Your teen's probably not jumping up and down for joy at the thought of enduring a series of lectures about driving from their parents. Your son's pretty sure that within a week or two he's going to drive better than you, and your daughter would prefer that you just give them the car keys, let their social life blossom, and get the heck out of the way. But most teens don't intuitively understand which driving skills are the most important, or which routes are the most dangerous. So your real job is to get your teen to buy into a more lengthy and comprehensive program than they probably are expecting or would want. And it goes both ways. You have to commit to it as well. So one of the best things you can do to get your team's commitment is to sign what I call a crash-proof agreement. This is simply a document where you state what you're going to do and what the teen's going to do and you get rewards and penalties built in for your driving behavior and use of the car. It can be a real incentive, a good behavior modifier, and it puts into writing the things that are really important. They have been demonstrated to have a big impact on crash rates. You don't have to make one up yourself. There's lots of them available online. Just Google Driving Contracts. Explain to your teen why you're taking this whole driving thing so seriously, and reinforce that you're both after the same thing - getting them the privilege to use an automobile. So you want to bring them into the process, you want them to understand how much you care, you need to tell them that you want their input in this whole process, that you're going to be flexible with them to some degree, but the program is not negotiable. And you're not going to stop it just because Heather's parents aren't making her do this. It's just way too important.