My youngest child was starting sixth grade when we moved to New York City and, naturally, I worried about what challenges the big city might have in store. But when it comes to adolescence, there is at least one major advantage to being a parent in Manhattan: Kids don't have access to cars.
This is not parental paranoia. The mix of drinking and driving is as dangerous to adolescents as you think it is, dangerous when the adolescents are driving, and also when they are passengers. Dr. Scott Hadland, an adolescent and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Medical Center, said that alcohol is a factor in half of the deaths of people under 21 from motor vehicle crashes. Those deaths are about an equal mix of drivers and passengers, and in many of the passenger deaths, the driver was 21 or older.
