Teenagers: Why do they take risks? | Integrated Learning Therapy

We know how difficult the adolescent years are! Teenagers have to learn new skills, such as dealing with emotions, learning to be more independent and making own decisions. They have to experiment, take risks and make mistakes. It’s a challenging time that we, as adults, struggle to remember and often don’t understand.

Pleasure seeking

Advances in neuroscience help us understand how adolescents carry out the decision-making process. Perhaps the most significant finding is that they do so with a brain that is still developing, so not all of its abilities are fully acquired. In addition, decision-making involve two areas of the brain that mature (become fully developed) at very different times), which is what leads to mistakes.

One of these areas is the mesolimbic system that is responsible for triggering our body’s reward system. This system reinforces the repetition of behaviours that create pleasure—such as partying with friends—or survival behaviours—such as drinking water from time to time or on very hot days. Hormones drive the mesolimbic system which is why its activation during adolescence is very high.

The prefrontal cortex is a second key area of the brain at this time, which is responsible for executive functions such as impulse regulation and self-control. It is still developing during the adolescent years which means there is a lack of maturity in the brain regions that are responsible for behavioural control.

This imbalance is key to understanding why adolescents sometimes make the decisions they do. In their heads, a highly activated pleasure-seeking system is combined with a developing conscious behavioural regulation system.

In short, it is the perfect combination for teenagers to engage in risky behaviours.

Feeling part of a group

In addition to individual development, the social world of adolescents is also a crucial aspect at this stage.

In these years, peers become central to socialisation and learning. Boys and girls don’t disengage completely from family, but they do expand their social circle. Increasingly, they look for trust, support and security in their friends.

Belonging to a social group is a priority which necessitates accepting and adapting to the norms of the group. This is why the behaviour of individuals is regulated by the group. What others see as positive and accepted will be desired and repeated. What is censored or seen as negative will be repressed. This influence that the group has on individuals is known as peer pressure.

The role of adults

Here are three tips from scientific studies that we can use to help adolescents:

Realising that making mistakes and taking certain risks is an adolescent process: the important thing is to learn from them and we should try to help them realise the mistakes and alternatives.
The brain development of this age group means thatthe pleasure of experimenting with certain risky behaviours prevents a proper assessment of their consequences. It is necessary to explain, carefully and with understanding, what these consequences are.
Adolescents need to feel free to experiment and make mistakes, but they also need to know the limits and consequences. Although they want to be independent, they still need to feel cared for by the adults.

Adolescents have a very different perspective from adults. Understanding their point of view is important but we need to value it too. They need to feel listened to and, above all, understood, while they navigate a stormy period in their lives.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.