Teens can show you some real dexterity when it comes to text messaging but when you combine texting with operating a motor vehicle, you can have a recipe for trouble.

Handing the keys to the car to your teen can be scary enough for a parent but throw in the distraction of a cell phone and texting and it can go from scary to deadly.

We put some teens on a closed course, gave them a cell phone and put them to the test.

Our teenagers are 16-year old Megan Trout and 16-year-old Zach Ford. Both are taking driving lessons through the National Safety Council in Omaha.

On the day of the test, we checked them on the cone course. Without a cell phone both made it through pretty well but then they were asked to text while driving, they quickly ran into problems.

"This is harder than it looks," Zach said. He took down three cones.

"Doing this one-handed, this is hard," he said.

Out on the street, those cones could have been other cars or pedestrians.

Megan had a similar experience on the test track. Cones toppled.

When the text test was finished, Zachary Ford told us he, " learned not to drive with a cell phone at all."

Megan Trout said, "It was a lot harder to get through the cones with the phone."

We sat down with Megan's parents as they watched her test.

Her mother, Pam Trout said, "She is a textaholic. She does text a lot and I don't want to see that. I don't want to see that at all as she's driving."

Her father, Tony Trout told us, "I'm going to preach to her and preach to her -- no phone use. If you've got to make a call, pull over. How much time is it going to take to pull over and make a call? It could not only save your life but somebody else's."

In fact, research shows that talking on a cell phone can make you as dangerous on the road as a drunk driver.

The National Safety Council's Bill Mulherin says, "If you're on a cell phone while you're driving, it can actually impair you beyond our current legal limit of .08."

Getting that point across to teen drivers is the challenge for every parent.

Mulherin says, "The hardest part is getting the teens to think beyond, well that's them, it's not me and so firsthand experience with something like we did here today shows them that they are just as affected as every other driver."

We focused on teens in this test because while just seven percent of drivers in Nebraska are teenagers, they are involved in up to 36-percent of crashes involving cell phone distractions.

There is a law in Nebraska that prohibits teens from using a cell phone while driving. For parents who would like their teen to get some training behind the wheel, visit the National Safety Council's Web site.