Rightly or wrongly, we're all accustomed, to some extent, to blaming our parents for some things, whether it is our inability to find a suitable life partner, our career choices or our emotional vulnerability.
However, you can now add 'driving' and a predilection to car accidents to the list of things that parents are responsible for. This is because, according to a psychologist involved in the Kids in Car campaign, "children are automatically programmed to mimic the actions of people who are important to them. Unfortunately young developing children do not have the skills to distinguish between good or bad driving habits and will reflect this behaviour in later life".
Kids in Car is a road safety campaign in Scotland aimed at getting parents to understand the role they play in helping mould the future driving behaviours of their children and therefore their likelihood of becoming involved in a car accident.
"Parents will wrongly assume their children somehow remain unaffected by such behaviours as gesturing, shouting or simply speeding. To create better drivers for tomorrow we need to look at how we drive today," added the psychologist and driving behaviour specialist, who, in his previous professional life, was a police traffic sergeant.
Unfortunately, it seems that many parents are from the old fashioned "do as I say but not as I do" school of parenting when it comes to driving, with a survey of more than 1,000 finding that, although 34 percent wanted their kids to show patience and restraint behind the wheel, 45 percent confessed to exceeding the speed limit or being impatient while behind the wheel.
"As parents we try to set them a good example in every aspect of life, why should this stop when we get behind the wheel?" asked Scottish transport minister Derek Mackay.
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