Reply to What did you do when you realized your young adult was not smart enough to obtain a driver's license

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[quote=Anonymous]You ask about online drivers ed courses. If you think there are particular things that would help your kid, I bet you could find them on youtube. Parallel parking is no longer required in MD for the test, but I wanted my kid to learn it, so we found some youtube examples, then we went out and she watched me parallel park (both from inside and outside of the car), and then we got some cones and flags and an empty road, and she practiced until she got it. Practicing parallel parking significantly improved her understanding of where the car was, and it made her a better overall driver.

If you can identify the particular issues, we might be able to help. My DD deals with anxiety, so the very first thing I taught her is how to safely bail off a road. If she gets overwhelmed or anxious, she needs to be able to get herself to safety. Hopefully it's a nice parking lot or side street, but it might be a shoulder of a highway. I needed to know she knew how to keep herself safe. She was also often stressed about knowing where she was going, having enough time to make transitions across multiple lanes of traffic, navigating from 95 to 695 and so on. She's become a lot more comfortable with GPS, but when we started I'd lay out our plan on a paper map so she'd have an overview, then we'd follow the GPS. Sometimes she'd get off track which was no big deal because we'd already practiced how to bail off a road. She could get somewhere safe and figure out her new plan. Practicing how to recover from the errors (missed exits, turning the wrong way down a one way road, getting lost) is helpful in achieving some self confidence. Driving around in circles at the local empty shopping mall wasn't helpful for her once she got the basics down.

If ultimately you and your child can't figure out a way for your child to be a safe driver, then you figure out how that works. What's in walking distance? Bicycling distance? How expensive are ubers? Where can DC live to not need to drive? There are solutions even there.[/quote]

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