5 Tips for Teaching Your Teen To Drive

Teaching your teen to drive? These tips may help keep everyone safe as your child gains confidence behind the wheel.

Alexandre Mouravskiy | 

Aug 25, 2025 | 4 min read

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Teaching a child to drive can be equal parts frustrating, terrifying, and rewarding. That's true for the would-be teen driver and parents alike.

To skip any blood, sweat, tears, and dented bodywork, here are five tips for teaching your teen to drive. These tips won't make your young driver into the world's best chauffeur but should help. Learning to drive well is a long and involved process.

Have a Plan and Stick to It

Come up with a structured plan from the beginning and stick to it. The plan should start with the basics — what happens before you even unlock the car and get inside — and progress through measurable and concrete milestones that ensure everyone involved is ready to move on. Avoid the temptation, or pressure from impatient teens, to skip ahead — instead, make sure they nail whatever the current task is before going forward.

Set Expectations and Boundaries

Sit down with your child long before you toss them the keys and discuss what you expect from their behavior. Also, listen to what they expect from you as well.

To avoid hurt feelings, make sure every rule has a clear reason for existing, that consequences are proportional, and you include your teen's expectations. Then write it all down, and once you're on the same page, have everyone sign it as if it were a real contract.

Some ideas for rules to include are:

• If the teen driver runs a stop sign or red light, the lesson is over, and they are expected to slow down and pull off the road as soon as it's safe to do so. At which point, you will take over driving and head home.
• If the parent raises their voice or shouts, they will apologize and help the teen pull off the road as soon as it's safe, at which point they will take five minutes to calm down before starting again. If the lessons are on a timed schedule, five minutes will be added to the end to avoid losing driving time.

Set Yourself and Your Teen Up for Success

Don't get in the car angry. Don't get in the car upset. Don't get in the car stressed. This goes for parents and teens. Getting behind the wheel while angry, upset, or agitated can greatly increase the odds of an accident, according to a study published by the Transportation Institute at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Find a routine that helps you calm down and set aside the rest of the day for a bit before beginning any lesson. If you — or your teen driver — are having an off day, consider postponing the lesson. Even better, include this in the expectations and boundaries document.

Keep Lines of Communication Open

Open lines of communication should start before any lesson begins, giving an overview of what you'll be focusing on during the lesson. It should also extend to after the lesson is over to debrief on what went well, what didn't, and how your child has progressed.

However, even between lessons, look for opportunities to discuss what makes a good driver. If you're driving your teen to hockey practice and you get to a tricky situation, explain how you're going to navigate it. If you make a mistake while driving, own up to it and explain why you shouldn't have done it. Or put them in the teacher's seat and have them identify what you're doing and whether it's an effective way to handle the situation.

Take Them to the Track

Many racetracks, high-performance driving-education organizations, and autocross organizations around the country have programs specifically designed for young drivers that focus on defensive driving and car control in ways that would be impossible to achieve on public roads or even in parking lots.

These car-control clinics, as they're often called, help young drivers learn how their vehicles perform in situations like sudden stops, last-minute maneuvers, spins, and slides. Having these skills enables teens to react appropriately to dangerous situations, thereby avoiding accidents or mitigating their effects more safely.

Alexandre Mouravskiy

Alexandre Mouravskiy has worked as a freelance writer for almost 20 years, covering pop culture, politics, and automobiles. He’s written about road tripping across the eastern seaboard, replacing broken wheels in a blizzard as an amateur rally navigator, and once drove from the Gulf to the Hudson Valley in a single day. When he’s not writing, Alexandre can be found wrenching on one of his project cars or teaching people to drive stick, whether they want to learn or not.