April 4, 2019—If you're the parent of a teen driver, chances are you've already warned your child about the dangers of talking or texting on a cellphone when behind the wheel. But here's a safety message you may have overlooked: Don't reach for anything either.
That's a crucial caution, a new study suggests. Motor vehicle crashes are the No. 1 cause of death and disability among drivers ages 15 to 20 years. And researchers reported that reaching for something—say, food or makeup—raised a teen driver's risk of crashing by nearly seven times.
This doesn't mean cellphones aren't a risky distraction. Manually dialing, texting or browsing the web doubled a teen's crash risk. But reaching was even riskier.
For the study, researchers outfitted the cars of 82 newly licensed teen drivers with cameras and GPS devices. After one year on the road, 25 of them had one crash. And 14 had two or more. The study also found that for every second a teen's eyes were off the road, the risk of a crash jumped by 28 percent—regardless of what distracted them.
Reaching for something may be especially dangerous because teens take their eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel. Moreover, teens in particular may be so comfortable with mobile devices that they overestimate their ability to multitask while driving, the researchers speculated.
The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine .