Teen Risk-Taking

Robert Fettgather teaches psychology at Mission College in Santa Clara California. He is interested in adolescent development, including positive risk-taking behavior. 

How should a teenager realize and claim their adulthood? Some adolescents may assert their man or womanhood by engaging in pro-social activities while others engage in high-risk behaviors. A first driver’s license is a case in point. Some adolescents express that it represents their own coming of age with an adult responsibility. For others, that also means risky behavior behind the wheel. 

Teens who routinely engage in risky behavior may be attempting to invent their own rites of passage. Of course, much depends on the peer group with which they identify and what constitutes a risk. For one teenager, the rite may involve preparing to audition for the school play. For another adolescent, it may involve joining a street gang that may provide a sense of belonging and protection in unsafe communities.

Remembering key elements of their own rites of passage, some adults recall alcohol/coffee/smoking as well as important relationships in ways the could inform their own parenting. Researchers believe that parents of teens must somehow allow for both limits and choices within those limits.

Adolescents have two, apparently contradictory, tasks in their relationships with their parents- to establish autonomy from them and to maintain a sense of relatedness with them. That is, teens could strive to separate/individuate while retaining a parental connection. Relatedness to parents has benefits. For example, teens who are close to their parents are less likely to use drugs. 

Besides the teen-parent relationship, peers become far more significant in adolescence than they have been at any earlier period. Peers who value prosocial risk taking are another positive influence on teen development.