Several folks from our group led by doctoral candidate Jessica Flannery have a new piece on teen risk taking over at The Conversation, “Teens aren’t just risk machines – there’s a method to their madness”.
You know the conventional wisdom: Adolescents are impulsive by nature, like bombs ready to go off at the most minor trigger. Parents feel they must cross their fingers and hope no one lights the fuse that will lead to an explosion. Adults often try restricting and monitoring teens’ behavior, in an effort to protect these seemingly unthinking riskseekers. That’s the tale told in the media, anyway.
Neuroscience evidence has seemed to bolster the case that adolescents are just wired to make bad decisions. Studies suggest that brain regions associated with self-control and long-term planning, such as the prefrontal cortex, are still developing. At the same time, adolescence is a time of increased activity in a brain region associated with reward, the ventral striatum. The story goes that these out-of-control teens are both extra sensitive to rewards and unable to rein in impulses – and thus naturally risky. They just can’t control themselves because their brains are unevenly developed.
As psychologists who focus on adolescents and their developing brains, we believe that teens have gotten an unfair rap. There are important developmental reasons adolescents act the way they do. They’re driven to explore their environments and learn everything they can about their surroundings. A teenager’s job, developmentally speaking, is to try out new behaviors and roles. Doing that sometimes involves risk – but not necessarily risk for its own sake.
Read the full piece here.
UPDATE (March 21, 2018): You can listen to Jessica discuss the piece on the Matt Townsend show here.
