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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 04 2016, @11:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do dept.

Technically Incorrect: A new study reveals some stunning statistics about texting behind the wheel and a parent's role in making it worse.

https://www.cnet.com/news/50-percent-of-parents-admit-to-knowingly-texting-their-teens-while-theyre-driving/

-- submitted from IRC

However, when it comes to texting and driving, how much are the kids really to blame?

I've just been given a new survey that examined, among other things, parents' attitudes toward their kids and the likelihood they will text their kids knowing they're behind the wheel.

There's one statistic that might cause you pause: 50 percent of the 1,000 parents surveyed said that they text their teen kids, even though they know that the teen is driving.

You might want to sympathize these parents, perhaps. They only want to leave a message, not to disturb their kids. Surely.

Well, 29 percent of these parents admitted that they expect their kids to reply before they reach their destination.

I pause for your exclamation.

The study was conducted in April on behalf of Liberty Mutual Insurance and Students Against Destructive Decisions.

Oddly, Parents Against Destructive Decisions don't seem to have been involved.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:23PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:23PM (#410555)

    between two grown adults.

    Ah well, about that adjective...

    You can tell people two ways why you didn't instantly respond

    1) You must be of a lower social status than I am; let me lecture you on the holiness of not texting while driving, BTW did I mention I'm holier than you, you suck, you and your texts are not important, you can FOAD because I'm better. This is a bit trolly but does work pretty well.

    2) I responded as soon as road conditions made it safe to respond. (And if its an ice storm or torrential rain or destination is 90 seconds away from the busy interstate, there may never be a safe time to respond while behind the wheel...)

    One tends to work better than the other.

    The whole thing is overblown anyway. I live in an area with a rather toxic climate and mother nature is trying to kill drivers on a regular basis. If you live in sunny CA maybe the whole concept is foreign. But here, mother nature is not a loving gaia spirt to hug trees with, but is a bitch trying to kill you. If you have bad judgment about road safety you MIGHT kill yourself and others due to texting, but I guarantee with the help of flash floods, ice storms, blizzards, arctic freezing, you WILL NOT live very long if you have bad judgment.

    I guess I'm saying something like in CA, kids texting behind the wheel actually kills people, but in more civilized parts of the world that kid already died half a year ago when he thought the weather service was kidding about the ice storm or last month when he thought he could drive thru a flash flood cause he's got 4WD. So its not necessarily relevant everywhere in the country.

    Part of the judgment call is I can return texts and calls when I'm parked at a red light, if I work quick. Its very hard to kill a pedestrian or other driver when at a red light and slam it in "Park". Ironically I don't text or call much in my car but I will F around with my podcast and audiobook player or maps/gps for obvious reasons, but its pretty harmless when the car isn't moving. I can assure you that being old, back when we used paper maps and "books on tape" the ancient alternatives were a hell of a lot more distracting and risky.

    And this is part of the 29% of parents assume a response, when I was a kid my parents were pretty cool about surface street driving because no matter how much I F up the death rate at 25 MPH is pretty low (well, not so much for pedestrians, but for me as the driver anyway). However not so good at 65 on the highway. So if they think I'm driving to my girlfriends house to go out for a movie and dinner I should be able to stop at a stoplight or pull over into a parking lot in about two minutes no matter where I am along the trip, but if I can't reply for thirty minutes because I'm on the interstate stuck in traffic as the designated driver going to a Metallica concert in Chicago with 5 of my drunkest best friends, they're rightly going to blow their top like a volcano.

    Having been a teen boy, admittedly a hell of a long time ago, texting while driving seems to be a shield against what you were really doing. And some of the derision applied against texting is because teens use it as a socially more acceptable excuse. Which is part of the battle to demonize texting. So if a teen boy and his distracting teen girlfriend get into a car accident telling her dad that my right hand was not holding the steering wheel because it was holding.... um holding um ... holding my phone because I was about to text my mom and let her know we're OK and on time because I'm a good boy. Yeah thats it sir now don't kill me it was just the demon of texting. Teens do occasionally do stupid things and they always have their phones and there's always texting going on and as long as sex and drugs are less acceptable excuses than texting, texting will be an epidemic claimed cause of accidents or general stupidity. Or just general dumb judgment, I really thought it would be OK to violate that traffic law that one time because it looked safe at the time, after the accident or ticket gets retconned into "darn that texting, darn it all to hell" not a dose of "hey everybody just wanted to let you all know I am a dumbass after all" Maybe privately some of the wiser teens think that and learn a lesson.

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