Make the most of the hours you spend in the car supervising your son or daughter.
Driving Together: Supervising with Confidence
Helping Parents Build Safer, More Confident Drivers — Without the Stress
Supporting a learner driver is one of the biggest responsibilities a parent takes on — and most of us step into it with outdated knowledge, unconscious habits, and no training for the job.
Driving Together is a personalised 90‑minute coaching session designed to help Canberra parents supervise with confidence, clarity, and calm.
The moment your child gets their ACT learner licence, you become their primary supervising driver — responsible for guiding them through up to 100 hours of logbook practice.
Over the coming months, you’ll sit beside them for hours — through suburban streets, on highways, wet roads, and maybe in peak-hour traffic — guiding them through many of the hours of supervised practice required before they are elidgeable to get their Ps.
It’s a bigger responsibility than most parents realise. And most of us walk into it completely unprepared.
Not because we can’t drive — we’ve been doing that for so many years that we don’t give driving a second thought. But knowing how to drive and knowing how to teach a learner driver safely are two very different skills.
When you are comfortable driving, it is very easy to unconsciously overlook many dangers and challenges learner drivers encounter.
Plus, the road rules, best-practice driving techniques, and the way we think about road safety have changed, in some cases considerably, since most of us started driving.
If you learnt to drive in another state, also be aware that there are many road rules that differ between states and territories.
“Most supervising drivers are unknowingly passing on bad habits that were outdated the day they formed them!“
Chris Edwards
Your child is at the most impressionable stage of their driving life.
The habits they form in their first 100 hours are the ones that will stick. If those hours are spent absorbing your unconscious shortcuts alongside your genuine skill, that’s exactly what they’ll carry into their years of solo driving.
One of the key goals of this 90-Minute Driver Coaching Session is to help you see your own driving clearly again — and give your learner the cleanest possible foundation to build on.
Safer ACT Drivers
This 90-minute coaching session will give you a taste of the quality of instruction your teenager will receive from an Authorised Driving Instructor, so that the hours you spend together in the car are genuinely constructive — for them and for you.
Many parents find they come away as noticeably better, more conscious drivers themselves.
Why Supervising Drivers Miss What Driving Instructors See
Think about the last time you drove to the supermarket. Did you consciously decide when to check your mirrors? Did you think about your hand position on the wheel, your following distance, or the moment you began to brake? Probably not. You just drove.
This happens to all of us. After years behind the wheel, driving becomes automatic — as natural and unconsidered as walking. The brain hands control to muscle memory, freeing your conscious mind for the radio, a conversation, or thinking about why you are going to the shops anyway! (Note that this lack of concentration also leads to many an accident!)
But here’s the problem. When you sit beside a learner, that same autopilot works against you. The habits you’ve formed over decades — some good, some not so good — have become invisible to you. You can no longer see them clearly enough to describe them, let alone teach them. And some of what felt right when you learned to drive simply isn’t best practice anymore.
Every experienced driver develops habits — but not all of them align with current ACT road rules or best‑practice driving techniques. I’ve developed this coaching session is a unique opportunity, for parents in particular, to pause and ask yourself:
What am I actually modelling? And, what could I do better — both as a teacher, and as a driver?
A Personalised 90‑Minute Coaching Session for Parents
Most of this coaching session takes place in your own car — the vehicle your learner will use for their ACT logbook hours. The goal is to prepare you and your child for real conditions in the best possible way.
How My 90-minute Supevising Driver Coaching Session Works
- Meet your driving coach. The learner and supervising drivers meet me, understand the program’s approach, and ask any questions about what the months ahead will involve.
- In-car supervising driver training. I work with parents — in your car, on local roads — covering current best-practice instruction techniques, you’ll learn how to give clear and calm guidance, and how to create the right environment for a learner to build confidence.
- Your driving habits revisited. With your driving coach in the car, supervising parents get honest, supportive feedback on their own driving — this ensures you’re modelling the safest, most up‑to‑date driving behaviours.
- Road rules update. A practical refresh of relevant road rules and driving practices that have changed — so the instruction your child receives from you over their supervised driving hours is accurate, consistent, and current.
- A shared starting point. By the end of the session, everyone — the learner and supervising drivers alike — are aligned on the approach, the expectations, and the journey ahead. This shared foundation dramatically reduces stress and misunderstandings later.
- Optional: Life‑Coaching Framework for Teenagers. For families interested in deeper support, we can discuss an optional life‑coaching support that can be integrated into driving lessons for boys, girls, or non-binary students.
What May Have Changed Since You Got Your Licence?
ACT road rules and recommended driving practices evolve over time, and many supervising drivers are surprised by how much has changed.
Here are some of the areas where supervising parents most commonly discover their knowledge is out of date. For example:
- Give-way rules and lane discipline in roundabouts have been updated in most states
- Mobile phone laws: Restrictions for learners and supervisors are significantly stricter than many parents realise
- Recommended following distances: The three-second rule has replaced older distance-based guidance for most conditions
- Peer group passengers: Curfue and peer group passenger laws for P platers have changed in recent years
- Speed zone changes: School‑zone and shared‑zone speed limits aren’t the same across Australia. Each state and territory sets its own rules.
- Steering practices have changed over the last few decades, and with good reason.
These aren’t small details — outdated knowledge can undermine your learner’s ACT driving test preparation and create unsafe habits.
A supervising driver who corrects their teenager based on outdated knowledge creates confusion, erodes trust, and can entrench habits that will need to be unlearned before a test.
Supervising Your Child Learning to Drive is a Great Opportunity to Bond
The ACT Government provides a booklet about supervising a learner driver, which I suggest you read. But nothing beats a one-on-one, in-car coaching session customised for you and your child.
Supervising your child as they do their 100 hours of supervised driving is more than a requirement — it’s a chance to build safe driving habits and strengthen communication between the parent and learner driver.
These hours are, for most teenagers, the longest sustained period of one-on-one time they will spend with a parent at this age.
This time is formative — not just for their driving, but for their confidence, their relationship with responsibility, and their sense of what it means to be trusted with something serious.
The way you sit beside your teenager in that car — how calm you are, how clearly you communicate, how you respond when they make a mistake — teaches them something about how to handle pressure, how to receive feedback, and how to recover from errors.
These are life skills, delivered in a driving lesson.
Many parents and teenagers think of the mandatory 100 hours of driving experience as a burden. A tiresome, grueling slog along highways on unnecessary journeys to log kilometres. I counsel you to reframe your thinking around this and view it as a great opportunity to grow together.
“When your son or daughter gets their driving licence, it won’t be long before they are off experiencing life without you.
The 100 hours aren’t just practice kilometres; they’re 100 hours of opportunity for you and your child to spend quality time, working through something hard together.”
Chris Edwards
Interested in my 90‑Minute Supervising Driver Coaching Session?
My supervising driver coaching sessions are suitable for learners at any stage — whether your child has just received their ACT learner’s licence or has already begun clocking up their supervised hours.
If you’re curious about how it all works, have questions, or just want to find out whether this might be the right fit for your family, feel free to reach out.
