Amaxophobia - the intense anxiety and avoidance of driving or riding in a vehicle.
If you have a teenager, they may have it.
Last year, the Washington Post noted that current teenagers eligible for drivers licenses were declining to get them. They also noted the ones who did, the 16- and 17-year-olds are not driving nearly as much as their predecessors did at that age and have a far different view of driving than their parents did when they were that age. The Post notes:
“Unlike previous generations, they don't see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.”
A statistic that shocked me was the finding that 80 percent of adults in their early twenties had their licenses in 2020 — down 10 percent from 1997.
I remember my teens.
I couldn’t wait to get a license. In Mississippi, it used to be legal for a 13-year-old to hold a “farm license” to drive tractors, farm trucks and other farm equipment and for a full driver’s license, you could get a permit at fourteen and a half and a regular driver's license at 15.
I did.
My first car was a 1965 Chevy Impala my dad bought for $500. Looking back, it was a great car – the small block 283 V8 was a great engine – and for the time, the two-barrel carburetor was pretty sippy on petrol. It had a back seat big enough for a family of four to live in and a trunk that could easily hold four or five bodies. Perfect for a high school kid.
I was allowed to drive it to school, to my after-school job and home. Eventually I was allowed to take it out on Friday and Saturday as long as I could keep tires on it, gas in it and insurance paid up.
It was a landmark of my independence.
But kids are giving up on independence.
They will refuse to drive because 1) they don’t need to because mom or dad will take them where they want to go, 2) they don’t want to work to keep gas in them and the oil changed, and 3) they just don’t want that responsibility.
In 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that while nearly half of 16-year-olds were driving in the 1980s, just a quarter were by 2017 and the Washington Post, drawing on data from the Federal Highway Administration, seems to suggests the data keeps the number at about the same 25 percent in 2020.
Maybe it has bottomed out.
Maybe not.
Maybe it is social media. We used to have to go somewhere to see our friends, kids today don't have to do that.
Just last year, the Huffington Post said kids were victims of High Anxiety! (that’s a Mel Brooks reference for those under the age of 40):
“In a recent survey from Aceable, a company offering online driving and real estate courses, 73% of California parents reported that their teens were experiencing driving anxiety. Fifty-four percent said the anxiety was intense enough to be called a phobia.”
The funny thing about all the articles on this subject that venture causes for this phobia mention all sorts of stuff, and of course, list the things you, as a parent, can do to help your teem wrap their hormone fueled brains around driving.
The one cause they never deign to mention are the helicopter, every child gets a trophy, weak minded, overprotective Munchausen by Proxy parents.
A recent video showed a gorilla that had been kept in a smallish 10' x 10' cage for many years. When they attempted to release the gorilla into the wild, it made a very well worn path in the forest where it circled and paced inside that same 10' cage when it was free to roam anywhere it desired.
Our children are becoming comfortable in their secure little orbits.
we let our grandkids drive the yard tractor last year and now the 2 13 year olds are hooked, they can't wait to get their license