Back seat learners

IF YOU'RE a menace behind the wheel of a car then your children will probably be bad drivers too. American researchers have found that the offspring of drivers with a bad accident record are also likely to have a disproportionate number of accidents when they start to drive themselves.

"If parents set a bad example it is logical that the child will follow suit, says Jane Eason, a spokeswoman for Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. "Parents should set an example. It's never too early to teach people about road safety."

Susan Ferguson of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and her colleagues looked at the accident records of 140,000 families in North Carolina, comparing the records of parents with their children between the ages of 18 and 21. They found that the children of parents who had been in at least three crashes in the previous five ...

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