Sure, it’s not hard to roll back only a short distance if it’s not too steep. But steep hills do show up, and idiots do stop right behind you, and while you can do it perfectly without the handbrake almost all the time, I like to use the handbrake just to make sure.
I thought that the handbrake system was separate? No?
Agreed - all the cars I’ve ever worked on, the handbrake was a direct cable connection to the brake shoes on the rear wheels, independent of the hydraulics.
You can also minimize rolling by heel and toeing it. Me? I like the handbrake if I have it.
I felt better motivated in teaching my 16-year-old son how to operate the manual transmission on his Saab when I realized he’d need both hands to drive, leaving no hands for the cell phone.
As jjimm notes, it’s a separate cable that goes back to the rear wheels and does not utilize the hydraulic system that your brake pedal uses - but that cable activates the same brake pads and rotors/drums that your foot-activated hydraulic brakes do. If your brakes were smoking hot before you started applying the hand brake, those rear brakes will continue to heat up even after you switch the handbrake. In fact, much more so, because now you’re asking those rear brakes to do the braking that was previously being shared by all four wheels, with the lion’s share having previously been done by the front brakes (car brakes have a front-axle bias to account for weight transfer during braking that improves front-wheel traction and reduces rear-wheel traction).
Many cars with rear disc brakes have separate drum parking brakes. My Mercury does. So does my 300D. The drum is machined into the inside of the rear rotors. I’m pretty sure their stopping power is weak compared to the service disc brake.
I would think it would be very very difficult to learn how to drive a manual after having started on an automatic. OTH if you start with a manual (like most places outside N America, Japan and Aus) you can learn very easily as you are learning how to change gears as part of learning how to drive, as opposed to having to add something to the prcess which you did not do.
I drove an automatic from 16-24, but wanted a manual for my first new car. I’d practiced once with my brother when I was 15 on his car, but that didn’t go well at all, and I did the test drive of my car (I’d test driven the automatic version of my car, first, plus my mom had the same model, so I knew I liked it). I basically threw myself into the fire. There were lots of starts with high revs as I was releasing the clutch, but otherwise I figured it out pretty quickly. I had the day off work the day after I bought the car, so I drove around a lot, and started to get the hang of it.
Just go really easy on her 
I learned at age 26. I had driven auto-trannys since 16. On top of that, I’m an engineer, so from an intellectual point of view I understood completely what was going on with the transmission and whatnot. A friend was kind enough to let me “learn” on his manual.
I still killed the engine at least a dozen times.
I stalled, mid-intersection (and panicked!) at least 4 times.
It really is both skill and magic to get to driving a manual well. I thought about this, no joke, a few weeks ago. At my job I sometimes have to write procedures for how to perform a particular QC test - it struck me, when I was thinking about it - that properly shifting a manual is a very difficult thing to describe. You just have to learn, make lots of mistakes, and get a natural feel for.
/edit I knew I was in for some voodoo learning when my boss, also an engineer, described the clutch to me as follows:
“If you think of the clutch as an on/off switch, you’ll fail. Think of it as a dimmer-switch.”
I learned to drive stick when I was in my 24, after having driven automatics since I was 16. It’s not that difficult, just take a bit of practice. I don’t feel that having driven automatics before hindered my learning. I was able to learn the basics in about a day (I mean, I knew, in theory, the basics before I tried my first stick, but it’s still a matter of getting the feel of the bite of the clutch down and how much throttle to give it). After that, it took about a week of city driving to start feeling comfortable, and then another week on an extended road trip (from Budapest to Switzerland and back) through hills and curvy roads that required constant shifting and parking brake hill starts to really get it down.
Thing is, once you get it in first, you’re fine. It’s just that first gear that tricky. Once you get the car moving, it’s hard (at least I find it hard) to stall it. My SO, bless her soul, once drove my stick shift car back from a bar when I had a few too many to drink. She had never driven stick before, but managed to get the car home without too much difficulty. Yes, she stalled it three times, but, (with a little instruction from me), got it to the house without giving me whiplash or having the car smell like burning clutch. I’ve also taken my brother out once to an industrial strip and he, also never having driven manual, managed to do all right. I think the both of them would have no problems getting comfortable with it within a week.
I like this thread because I have tried to teach a few people to drive a stick. It is hard to teach because once you are experienced, it comes almost second nature, so that when you are describing the process to a newbie, it sounds like trying to pilot the space shuttle.
Without exception, all of my newbies start out as stallers, move to clutch dumpers, and then get better. At first, they let out the clutch until it stalls. Then when you tell them that they “need to give it more gas” they floor the gas pedal, release the clutch and leave tire tracks for 47 feet and the burning clutch smell in the interior of your car for the next 3 days.
It really does just take time. You need to feel when the clutch has disengaged and the appropriate amount of gas to apply. Once they have mastered doing it on level ground, then teach them to catch a clutch on a hill. That’s scary at first, because the “disengage the clutch, apply gas” must be done simultaneously.
Like others, I’ve never seen the need for a parking brake on a hill, but I drive enough so that I know my vehicle well.
I have nothing to add to the excellent advice above about how to teach her, but I thought I’d share an interesting story about memory and learning a stick shift.
I originally learned on a manual transmission at age 18. I didn’t have my own car, and didn’t drive much, but I could get from point A to point B without killing the engine very often. Then I went away to school back East at age 19 and didn’t drive at all until I was 22. I drove an automatic from then until age 25 or so.
At that point, my parents were terrified of the POS car I was driving, so when my father got a new car, he gave me his old one instead of trading it in (a Nissan 200SX with an upgraded engine - nice car, even though it was eight years old at that point). They even had it driven cross-country to me.
My boyfriend then took me out to a church parking lot on a Saturday to practice driving it, since it had been quite a few years since I’d driven a manual transmission, and I hadn’t exactly been skilled at it then. I tooled around the parking lot killing the engine repeatedly, and gradually getting slightly better at it, but still not good. He convinced me to try driving it home and I killed the engine in the middle of the road making a left turn, broadside to oncoming traffic, and scared us both silly, but still managed to make it to the house with us and the car unscathed.
We decided we should take it out again on Sunday for further practice, so we waited for the church service to be over and the parking lot to clear, and headed over there again. I sat down, and suddenly could drive the thing. I started and stopped over and over, smooth as can be, drove it out on the road and up and down several hills - no problem. It was like my mind spent the time overnight accessing all those “how to drive a stick” muscle memories, and then also integrated them with the general “how to drive a car” skills that I had a acquired on the automatic, and I could drive without even thinking about it.
I guess that if there is a point to this other than me telling a random anecdote, it’s to reassure you that it really is worthwhile teaching her to drive a manual transmission now, even if she’s not going to use it for a while. The brain is a weird and wonderful thing.
I have yet to see a car like this. “Stopping power” is a bit ambiguous, in that such a separate parking brake does need to develop enough force to hold the car on the steepest conceivable hill, but at the same time it’s almost certainly not designed to accept the kind of heat that is produced when decelerating a moving vehicle - and using it to absorb that kind of heat is likely to lead to damage.