Legal Age to Drive Should Be Raised to 21

Teen drivers are every adult’s nightmare. With the lack of experience and maturity, both parents and fellow drivers are frightened to share the road with adolescents. Through much research, juveniles as a whole have proven to be incapable of obtaining respectable driving skills. According to “Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association,” motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death among 13-19 year old males and females in the United States. Culpable for this statistic is the three main distractions: visual (taking one’s eyes off the road), manual (taking one’s hands off the wheel), and cognitive (takings one’s mind away from the driving task). Factors causing these distractions are cell phones, passengers, and adolescent’s poor cognitive skills. Due to the adolescents being pre-mature and accident prone, the legal age to obtain a license should be 21 in order to improve young driving skills and create a safer environment on the road.
In present day society, teenagers are known for making bad decisions and not taking serious matters, seriously! Whether it’s that they’re simply immature or a victim of peer pressure, the failure to make moral decisions is a major contributing cause to such high adolescent motor vehicle crashes. On the other hand, studies have shown that teenagers may not have control over the development of their cognitive skills. Studies regarding brain development say that “During childhood and adolescence, the brain’s cortical areas thicken as neural connections proliferate. Subsequently, rarely used connections are selectively pruned away, allowing the brain to change structurally in response to it’s environment. The frontal lobes are among the last to show these structural changes. The frontal lobes are a region of the brain that supports roles such as the ability to overcome emotional excitement, regulate impulsive actions, and anticipate consequences” (Johnson). In other words, teenagers aren’t naturally able to make logical