Allstate Insurance Company recently awarded fifty $1,000 awards to various organizations that promote safe driving for teens. National Youth Traffic Safety Month was declared for the first time this past May. Allstate Insurance teamed up with NOYS (National Organizations for Youth Safety) and issued a challenge to these different youth organizations to come up with campaigns that could help decrease the number of fatalities and injuries due to teenage driving.
You might say that many teens all over the country took to the challenge and managed some creative, educational ways to promote safe driving for teenagers. How many lives has this effort saved so far? No one knows the answer. However, this $50,000 incentive has challenged teenagers to come up with solutions and essentially has put them in the driver’s seat. What better way than to engage teens at the very thing that is the problem?
By empowering teens to come up with solutions on how to save the lives of other young drivers, you are actually opening their eyes to the fact that maybe their own actions and habits are not safe either. This is actually a pretty ingenious move on behalf of Allstate Insurance and the National Organizations for Youth Safety. Everyone knows that teens sometimes just pretend to hear adults and lectures often go in one ear and out the other. However, by putting them in charge of coming up with their own solutions to this growing teenage driving problem, these teens are getting quite an education on their own and often will fix their own habits without prompting.
This contest likely brought many teenagers face to face with their own mortality and they probably did not like it. After all, most teens feel that they are invincible and have all the time in the world. Well, when preparing for this contest, these teens likely learned about the appalling statistics on the death rate of teenage drivers and how many of these accidents could have been prevented. That kind of eye-opener tends to make most people, especially impressionable teens, sit up and take notice.
An adult relaying this information will likely be met with eye-rolling and “yeah, whatever’s.” However, when you empower your teen to come up with this information on their own, well, they appreciate it all the more. Allstate Insurance and NOYS deserve some kudos for protecting new teenage drivers on the road. Now, let’s hope that your teens sit up and take notice too.