In a big city, the hardest part of raising a teenager is often logistics.
A 13- or 14-year-old has to get to practice, a lesson, or a friend's apartment across town, and a parent cannot always be the driver. For years the only choices were an unsupervised taxi, a city bus, or a subway ride that left a parent guessing where their kid actually was.
The big ride services now offer a supervised middle ground. Uber introduced teen accounts a few years ago, and Lyft followed in early 2026 across more than 200 markets. Both let a parent add a 13-to-17-year-old to a family account and approve solo rides. The parent gets a notification the moment a ride is requested, can watch the trip live from pickup to dropoff, and can message the driver along the way. Teens are matched only with highly rated, experienced drivers who pass extra background checks, and core safety tools — PIN verification, route-change alerts, an emergency button — stay on and cannot be switched off by the rider. The teen has to complete a short safety lesson before the first trip.
The app handles the safety. The manners are still the parent's job. A child riding alone is a guest in a working adult's car, not a passenger in a private chauffeur service. A few basics are worth covering before that first ride: greet the driver, ride in the back seat and buckle up, keep the phone down long enough to be polite, skip the messy snack, and say thank you at the end. A fair rating and a kind word cost nothing, and they mean a lot to someone earning a living one trip at a time.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
