not to drive due to the expense and risk may make sense. I also understand the parent's reluctance to let the kid out on his own - I'll probably struggle with that when it's time. But they have to leave the nest eventually and they need to be prepared - that overrides the desire to protect them from harm while in the nest. Teach, guide, set reasonable rules (only 1 friend in the car, home by 10:00 PM, etc.) but they have to do and fail at times on their own. Could I get the kid to high school more safely than they could on their own? Probably. But since I can't and won't do that for them for life, they better learn to do it by their self when old enough and mature enough.
Timeormoney wrote: Financially it is a lot harder to drive now. In 1991, gas was ~$1.00 per gallon and minimum wage was $4.25/hour in 2014, gas is ~$3.65 and minimum wage is $7.25/hour. So gas is twice as much time for the typical kid...even if they can find a job. Throw in the fact that gas price volatility is rather insane and I can see why the allure would go right out the window with cheaper alternatives. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?f=W&n=PET&s=EMM_EPMR_PTE_NUS_DPG http://jobsearch.about.com/od/minimumwage/a/history-minimum-wage.htm http://www.gasbuddy.com/
Thats not as big of an issue as insurance costs.
FWIW, when I was 16(12 years ago), it was roughly 3000/yr for plpd on an old 80's F150. I can't imagine that has changed any.
I agree that kids must learn to drive but the key part of this is that they don't want to. That, I think, is because they are raised in a different world. Kids don't have a sense of independence or adventure because they are never off the leash. We, collectively coddled all the wander-lust out of them and have taken the necessity of transportation out of the picture too. "It's too dangerous to ride your bike on the main road" instead of "be home by dark" is the root cause. It's the play date that killed adventure.
When I was a kid we left the house to go play and no one came looking for you until you didn't show up when you were supposed to. No one knew where you were aside from a general vicinity and there were no cell phones to immediately contact us or anyone chauffeuring us from neighborhood to neighborhood to keep us from getting as far into trouble as we were willing to go. We wandered on our own for good or bad, pretty much all day in the summers. The means to wander even more was first opened by a bicycle... You could be miles away playing baseball or hanging with friends from the next town over on a bike. Everyone wanted a car. Cars were freedom to go further.
IMO all kids would be better off with a little less structure and a little more off-leash time to find a little trouble but if I did that today... I'd be the one on the leash for criminal negligence or some such thing.
i wonder if the perception of a car is not freedom to the young anymore, but is responsibility...?
think about it. if all you see associated with a car is gasoline, insurance, payments, a job, and time, how is that more appealing than an Iphone?
^That. Be home by dark or else. If Mum used the air horn we were dead meat.
madmallard wrote: i wonder if the perception of a car is not freedom to the young anymore, but is responsibility...? think about it. if all you see associated with a car is gasoline, insurance, payments, a job, and time, how is that more appealing than an Iphone?
It's a good observation. My dreams of a car started very young - but the effort to afford one was the first step into "the things you own end up owning you" phase of life. Maybe kids today see that more clearly because it is so much more expensive and difficult to have a car. I don't quite buy that though. My kids don't use their bikes to go places either - they like to ride them for entertainment but not for transportation.
but thats a confusion, to me. the only cost that can't be accounted for in inflation is insurance. tag fees and a cheap used car are (somewhat) in line for what it used to be. maybe a bit more after Cash for Clunkers drained the used market.
and even if more modern (85 forward) cars are a pain to work on, they still tend to last longer and put up with more abuse, even if they are boring.
with all 50 states on manditory liability, the cost of that coverage inflated accordingly.
it used to be collision was a luzury and MUCH more than liability costs. in the last 10 years, that flipped...
In reply to madmallard:
A couple things... adjusted cost of the car and so on is relatively the same.
There are new rules for driving that require adults and no night driving so ... not as attractive a package if you have to take mommy along everywhere.
Insurance is very expensive. Way out of the average 16yr old's league so parents have to pay. Not all parents can afford it.
Where can a 14 year old find work today? I mowed lawns, pumped gas, washed dishes, bussed tables, dryed cars outside the car wash. All of it was cash I could pocket. I didn't go "on the books" anywhere until I got a job driving a newspaper van when I was 17. They needed me to be insured so... had to go on the books.
My son cuts my grass for money but no one else will hire him because they have a lawn service. The local businesses won't touch a minor even with working papers. Where does a kid get a couple grand stashed away to afford anything tangible these days?
In reply to Giant Purple Snorklewacker:
in the last 10 years, the biggest growth is off the books IT stuffs.
most of the major web/net software techs in use of the last 10 years were developed as teenagers. I also have anecdotal stories of OTB kids doing home tech support.
if there's less demand for youth yardwork (which i just dont see dropping in metro atlanta as you may), i'm pretty sure other opportunities are arising...
I don't think the economics are there for the average teen to be able to buy and afford a car these days. Blame cash for clunkers? Regardless, kids should still be trying to steal their parents cars in the middle of the night to see some popular band play in a tiny bar in the middle of nowhere. Maybe kids these days don't know about such adventures?
Brought this thread up with the daughter unit...she asked me how my buggy-whip waving and team driving skills were holding up?
Even without the odd ride from Mom or Dad, the little bitch does seem to get around just fine without a car be it on a city-country or worldwide basis.
Regardless, unlike Madmallard, its not a battle I am going to fight; except for this minor mental disorder, she is a pretty awesome kid unit.
Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: Where does a kid get a couple grand stashed away to afford anything tangible these days?
Caddying. When I was 13, I made over $1,000, cash. Next year it was close to double that. By the time I was 18, it was over $10,000. In a summer.
In reply to yamaha:
I'm 21, when I started at nearly 17 (I wanted earlier) it was about ~$560/yr basic liability on my 92 Camry. It was around $650 a year for comp on my old sunfire. Its crept up to ~$700/yr on my current 99 Prizm for comprehensive. This is all a 3rd (4th now with my sister driving) car on my parents AAA account, the current car has my name on the title. This and fuel was easy to make back then between helping my mechanic father moonlight in the driveway(and outright taking simpler jobs from him) and flipping lawnmowers/karts/outboards etc. I bought and sold on craigslist.
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