How do I talk to my parent about giving up driving?

Because of what raising it concedes.

Karen Fingerman at the University of Texas at Austin asked middle-aged adults how they handle disagreement with their aging parents, and how they handle the same thing with their own grown children. Toward the parents, the strategies skewed passive: accept it, sidestep it, let the thing drop. The argument they would have out loud with a son gets swallowed with a mother.

Her sample reports on middle-aged adults in both directions and doesn't isolate adult children as a group of their own, so take it as a tendency rather than a proof. What the tendency points at is that the avoidance isn't laziness. Saying it out loud concedes that your parent's independence now has an edge to it, and neither of you has agreed to that.

It's easier. Kindness isn't quite what it is.

Silence is legible. Your parent notices the topic everyone steps around, and what they take from it is that a judgment has already been made and nobody intends to discuss it with them. Saying nothing doesn't spare them the judgment. It spares them only the chance to answer it.

It also costs you the thing you were after. Your parent has very likely thought about this harder than you have, on more nights, and has never once been asked. Leaving it alone keeps you guessing at a position they already hold.

Bring a question rather than a verdict.

The instinct is to arrive with the conclusion already reached and then manage the reaction to it. The trouble is that it casts your parent as the subject of a decision instead of a participant in one, which is the thing they will react to, more than to the driving. It's also usually a bluff. Most adult children have no power to enforce a conclusion here, and it is worth knowing that about your own position before you rehearse a speech built on it.

So open the subject and hand them the floor. Can I ask you something I've been avoiding? How are you feeling about driving these days? Then stop talking. The sentence isn't there to win agreement in the next four minutes. It's there to make the subject speakable, which right now it isn't.

Then something has still moved.

A first conversation about this rarely ends in agreement, and treating agreement as the test guarantees you'll read an ordinary outcome as a failure. What one conversation can do is establish that the subject is open, that you'll raise it with them rather than around them, and that their read on it counts. Any later decision has to stand on that ground, and the ground isn't there while nobody has spoken.

If the safety risk is immediate, that's a different problem on a different clock, and a physician or your state's licensing authority belongs in the answer rather than a conversation you carry alone.

Related: Why does my parent resist help? covers the tone underneath this, and Talking to the People Who Taught You to Talk is the longer argument.