Exclusive: Julie Bowen On the Nerve-Wracking Phase of Teaching Teens to Drive

If you feel like you’re the last to know about anything happening in your teenager’s life, Julie Bowen is right there with you.

“Being in the dark is a terrifying milestone for me,” the actress and mom of three teen boys, 17-year-old Oliver and 15-year-old twins John and Gustav, confesses during a chat with SheKnows. “Like, is that a girlfriend? Are you guys involved? Thank God for the brothers, because they’ll sometimes indicate, ‘Yeah, this happened … yes, they were going out’ — or, sorry,” — she corrects her teenage terminology — “‘They were in a ‘situationship.‘”

It’s hard to go from knowing everything about your kids to being very much out of the loop. But as any parent of teenagers can attest, there are a lot of things that What to Expect While You’re Expecting just didn’t warn you about (the nerve!) … like “situationships” or anything else, really. Raising a teen can be a rough road, especially once you get to the point where literal roads are involved. Learning to drive is one of those big milestones that bring teenagers more freedom and their parents more gray hairs, and Bowen is in the thick of it; we were able to commiserate over the ups and downs of having a teen driver thanks to her recent partnership with Hyundai, recognized by U.S. News & World Report as the manufacturer of some of the best cars for teen drivers.

“My biggest concern is their overconfidence about driving in general,” the Modern Family star says of her boys. “They think they know everything, and then they’re afraid to admit what they don’t know.” Is it because they’re gamers, who think their years of “driving” race cars onscreen equates to real-life experience? We agree that we aren’t sure, but one thing is for certain: you can’t just crash into something and then “respawn” IRL, and there are very real — and very risky — variables associated with actually being on the road. “[Video game] tracks don’t have stop signs and drunk, distracted people merging onto the 101,” Bowen quips.

When we’ve got new drivers on the road, surrounded with distractions, it helps a little to know we have the technology available to track their location in real time. Most of us are glad it wasn’t around when we were teenagers, but it’s a definite advantage now that we’re parents. And though you’d be hard-pressed to get them to admit it, teenagers don’t always mind someone knowing where they are. “My kids are always like, ‘Mom, why are you tracking me? … You’re such a weird stalker,'” laughs Bowen. “But it does make them feel safe. It makes me feel better, too.”

Of course, with all the technologies we have at our disposal, there isn’t a single safety feature available that can prevent poor teenage decisions. That fact isn’t lost on Bowen, or any other parent of teens, hence the lecture we’re all familiar with. It’s a parental speech that often elicits an eye roll and an “I knoooooow, Mom,” — but, hopefully, it’s also the one that replays in our teens’ heads when they’re in a potentially-precarious situation.

“‘You’re never going to get in trouble if you call me, if you think you’re in any kind of a situation where driving is a bad idea,'” Bowen says she (constantly) tells her kids, in typical mom fashion. “Yes, you can have all the safety features in the world … but there’s no substitute for using your judgment when you’re with a bunch of idiot teenagers who may or may not be impaired on anything, and that’s a no driving time. They’re so bored of hearing me say, ‘No pills, no powders. Never, never, never, never get behind the wheel of a car when you’ve been in the room and you smelled something funny. Yes, take an Uber. I’ll go broke on Ubers.'”

Luckily, Bowen says the only teen driving drama she’s dealt with so far was when one of her sons accidentally ripped a bit of siding off the garage with the car. “That’s why I got psyched about the whole Hyundai opportunity, because they have so many safety features and things like the automatic backup … which makes my kids feel so much more confident about, you know, not ripping the wall off of the garage again,” she laughs. “Like, maybe once was enough.”

Before you go, check out how these celebrity parents’ tales about teaching their teens how to drive.