Kathy Stewart, wtop.com

WASHINGTON – Most parents spend time teaching their teens how to drive, but they may be leaving out one of the most important skills — driving in bad weather.

Even in states like Virginia and Maryland, which have Graduated Driver Licensing programs, the programs do not require practice hours in bad weather.

“The fact of the matter is they have to know how to negotiate in snow and ice and that’s the hard lesson even for adults because most of us don’t know how to do it,” says Townsend.

He says that most parents just keep their teens off the road when the weather turns bad.

Teens need to learn how to drive defensively in bad weather, to watch out for cars that may stop suddenly and to drive in the tracks of the other cars.

But the biggest thing is to teach them how to handle a skid.

One of the safest ways is to take your kid to a large empty parking lot. There they can learn how to deal with skids, how to use anti-lock breaks and even how to gain traction on ice with the car being in a stopped position.

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