Over a lifetime, there’s probably a balance in the good and bad surrounding the children we produce. But there are certainly times when we bitterly regret taking the plunge, as it were. There are those times at school or when early experiments with cigarettes and alcohol go horribly wrong. There’s all that attitude we get. But the worst comes when we’re supposed to calmly shell out on driving lessons and then, to add insult to injury, to buy a cheap car for them to drive and to pay for the insurance. The fact finding cheap car insurance for teens is like winning the lottery seems not to occur to them as they assert the divine right to disappear from sight for hours on end, driving who knows where, while all we can do is sit in prayer the next call will not come from the police or hospitals telling us when we can come in to collect the broken bits of body.
Then, suddenly, we might be tempted by the arrival of telematics – not those fuzzy TV characters with rhubarb growing out of their heads, you understand. The Co-op, we can’t go wrong with them, can we? have been running ads for their Young Driver Scheme. Instead of the usual “the sky’s the limit” approach to insuring the young, they will fit black boxes that will watch our kids like a hawk. If their spy finds our children have suddenly converted into angels on four wheels, we will be rewarded with lower premiums. That sounds like such a good deal until we remember our children are more likely to be recorded hotdogging around the local park at 2 in the morning – a stunt that will ensure we never see a premium under four figures for the next however many years until they leave the nest and start paying their own way in life. So although there’s that terrible lure of cheap car insurance for us to pay, we parents have to remember Big Brother watches and sees both good and bad. And the bad can be very expensive for us, if not for our young drivers of the year.