As a mom of three kids, Christina Mott had been eagerly counting the days until her oldest son, Colton, got his driver's license. It falls on her to drive each of them — age 10, 12, and 16 — to three different schools every day, and then to extracurriculars and social outings. "Having him able to drive himself would free up a lot of time," she says. If only. While out one day on his learner's permit, Colton rolled through a red light and a stop sign. He panicked and decided to put his license on hold indefinitely. "Getting in crashes, that's something that frightens me a lot," Colton explains.
That means his mom is still chauffeuring three kids around their Northern California suburb. Christina, who's 46, says a lot of her fellow parents are going through the same thing: Teenagers are slamming the brakes on the time-honored rite of passage of getting a license at 16, either out of fear or because they're put off by the process or the costs. And that means a lot of Gen X parents are stuck behind the wheel longer than they had anticipated. "When I was 16, we didn't think this way about driving at all. Driving meant freedom!"
Even so, she admits Colton doesn't feel quite as ready for a license as she was at 16. "He's not very observant and tends to live in his own world. I don't think, without GPS, that he would even know how to get to the grocery store from our house that we've lived in for eight years. So, the idea of him dealing with traffic lights and other drivers makes me nervous, too."
In 1983, roughly half of US 16-year-olds had a driver's license. That number fell to 25% in 2022. Most teens will eventually get their licenses, they're just willing to wait a lot longer.
Even the CEO of Uber — a beneficiary of the Delayed Driver trend — says it's caught him off guard. He revealed he'd been struggling to convince his 18-year-old son to get a license.
"It drives me crazy" he said. "I don't know about you, but did you get a license the minute you were eligible? It was just such a thing. It was a goal in life. It represented freedom."
Delayed Driving goes hand in hand with a broader trend: Gen Z is falling behind older generations across a range of social markers. They're dating less and waiting longer to couple off and start families. They don't go out as much and drink less alcohol, in part because it's so easy to socialize, shop, and order meals online. "If you think of why those 16-year-olds — 30 or 50 years ago — were so anxious to get their license, a lot of it had to do with wanting to drink and date". That's still the case — Gen Z is just slowing down the march into adulthood.
Add to that the convenience of rideshare apps like Uber and the promise of self-driving cars, and the urgency of getting a license has diminished. "They don't see their future as necessarily involving a car". It’s believed the trend will be a boon for autonomous vehicles. The situation has sent a lot of Gen X parents to online forums like Reddit to vent their frustrations that they're "chauffeuring kids old enough to drive themselves." One described her kid as a "21-year-old passenger prince."
Rather than teenagers begging their parents to let them drive, more parents are the ones doing the begging. "It's almost like pushing him off the cliff," Giselle Greenwood, who lives in Houston, says of her 17-year-old son's resistance to getting a license. It's the same for his classmates, nearly all of whom still depend on their parents or their friends' parents to get them around. "It becomes 'rock, paper, scissors' as far as who's going to take who to whose house. We have a text thread of lacrosse parents, and that's where we make the plea for help."
Like Mott, Greenwood is not unsympathetic to her teen's reluctance. Houston is ranked among the most unsafe cities for driving. She wonders if she's more of a helicopter parent than she realizes. "Sometimes, I fear I may have passed my fears on to him," she admits.
Indeed, a lot of parents worry about pushing their teens to drive before they're adequately ready — or have a handle on their screen use. Teenage drivers spend about 21% of car rides glancing at their phones, and about 26% of those glances lasted 2 seconds or longer. Even if they put their phones away, growing up with screens can change how Gen Zers navigate the road.
Still, driving is an essential skill, and Greenwood plans to take a more stringent approach with her younger son, who's 14. "I'm just throwing him behind the wheel as soon as he can," she says. "I'm not doing this again."
Even a strong parental nudge isn't always enough to get a kid to the DMV. When Sarah Wilson stopped offering to ferry her 16-year-old around town, her daughter didn't sign up for driver's ed; she started taking the bus. She's now in college, and still doesn't know how to drive. She gets around mostly on her bike or by catching a ride with friends. "It becomes frustrating when she can't help with long drives or simple errands," says Wilson, who's 50. "It's a form of independence I want her to have, even if she's been slow to claim it."