Driving Lessons

Teaching the kids to drive has been one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced with parenting so many children who came to our family as older adoptees. For many of our children, they never rode in a car or only rode in a car a handful of times before they were adopted. For this reason, we struggled with a few additional challenges, like children who had motion sickness every time we got in the car for the first six months or so after they came home. We found that Dramamine could help with this, but it usually made them fall asleep.

The written portion of the test can be somewhat of a challenge for kids that are still learning English. We’ve even tried having one of them take her test in Spanish, but what we found was that she had lost most of her Spanish and really wasn’t fluent in English either. She was basically lost between languages. After several tries and lots of one on one with mom explaining words she didn’t understand, she finally did pass the test.

Not many people can say that they started teaching drivers education to four of their children at one time, but that’s exactly the way it has happened for us. On round one, we had Elizabeth, Rebekah, Andrew, and Abigail. Round two, which was only about six months later, was Jacob and Joshua. We are now on our third round of drivers ed. This time it’s Naomi, Julia, Samuel and Hannah. We’ve also recently applied for Nathaniel and Sarah to start the written portion of driver’s ed.

Riding in the car with new drivers can be a pretty scary experience! We’ve had one child who became so stiff and pale that we worried he would pass out behind the wheel. One of our daughters, who we never were able to help get a license for before she left home, thought it was funny when we were about to hit a tree or drive through a fence. You can imagine how upset that would make her father and I. We reached a point where we realized that it was not worth the risk that it was putting everyone in and that she could try to get her license when she had matured enough to take it more seriously.

It’s interesting how things work. While teaching some of the kids to drive, we are the ones who feel car sick now! You can only handle that snaking back and forth for so long before it gets to you. Most of our new drivers are learning well, but it has definitely been more of a challenge for children who grew up in orphanages. There is a lot of learning that takes place just from riding in a car for years, and some of our kids missing out on that. Today we have driving lessons with Naomi, Samuel and Hannah. Wish us luck!!! J