Personal responsibility drives public policy

Childhood, and thus parenthood, has many milestones. Some of the most monumental of these involve motion: taking first steps, or walking through the schoolhouse door to begin kindergarten.

For the child, these milestones represent moving forward. For the parent, moving away.

This is as it should be. The point of parenthood is to prepare the child for the wider world. But that doesn’t mean these milestones dig at the parent’s heart any less.

My family recently hit another such milestone: Our older son turned 16 and got his driver’s license. All of us were excited for him. The dig arrived in the red glow of tail lights, as he drove to school for the first time.

He’s as prepared as he can be. But as I’ve told him many times, maneuvering the vehicle is the easy part. Knowing how to maneuver it in different scenarios takes experience, and the only way to get experience is to drive.

For that reason, earning a driver’s license in Georgia has gotten harder for teens. When I was an aspiring motorist 30 years ago, I needed only to pass a written test for a learner’s permit and a road test for the full license. Today, Georgians under the age of 18 must complete a 30-hour course either in a classroom or online, along with at least 40 hours of driving supervised by a parent or guardian. Even then, they receive a license with a curfew and passenger restrictions.

Helping our son navigate these new requirements got me thinking more broadly about the role – and the limitations – of public policy in protecting us from ourselves and each other. Consider driving as an illustration of how this works generally.

No driver gets the road to himself – another reminder I keep giving my son. So, we all have an obligation to avoid endangering others when driving.

Public policy commonly addresses such obligations, particularly those where access to a public space (the roads) is already controlled by the government (through the licensing of drivers, among other ways). In these cases, it’s legitimate for public policy to set the standard for gaining access.

Or as generations of parents have explained to their teenagers, driving is not a right but a privilege.

Requiring more driver education is a fine way of setting that standard. We know younger drivers not only lack experience but also, from a biological perspective, fully developed capacities for judgment. We can’t bestow extra experience upon them or speed up the brain’s developmental processes; instruction is the best substitute we have.

But the law can only do so much. At some point, personal responsibility is required.

There’s the personal responsibility of the parent to instruct and to be truthful about their instruction: The law requires a parent to attest that the would-be teen driver has completed the 40 hours of driving time since obtaining a learner’s permit. Of course, that’s the minimum. No law says a parent can’t require more of his own child.

There’s the personal responsibility of the parent and the teenager to continue accumulating experience in less stressful situations before moving to more stressful ones, even after the license has been granted.

There’s the personal responsibility of young drivers to comply with the restrictions on their initial license, such as not driving anyone outside their immediate family for the first six months. And there’s the personal responsibility for all of us to follow the rules of the road and keep ourselves, our passengers and other motorists out of harm’s way.

None of that will eliminate traffic accidents; they’re called “accidents” for a reason. Even a shift to having only autonomous vehicles on the road would not eliminate human error and accidents. It would simply change the types of human error, and thus accidents, that occurred.

Again, you can apply this lesson to many other issues: Good public policy can point the way, but personal responsibility has to take it from there. On that, your mileage will not vary.

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