Should the 6 month rule for driving be in effect?

The six month rule is a very controversial topic for various reasons. What is the six month rule? Well for any of you that don’t know the six month basically just says that for the first six months of you having your license you can’t have any one else in the car with you, this includes friends and even family unless they are your legal guardian. First off the parents of most teens wish that they would be able to at least drive their younger sibling to places that they need to go like school or to after school activities. Also the rate of car crashes did at first improve, however recent studies show that the amount of crashes aren’t as low as they originally showed. Lastly by the time kids get their licenses they have been driving for at least 6 months if not longer. Also by this time the teen drivers have taken a written exam and a driving exam, along with whatever minimum driving time that was required for the state that they are in.

First off when teens first get their license it’s like a sigh of relief for the parents, they don’t have to drive that child anymore, and they wouldn’t have to take their other kids places if it weren’t for the six month rule. However with this six month rule in place it only lets the one kid drive places with ease, and for most parents this means that they have more expenses like gas and insurance, and they don’t get as good of a trade off because it’s not as useful for their kids to be able to drive as it was before the six month rule was implemented. Parents just think of it as an inconvenience, because shouldn’t it be their decision if they’re okay with their children driving around with other people? And shouldn’t be a reward for being able to pass the driving test and getting in all of your training hours?

Another thing is that a large majority of teens ignore the six month rule whether their guardians know it or not. Now I am not saying that this makes it okay, however there is no way to actually monitor the rule. What I mean by that is that the only way for someone to get busted for the six month rule is if you got caught with someone in your car when you were pulled over by a cop and they checked your license and saw how long you had it for.

Cops can’t just pull you over unless they have a reason to do it, so it’s not like they can just pull you over because they think you look to young to be driving with someone else in the car. For this reason alone it makes it very hard to monitor whether or not teens are actually obeying the rule or not. In source 1 Kristen said that she has been caught with other people in her car by her parents, but not by the cops. Now although she got into trouble with her parents she never got caught once by the cops, this just shows how hard it is to monitor.

Lastly the amount of teen crashes that were reported went down drastically when this rule was first implemented, and that was a good thing. However this is no longer the case, and the amount of reported crashes in teens had leveled out and actually started to rise again and the importance or the relativity of the rule has decreased drastically from when it first was implemented. In source 2 it says that since 2008 the amount of crashes has flattened out and hasn’t continued to improve the amount of accidents, and has brought them back up.
For all of these reasons we can see that the six month rules importance has gone down. Especially in recent years we have been able to see how the rule hasn’t had as much of a good affect and may actually be worse. We are also able to see how teens may actually be better off without this rule, and how it could not only benefit their families, but also just be better for the teens for convenience purposes any ways. 

Sources:
Tom Cleary and Brian Lockhart, Staff Writers. "Teen Driver Laws Frustrate Some; Officials Say They save Lives." Connecticut Post. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2017.
"Teenagers." IIHS. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2017.