Parents Hand Out Keys, and a Monitoring Device

A device called a CarChip lets Phil Bowman and Susan Schauer look through speed and other data from the trips of their teenager, Ben Ellison. (Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

They'll remove the CarChip, they've agreed, when Ben is 18.

The family's conversation is at the heart of monitoring systems' effectiveness, said Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Arlington-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

"When people know they're being monitored, they can change their behavior," she said. "Assuming we had a study that said, 'Whoa, this can make a difference in crash rates,' we still have to ask: Are the parents willing to be more involved?"

Experience with the new systems and new research point to old-fashioned parental communication as the best way to instill good driving habits. In a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study released last week, parents of 16-year-olds reviewed newsletters and a video with facts about risky practices, then drew up written agreements spelling out consequences for engaging in each bad habit. The limits, researchers found, stayed in place up to a year, the riskiest time for young drivers.

"Teens whose parents had restrictions on their initial driving experience reported engaging in less risky driving later on," said Bruce Simons-Morton, a research chief at the institute and the study's lead author. "There is a use for electronic monitoring devices. But there's a tendency for parents to be a little more passive than they should be."

Joanne Devens agrees. Harder than watching a video of the accident her daughter Stephanie had, she said, was establishing consequences for Stephanie's careless driving.

Devens, of Mankato, Minn., had a camera installed in Stephanie's Saturn last year as part of a 26-week trial involving a dozen Minnesota high school students, organized by the Mayo Clinic. Mounted near the rearview mirror, it filmed Stephanie, then 16, without her seat belt, chatting on the phone, joking with passengers, fiddling with the radio.

It wasn't long before the camera captured the car flying off a curve into a snowy ditch. "She was dialing her cell phone," Joanne Devens said. She saw her daughter's terrified face and heard "this blood-chilling scream," Devens said. "Thankfully, she didn't get hurt."

Was she punished?

"Yes and no. . . . I kind of gave in," she said.

Though the camera was designed to monitor truck drivers, parents have begun ordering the $1,400 device, inspiring its manufacturer to plan a consumer version, said Rusty Weiss, director of product management for DriveCam Video Systems of San Diego.

During the trial, students' near misses, swerves and hard braking that trigger the camera dropped from 24 a week to nearly zero, he said. Seat-belt use rose from one-third of students to nearly all.

The camera has helped reduce truckers' accident rates as much as 70 percent, but, Weiss said, "there has to be somebody judging the performance."

Devens has begun to curtail her daughter's driving privileges for carrying other teens in the car and not wearing a seat belt. But she acknowledged she could do more. "I think parents have to be stronger than I was and have more consequences," she said.

Ben Ellison, after his drive past the seafood shacks and rainbow Victorians of Easton, returned to his parents' house and removed the CarChip. "Let's see how you did," Bowman said, plugging the CarChip into a cable linked to his computer. A spiky, black-and-white graph appeared, showing speed and braking patterns. "You went 55 here."

"The speed limit!" Ben said. Bowman scanned the graph: no red lines indicating risky driving behavior. "You passed, Ben," he said.

"If I have to go through this every day, I swear to God I'll go to my room and cry," Ben replied.

"But this is what a caring parent would do," his mother said.

"Or a spy," Ben said. "Put yourself in my shoes."

"Maybe I can't do that anymore," his mother said. Partly, she said, because of Megan Batdorf. Tall and athletic, a 16-year-old classmate of Ben's, she took him for a ride in her Corvette in December. Days later, driving to visit another friend, she hit a truck and was killed.

"Maybe he's going to be mad," Schauer said, looking at her son. "But I just can't hand the keys over and say, 'Off you go.' "