This weekend's New York Times featured an opinion piece by noted polemicist (and better mom than you) Caitlin Flanagan that addressed the decrease in the number of 16-year-olds with driver's licenses.

"That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver's licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third," she writes. Interesting! Why might that be? According to Flanagan, it's because kids are happy having mom and dad chauffeur them around.

Apart from being more comfortable around their folks than previous generations, Flanagan suggests that the rising costs of car insurance and driver's education programs are also to blame for keeping teens on the passenger side (but oddly fails to note that the ever-rising gas costs most working adults can barely afford might also play a role). Also: "Teenagers report that they don't need to drive: their parents are willing to take them where they want to go, and they are content to ride shotgun with Mom, texting and yakking all the way to the mall." The teenagers who "reported" this aren't quoted in Flanagan's article, of course.

We wonder if the actual reason more teens aren't driving is not because of some underground, national movement to suddenly tolerate parents' existence, but because of the graduated licensing laws most states now have in effect, which severely curtail the freedom of younger drivers.

Though each state is able to customize its graduated licensing programs, most adopt a model that restricts everything from the number of passengers a 16-year-old can have in the car—by and large, passengers must be a family member or at least 18-, 21- or in some cases, 25-years old—to the hours they can be on the road. Most states do not allow 16-year-old drivers to be on the road between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.—give or take, depending on state.

So unless "Chloe," the fictional teen Flanagan uses as the centerpiece of her article, has a college-aged boyfriend and is allowed to be out past 10 p.m.—and we are fairly sure Flanagan would roundly disapprove of both these scenarios, leading as they do to blowjobs—she's probably just waiting until she's 18 to get her full, unrestricted license and drive far, far away.