On December 2, 2006, my 17-year-old son, Reid, died in a one-car crash on an interstate highway in central Connecticut. When he died, Reid had had his license for eleven months.
During those months, Reid drove crash free — and I considered myself a responsible, hands-on parent. I had educated myself about Connecticut’s teen driving laws, made sure Reid understood them, gave him more than the required hours of on-the-road instruction, enrolled him in a driving school, demanded that he always wear his seat belt, and revoked his driving privileges when he had disobeyed our household’s rules.
A year after Reid’s crash, our governor formed a Task Force to overhaul Connecticut’s teen driver laws, hoping to reduce the recurring tragedies on our roads. The report stated that bereaved parents would be asked to serve. I volunteered.
While serving on that task force, I thought back to what I had been thinking during those eleven months that I supervised Reid’s driving: I assumed that the legislature, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the police had gotten together to formulate sensible rules that, if followed, would keep Reid safe. And I cannot deny that having my son drive was convenient for my wife and me; Reid provided an extra pickup and delivery service.
As our work continued, I started to realize that teen driving is more dangerous than I had understood while parenting Reid. And then this question popped into my head and would not go away: Why had I not learned all of this earlier? Had I been seduced by the convenience of having another driver in the house?
In 2008, the Task Force recommended and the legislature adopted stricter rules for 16- and 17-year-old drivers. These were:
- doubling the required hours during the learner’s permit stage
- moving the curfew from midnight back to 11:00 p.m.
- prohibiting teen drivers from transporting anyone other than parents, guardians, and siblings until they are licensed for a full year
- suspending licenses for violations (instead of just monetary fines)
- providing faster court prosecutions and driver retraining sessions
- requiring a parent or guardian to attend a two-hour safety class with each teen during Driver’s Ed
- requiring all passengers of teen drivers to wear seat belts
- allowing law enforcement to confiscate a teen’s license and impound the car for forty-eight hours if the situation warranted.
Connecticut went from one of the most lenient teen driver laws in the country to one of the strictest. The results? From 2008 to 2013, fatalities among 16- and 17-year-old drivers in Connecticut have decreased 71 percent, and all other teen driver crash and injury categories are down substantially. The stricter laws were too late for my son, but not too little for families in our state.
When the task force finished its work in 2008, there was no doubt that I had to find a way to communicate my new perspectives to other parents of teen drivers. And so, in October 2009, I launched my national blog, From Reid’s Dad. In 2013, I published my book Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving (Chicago Review Press). Publishers Weekly has called the book, “A concise, practical and potentially lifesaving book that should be required reading for every parent before their teen gets behind the wheel.” All proceeds are donated to the Reid Hollister Memorial Fund, which is part of the endowment of a church in Hartford and supports infant and toddler education and traffic safety programs.
For more information on driving safety, click here.
Tim Hollister, of Hartford, Connecticut, lost his 17 year old son in a one crash in 2006. A year later, Tim was asked to serve on a statewide task force that overhauled his state’s teen driver law, now of the strictest in the nation. Based on his service on that task force, Tim launched a national blog for parents of teen drivers, “From Reid’s Dad,” in 2009, and in 2013 published his book, Not So Fast. For his advocacy of safe teen driving, Tim has received national public service awards from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Governors Highway Safety Association.
