What I've Learned Sharing A Car With My Teen
The used car in question…which has front-end collision avoidance braking…for teens…What? An entirely sane American adult individual living in the suburbs gave up his vehicle…voluntarily?
Send in the anthropologists to study this strange creature! At once!
An Unreliable Narration Concerning How I Got HereWhen parents spend 16 years chauffeuring their child to and from roughly 10,000 appointments, sports activities and supposedly-fun events, it takes no social scientist to understand why they will potentially spend a lot to get the teen moving independently in her own very separate vehicle.
“Drive yourself, damn it! I’m having a second Margherita!” says the voice in every father’s head -
image courtesy of PBSIt just so happens that Oscar the Grouch is my oldest mentor. Now, in my defense, I was under the false impression back in 1976 that ALL characters on Sesame Street were adult role models I could choose freely to emulate. Ah, yes, early training in American-style individualism. Pick your own media hero. Yet, I should have known by that tender age that the immaculate state of “Mom’s house” meant I might not emulate someone living in a filthy metal trash can. Oops.
Per the Code of Grouch, handing my teen a vehicle only rewarded my curmudgeonly irritation. It handed me back ten hours a week, at least. I mean, what do I do with myself? Ten entire hours!
Well, per the Law of Inevitable Parental Frustration, I won’t be using my ten extra weekly hours to drive this:
Nope. (Cue the sound of a weeping middle-aged male). (Sob).
“But it purrs like a kitty cat when you press the accelerator,” I cry.
Tough toodles, Oscar. Pick your battles. Share the car and focus on the ten extra hours.
Yes, you read all of this correctly. A well-paid American adult male voluntarily traded in his sports car so his 16-year-old son could get a used Subaru AND then agreed to share the used car with the aforementioned teenager.
Enter the Barney-ization of fatherhood.
So much for the gritty realism of 1970s Oscar. And so much for the entitled patriarchy of Father Knows Best. Nope. As a delightful contrast to my current situation, please note that I never drove my Dad’s Chevy Caprice Classic in high school once (because it never occurred to me to ask for such verboten privilege and possibly also because my own used Caprice vehicle played James Taylor and the Doobie Brothers, not an endless loop of Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Brahms).
But, dear reader, this 21st-century father tragically born in the 20th-century can not justify paying insurance and payments on three cars (like my father did for years), not in this highly rational era of parenting where we ever diligently save for retirement and massively overpriced college educations. $1500 per month for all that diligence.
Back to the MINI, I no longer drive. (Sob).
“It’s just a toy,” my 20-century father-in-law said dismissively when he first saw my Mini Cooper four years ago, refusing to take as much as one joy ride. Ouch. Refusal of the gift and mockery? Double ouch.
And in that biting dismissal lies the truth I could not avoid as my teen approached driving age. Not when I calculated what it would cost to insure three cars with a teen driver on the policy. Don’t ask. It’s very triggering. Even the insurance on two cars keeps going up every six months when the policy renews, like some mafia extortion racket. Another $500 annually, Mr. Amica? Sure, cut off another finger. No worries. I don’t have to drive him anywhere!
But wait a minute? I work from home full-time and have no commute. So, why all this internal drama about losing the sports car? Why would I assume that I even need a car? How could any personal vehicle now be anything other than an utter “toy”?
With the MINI gone and the teen empowered by my ‘sharing,’ I could feel Tom Selleck glaring at me from the seat of his Ferrari 308 GTS.
“So disappointing, James.”
I was caught between Oscar and Magnum, two randomly acquired media mentors and their deeply held priorities.
Send in the cultural analyst! Or therapist!
The Ideology of Automotive Autonomy is Just Silly, Even in the SuburbsThe American suburb was built around the automobile. Until the spread of white-collar remote work during the pandemic, low suburban population density, and long distances to the office required a car for a mature, working adult to be deemed ‘civilized.’
While urban Millennials claim to have introduced the ‘no car, no problem’ middle-class lifestyle in the 2010s, I lived it from 1994 to 2000 in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. During graduate school, I walked, took the bus, or biked to wherever I needed to go. I was so busy studying that I did not miss having a car. Not dating anyone also helped. How? No one to impress. Back then, you see, you weren’t a legitimate dating partner in your 20s, if you were a male who didn't have a job or car. You were a loser, both culturally and in terms of evolutionary biology.
And only those also pursuing a long, post-grad program with no income understood the dating limitations of this poverty-grade, all-consuming lifestyle. So, you dated only within your miserable, alienated tribe of postgrads. Or not at all. It was messed up because both women and men generally did not want to sacrifice their professional careers to follow the other around. In other words, the only people you could feasibly date were unlikely to partner up with you for a long time.
[NOTE- I believe the modern, pragmatic “hookup” culture took off in this graduate school cohort out of structural desperation].
Growing up in the 1980s, it was so assumed that your adult identity ties directly to a specific VIN that, decades later, we 20th-century types just keep hanging on to a car even after we started working remotely and after e-commerce started bringing 50% or more of our shopping straight to our homes. We became habituated to chasing shopping impulses even though the car was mostly a way to get to work. The irony is that the flow of ‘jump-in-the-car-and-shop’ impulses did not stop as e-commerce took off in the 2010s. Those of us with cars still went out in our cars on impulse, ad hoc, whenever we wanted. We just needed to do this less and less and refused to accept it.
When I relinquished My Lady last January, what was the first thing that plummeted in frequency? Starbucks purchases. I had silently acquired a habit of jumping in my MINI convertible to grab a Nitro cold brew, which gave me an excuse to drive the MINI! Only a therapist could unravel this tautology to determine its starting point. (Sob).
For the three years I owned My Lady, I enthusiastically raised my hand to do random errands for the house… “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me! I’ll go get the milk!” Suspicious enthusiasm from a husband, yes. Very suspicious.
Despite what some non-generalizable, elite Millennials living in Manhattan, D.C., and Boston claim, the concept of a personal vehicle is alive and well. 92% of U.S. households have a car available. And, while we only have 98M registered vehicles for 260M adults, yes, of those who commute to work, 80% still drive their own vehicle alone.1
The notion of a personal vehicular need has erased a need to share a fundamental daily resource - transportation. Only the extreme costs of insurance and car loans over-ride the American desire for a personal vehicle. At some point, the cash flow sputters and debt runs out.
Or Oscar’s voice whispers in our ear - “It’s just a stupid toy.”
So, what really changes, when a grown-ass father shares a used car with his teen?
What I Had to Do To Share a Car With My TeenAccept that the Subaru is primarily the teenager’s car. What?! I know, I know. It’s a shocking inversion of the most ancient status hierarchy - age. I accept this because the kids need to get to and from school five days a week. As an internet-based consultant, I don’t need to go anywhere.
Determine when I need a car on any given day at the beginning of the day (or the night before)
a day when I have multiple errands at a time stacked up
or a trip that could not wait at all (e.g. doctor’s appt).
Accumulate errands before asking for the car. Get your entitled A.S.S. organized. Side note: it’s tough to convince your loved ones that you have organizational troubles when you hold a Ph.D. in anything. If you closed on that degree, then you can plan your f’ing errands.
Be willing to drive the kids to school to ‘obtain’ the car for the day. (Wait! I got him the car so I wouldn’t have to drive his skinny ass there and back!) Deep breath in. Deep breath out. It’s OK to backslide 3-4 times a month. The space-time continuum will remain stable. The Earth will continue to rotate. Sigh.
Find out if the ‘teen’ needs the car after school hours and then drop it back off at school and take a Lyft ride home ($16-18 a trip). This requires conversing with your teen, sharing information, and compromising. My God! Oscar did not anticipate this. If the patriarchy is dying, folks, it is dying in these very Barney-esque conversations.
Accept that, on average, 3-4 Lyft rides a month are far less than a third car plus insurance. Oh, yes, they are, if the trips are 10 miles or less.
Accept that Starbucks was always a) overpriced and b) an utterly unnecessary affordable luxury. Coffee out is not supposed to be a habit. This cultural pandemic originated in Seattle.
Enjoy not driving yourself to/from the airport for business trips! Make the client pay for it! Yeah! Stiff’em! (Oh wait, some of them are reading this publication. I need an editor.)
Enjoy more time with your dogs who resented all those Mini Cooper trips to which they were not invited!
Resist the urge to re-calculate home cash flow/budget to justify the impulsive purchase of yet another MINI!
The drive that spoiled the Beagle forever…Not sharing was way more fun.
Don’t forget to grab a copy of my new book, which will explain how “fun” became such a dominant American concept, leading to needless drama when relinquishing one’s MINI cooper convertible out of monetary common sense.
1U.S. Department of Transportatin State Motor Vehicle registration data; U.S. Census 2022 American Community Survey - My analysis of most recent data available (2022)
