As every parent knows, the day their teen gets a driver’s license and drives away alone for the first time is bittersweet. There’s pride in a teenager completing a right of passage. And there’s great fear over safety.

Thankfully, there is much you can do to increase safety for your teen driver. Safe driving classes, modeling good behavior, monitoring their actions and choosing a safe vehicle can help your teen drive safely and help parents ease their concerns.

To learn more about how to keep your child safe as they transition to a more mobile lifestyle, read on.

State Laws are Helping

State laws have made great strides toward increasing teen safety on the road. The current system of graduated driver licensing (GDL) requires teens to have a lot more training and discipline before they take the wheel alone.

In most cases, there’s a permit stage, a road test, and then a provisional stage. The laws also add restrictions on the hours they can drive, dictate who else can (or must) be in the car with them and contain ironclad rules about mobile phone and seatbelt use.

Since 1996, when the first three-step graduated licensing laws were passed, teen driving deaths have dropped by 50 percent as this kind of licensing became more common, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The best thing parents can do? Be relentless about obeying the licensing laws. They keep you from being the bad guy (these aren’t your rules, they’re laws) and they make your teen safer. Making your teen obey the restrictions helps other families, too, because everyone will be driving by the same rules.

Additional Class Time

Some states require teens to take a basic driver’s education course. That’s a good start, but there’s another step you can take to make your teen safer. Whether or not classroom time is part of a state’s licensing requirements, adding a defensive driving class will almost certainly make them better drivers.

The classes are kind of cool, often taught by professional drivers or law enforcement officers. They cover advanced driving techniques to avoid the hazards that can be most dangerous, such as poor road conditions, bad drivers, and debris on a highway. Some will even delve into car maintenance, so teen drivers understand that tire pressure, fluid levels and proper care for a car make them safer as well.

Monitoring Driving Activity

Parents looking to keep their children safe may also get some help from technology. You can do simple tracking by using a family phone locator, like Find My Phone on Apple or Google’s Find My Device for Android phones.

There are also scores of GPS trackers that can be used on a teen’s car, much the same way that businesses do for their fleet vehicles. They can be hidden and track a car’s real-time location and speed.

If your teen knows the car has a tracker, they may be more careful. You can remind them that it’s a safety device in case of a problem situation, like when their phone dies and they run out of gas or get lost.

Modeling Good Driving

Teens often do as they see, in the movies, on social media and in their own homes.

While parents may have 30 years of experience behind the wheel and feel they can take liberties in the car, teens don’t have that same level of experience. But once they get behind the wheel and roll down the street, the temptation to act like their parents is high.

Make it a point to model car safety for your teens. That means no texting, no multitasking and obeying the rules of the road. It also means undoing bad habits, such as rolling stops or changing lanes without a signal. It’s not always enough to say, “do as I say, not as I do.”

Choosing the Safest Car

While it may feel like car safety for teens starts by encasing them in a tank-like SUV to protect them from crashes, studies show there are reasons to question that strategy.

Crash tests performed at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety show that bigger, heavier cars have higher survival rates. That makes perfect sense. But also consider that these huge cars may be a factor in getting into those accidents in the first place.

Behavioral scientists have posited that the bigger the car, the bigger the risks a driver will take. Research from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety is showing that poor visibility and imposing grills on our increasingly bigger SUVs and trucks are contributing to America’s alarming spike in pedestrian deaths.

Bigger, heavier cars also have a greater rollover risk and are less maneuverable. A smaller, nimbler car may give drivers a better shot at avoiding accidents. The sweet spot for first-time buyers and young drivers, experts agree, is a mid-size sedan or small SUV.

If you’re ready to start looking for a safe car for your teen, you can begin looking at your budget and which models might be a good fit. One thing you can do immediately is to explore auto financing by getting pre-qualified through Credit Acceptance. The process will give you a great deal of information about what you may be pre-qualified for, and help get you on your way to a safer car for your teen driver.