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| Illustrations by Rod Clement |
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It is no surprise to parents that teenagers take risks. Research is showing why teens take such foolish risks---from alcohol abuse, ecstasy popping, reckless driving, unsafe sex, and so on.
The most compelling fact behind the research is that adolescents are the only age group in which mortality has risen since 1960. Sixty per cent of adolescent deaths are caused by accidents---indicating a lethal propensity towards risk-taking.
The research picture that is emerging is a deadly combination of hormone related thrill-seeking, an inability to perceive risks accurately, and the need to impress peers by one's cavalier recklessness---all of which peak during the years age 10 to age 25.
In seeking the causes of the risk-taking, researchers are confronted with a fact known to every parent: Teenagers can revolve in an orbit all their own. The reasonable imperatives of adults have little relevance. According to Sydney psychiatrist Dr. Brent Waters, author of CYBERKIDS: PARENTING IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE (1995) and other books, "often teenagers believe they are old enough to be doing all the things adults do. And the gratuitous warnings they receive from adults they take no notice of." Dr. Waters adds that "parents and other adults are often seen to be old fogies who only want to control them."
As a class, teenagers seem to have a poor ability to evaluate risk compared with most adults. For instance, when they were asked to anticipate what risks become more or less dangerous over time, they saw addiction from drug use and pregnancy from unprotected intercourse as becoming less rather than more likely. This is according to Dr. Charles Irwin, a pediatrician at the University of California at San Francisco.
Furthermore, perception of some risks may fade in the face of peer pressure. For example, when it comes to using condoms, the major concerns of adolescents are not the risks of pregnancy, but rather such matters as whether they think their peers use condoms and whether condoms are inconvenient or might make them look "daggy", "nerdy", "uncool", or just silly. This is according to Dr. Nancy Adler, a psychologist also at the University of California at San Francisco. "The immediate experience is what matters to them, not worries about long-term consequences", Dr. Adler adds.
Dr. Waters observes that often there is "a compounding of risk behaviors---two or more at a time. For example drinking alcohol results in impaired judgment. This in turn results in a lowering of the appreciation of the danger in a risky activity." He adds, "more car accidents, suicide attempts, sporting accidents (such as while skateboarding), and risky sexual experimentation occur in this way. Unsafe sex very often occurs in the context of intoxication---by both parties".
Dr. Waters stresses the negative role of alcohol in the teenage risk-taking equation. He notes that alcohol is implicated in the vast majority of the traffic accidents to young people. He says that "half of teens killed or injured in car accidents, as drivers or passengers, are intoxicated at the time."
Of course, moderate risk-taking is part of the normal maturation and exploration process, assertion of independence, and self-testing that every healthy teenager goes through to one extent or another. The pursuit of new activities and taking of initiative are crucial for the psychological growth that young people undergo through adolescence. This natural tendency makes risk-taking all the more likely in teens.
Dr. Waters also observes that there is a dangerous "progression" in risk-taking behaviour. First, in early adolescence, oppositional behaviour occurs. This is verbal only and may take the form of arguments with parents over dress code, curfew, and so on, in a desire for autonomy and independence. Second, in later adolescence, the confrontation becomes behavioural and is acted out as an outward demonstration of newly-won freedoms---often taking the form of risk-taking.
"Part of adolescence is trying on new roles and seeking new experiences", says Dr. Beatrix Hamburg, a child psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "But by age 10 or so, they enter a risky period when they do lots of exploring at a time when their cognitive development has not yet reached the point where they can make judgments that will keep them out of trouble. They cannot really comprehend laws of probability. And they also have ideas of invulnerability that persuade them that they can safely take a known risk."
One of the major deficits in the thinking of teenagers, particularly in early adolescence, is in evaluating the probabilities of a risk. Dr. Hamburg notes that "Often, when a teenager does something several times---like not breaking his neck when he does something stupid, or not getting pregnant after unsafe sex---he or she will assume it becomes less risky each time, not more so."
Teenagers are also prone to exaggeration. Dr. Hamburg observes that "adolescents tend to grossly over- or underestimate based on their immediate experience. When they say, 'Everyone's doing it---why shouldn't I?', they wildly overestimate the actual numbers. And, by the same token, they wildly underestimate the safety of the dangerous things they do."
Dr. Waters adds that with some teenagers "risk-taking behaviour may be exploratory, but also risky in the deliberate flirting with danger because of low self-concept, low self-esteem, and lack of self-confidence."
Biology too seems to push some adolescents to take more risks than others. This is according to studies of sensation-seeking by Dr. Marvin Zuckerman, a psychologist at the University of Delaware. Sensation-seeking is a personality trait that includes the desire for thrills and adventure, the enjoyment of physically risky activities, and the need for sensory and social stimulation such as loud music or wild parties. As Dr. Zuckerman notes, there is a direct relationship between how people score on a personality test for sensation-seeking and how fast they say they drive on an open road. People who have the lowest sensation-seeking scores drive, on average 55 mph (the U.S. speed limit). As the scores rise, so does the average driving speed. In the highest range, it is over 75 mph.
The urge for sensation-seeking in general, reaches a peak during the late teen years and then declines gradually throughout life. Those who are highest in sensation-seeking, Dr. Zuckerman has found, tend to have higher levels than others of sex hormones that are released at puberty, particularly the male hormone testosterone.
Another biological factor in sensation-seeking may be mono amine oxidase, or MAO, an enzyme that regulates levels of some brain chemicals. Sensation-seekers tend to have low levels of MAO. This is according to research by Dr. Monte Buchsbaum, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine. People with low MAO levels, Dr. Buchsbaum has found, tend to smoke and drink more than others and are more likely to have a criminal record.
Dr. Hamburg says that "teenagers don't see activities like smoking or drug-taking as risky in the same ways adults do. For them, the risk is in social rejection from not doing what others kids do. The hard facts about something like smoking do little in the face of peer pressure."
According to Dr. Lewis Lipsitt, the noted child psychologist at Brown University, "the three biggest killers of young people are essentially psychological. They are dying of their own reckless behaviour. Dangerous risk-takers typically have problems of inadequate self-regulatory behaviour. Impulsive rather than constrained, uninhibited rather than shy, they flout rules from an early age, and they covet adoration from their peers. Interestingly, they grow up thinking they are inadequate persons but reveal this only in the greatest confidence, often only after a terrible psychological crash. Excessive risk-taking kills and debilitates. More deaths occur in the young from poor behaviour control than from all diseases combined. The killers are accidents, drinking to drunkenness, drug-taking, suicide, homicide, and sex without precaution."
For many years now we have known that high school students who have been the victims of child abuse are more likely than their peers to engage in high-risk behaviours. Drs. S. Riggs, A. Alario, and C. McHorney of the Department of Psychology at Brown University surveyed 600 Rhode Island high school students. They found that 13 per cent of these subjects had been maltreated (5.2% physical abuse, 5.4% sexual abuse, 2.7% both physical and sexual abuse). Students who were physically abused were three times more likely than their peers to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, almost twice as likely to use illicit drugs, six times as likely to induce vomiting while dieting, and five times more likely to attempt suicide. Students with a history of sexual abuse were three and one-half times as likely to be sexually active and one and one-half times as likely to attempt suicide.
Being a teenager is risky business.
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