"Parents are the Key" to safe teen driving

Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control kicked off a pilot event in Ohio to promote safe teen driving. Last year, 121 teens were killed on Ohio roads.

A few things that the CDC recommends to help parents keep their kids safe:

• Talk with your teen about safe driving early and often. Emphasize your concern for their well being.
• Extend your teen’s supervised driving period. Schedule as many supervised practice driving hours as possible.
• Understand and enforce Ohio’s Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) laws. GDL laws help new drivers gain skills under low-risk conditions and are proven to reduce teen crashes and deaths.
• Enforce the rules with a parent-teen driving contract.

To learn more about this important campaign, visit http://www.cdc.gov/parentsarethekey today. Also check out the Ohio Department of Public Safety's Ohio Traffic Safety Office for more information.

Below are some images from the event of parents pledging to keep their teenager safe, and adding their pledge to the tree. Each orange key represents a teen that was killed last year on Ohio roads.