When entertainment icon Dick Van Dyke recently was involved in a car accident at the age of 97, my colleagues and I all thought it was a good time to assign a story about aging parents and driving.
“Mom turns 79 this year, and it’s the kind of discussion I don’t want to have with her in 10 years, but I know I’ll have to at some point,” one of my coworkers said.
Indeed, it is the kind of conversation that mixes every possible explosive ingredient: Family, emotions, insurance, physical danger to oneself and others plus deep-seated fears of dependence and decline.
The first thing for families to acknowledge is that the decision to take away the car keys is very much case by case, and that no blanket generalizations can be made. One person may represent a danger on the roads at age 65, while another may be perfectly fine at age 85.
So how do you handle the question of aging parents and driving? “There are three key areas – vision, cognition and motor function – that are responsible for higher crash rates for older drivers,” says Loretta Worters, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute.
If you feel your elderly parent is declining in one or more of those areas, then your family has some hard decisions to make. Here are the key factors to consider.
