America is one of the few modern societies which grants teenagers full driver's licenses before the age of 18. Without widespread, reliable public transit, this is a necessity in our culture. Because of that lack, the responsibility of transportation falls to the individual. Parents often see purchasing another vehicle for their teenage driver as newfound freedom, and they’re right to a degree: it frees them from endless chauffeur duty and allows their child to explore places and activities once only available with a parental escort.
In many other ways, it presents new risks and dangers to their child’s life. These risks are compounded with distractions like cell phones and friends in the car, even more so with drugs and alcohol. Real Life Teens DWI - Driving While Intoxicated explores some common issues around teen driving and warns of the dangers of driving while intoxicated which include a range of outcomes from a loss of personal privileges to imprisonment and death.
One thing which stood out to me during this film was how dated it felt. The intro, the style of dress, and the production quality reminded me of the content they would show us during Red Ribbon Week in elementary school. Another issue that struck me was the use of statistics and data without any accompanying graphs or sources of the information. Especially with the number of quoted statistics, it would have been helpful to be able to look up secondary information or studies to accompany related programming or sate curious minds.
Finally, there is a focus on the ‘scared straight’ methodology which many educators and psychologists claim is counter-intuitive to educating teens: Teens want to rebel, and scared straight programming simply feeds them a list of rebellious things to do. These critiques aside, Real Life Teens DWI is a decent resource for defensive driving resources and should be considered when putting together programming for driver education or road safety.
What type of library programming could use this title?
Library programming for teen drivers could benefit from the addition of this title.