"So it's three now, right?" Garrett asked this at dinner on July 30, the day after his license turned six months old. He'd clearly been counting. He'd also clearly checked the state's rules himself, because he said "non-family passengers under 19" in the exact words.
Yes, it's three now. Under Missouri law. Our house is a different jurisdiction.
Missouri's intermediate license has a passenger rule in two steps. For the first six months after you get it, a driver can have only one passenger under 19 who isn't immediate family. After those six months, the limit goes up to three. The nighttime rule doesn't change: no driving between 1 and 5 a.m. unless a licensed adult 21 or older is with you, with exceptions for school, work and emergencies. At 18, with a clean record, he can move to a full license.
Garrett got his intermediate license on January 29, so the six months ran out at the end of July. Lainey has never counted against the limit, since she's family. She has reminded everyone of this every day since February.
What we allow
Two. Not three. At least for now.
Here's how Tina and I got there, and how I explained it to him. A lot of what makes a new driver less safe isn't the steering or the braking. It's attention. Every friend in the car is another person talking, laughing, holding up a phone, wanting the music changed. One friend in the passenger seat is a conversation. Three friends is a party in a car, and the person driving the party is 16.
Two is a compromise. It lets him drive a couple of friends to a game or to get food without someone getting left out, and it keeps the car from turning into the lunch table. I also pointed out that the Civic is a compact sedan. Three teenagers in the back seat would be a lot of elbows near his headrest.
We're not making it permanent. We told him we'd look at it again after the first month of senior year, and again at Christmas. What would move it: no near misses, no surprises on the driving-score app, and continuing to follow the rules we already have, like the phone in the console and the arrival text.
How we talked about it
The conversation went better than I expected, mostly because we didn't spring it on him. We'd told him back in the winter that the state's six-month mark wasn't automatically our six-month mark. So when he asked, it was a discussion and not a surprise.
Things that helped:
- We let him make his case first. His argument was basically that he'd been careful for six months and he'd earned it. That's a fair argument, and I said so.
- We gave reasons, not just a number. He may not agree with them. He at least knows we're not just saying no to say no.
- We tied it to his record, not his age. The limit goes up when the driving shows it should, not on a date.
- We were honest about July. He scraped a light pole backing out of a parking space on July 1, alone, at four miles an hour. Not a big deal, and he's paying back his half of the $640 fix. But it was a reminder that small mistakes still happen, and friends in the car make small mistakes more likely.
He didn't love it. He also didn't argue past dinner, and by the next day he'd already planned out which two friends were riding with him to the first football game.
The other rule that changed
We did loosen one thing. Our original "no highway with friends" rule is now "no highway with friends after dark." He's taken I-29 plenty of times alone and with us, and a daytime run down to the stores on the south end with one friend in the car is fine.
School starts in a couple of weeks, and the first passenger who matters most is his sister. He'll be driving Lainey to school most mornings, which takes some miles off the van and some minutes off Tina's day. Lainey has already claimed the front seat for the year, and I suspect his two-friend allowance will mostly be spent on figuring out who has to sit in the back.