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Sitting next to my teen daughter, she in the driver's seat and me in the passenger's seat for our third driving lesson, I had a flashback.

My mind drifted to the day after her birth, 15 years earlier. I was lying on my back and she was napping, her tiny stocking-capped head resting against my rib cage, each of us feeling the other's warmth and heartbeats. I remembered thinking about the wondrousness of birth, the immaculate beauty of a newborn and the performance capabilities of the modern diaper.

Screech! I was jolted from my reverie by a dumped clutch as our family car lurched across the empty parking lot.

"Sorry, Dad," she said, wondering aloud how her parents could be so thoughtless as to inflict upon her a manual transmission while all her friends were learning on automatics.

It goes without saying my daughter is a competent young lady -- intelligent, attentive and dexterous. In my fumbling paternal way, I have tried over the years to teach her a thing or two, but typically she already knows those and more.

It's actually nice to have a fleeting upper hand, experiencing a skill I can do robotically and so far, she can't do at all.

Earlier in the week, I sat through an excruciating evening presentation for young drivers and their parents at Christiansburg High School, where a parade of pedantic teachers, administrators and law enforcement people downloaded a weighty cargo of horrifying statistics about teens behind the wheel.

For instance, your child, or shall I say my child, is roughly 126,000 times more likely to have an accident before her next birthday than the members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club. Teenagers, at 16, have the attention span of cocker spaniels (with all due respect to cocker spaniels) and don't develop into functional human beings, attention-wise, until at least their mid-20s. Furthermore, these teens are physically incapable of just doing one thing at a time, like driving, and will preternaturally gravitate toward adjusting the radio, putting on make-up or downing a 16-ounce Mellow Yellow, or some combination, every 12 microseconds.

We were told that cell phones are a real driving hazard. Some states have restricted their use when driving, but not Virginia. My daughter's fingertips haven't been more than a millimeter away from her phone since Day 1, and I'm sure she'd be happier if it could be surgically implanted. She types cryptic messages at 48,000 words per minute and there is no thought too inconsequential to exchange at any hour of the night or day with her boyfriend. She: "I dnt fel wel & i jus snezd." He: "Im bord w/ my jb & i wnt 2 go hm."

The presenters at the young drivers session suggested we convince our child that the cell phone should camp in the trunk and not be accessed whilst driving. I proposed it here in the parking lot and received a cryogenic look of outrage and indignation.

Also it was suggested, perhaps as a twisted joke, that we see the whole driver training experience as a wonderful, familial bonding opportunity.

The meeting featured several gratuitous angst-breeding documentary films, some of the more relevant having been filmed right here in the homes and valleys of Virginia, where real parents of real deceased children choked through torrents of tears talking about the senseless losses to avoidable traffic crashes.

The irony here is that my daughter didn't accompany me to this meeting, as she had something infinitely more important to do, like riding her horse or somesuch. The presentation was completely wasted on me, as I'm already more vexed about her safety in cars than anything.

Screech! "Sorry, Dad," she repeats.

The young drivers session finished with a sermon from the local State Farm Insurance agent. He didn't venture any actual numbers regarding the projected increase in premiums associated with adding a teen driver, lest mass resuscitation efforts be necessary. But I envisioned that if our current insurance costs $500 annually to cover my wife and me, it would rise to approximately $675,000.

That is, of course, assuming we can actually find an insurance company naive enough to cover such an obvious risk as my daughter.

The bottom line is that the chance of your child having a tragic crash the first time he or she shifts into reverse is 344 percent. Any parent would have to have a bucket of walnut shells inside his or her cranial cavity to allow his or her baby to drive an actual car on an actual road before that baby reaches the age of, say, 43.

Michael Abraham lives in Blacksburg, works in Christiansburg and has always been more comfortable on two wheels than four. And definitely more comfortable driving than being a passenger.