Tips for Parents: Understanding Your Adolescent’s Behavior*

1. All teenagers take risks as a normal part of growing up. Risk-taking is the tool an adolescent uses to define and develop his or her identity.
2. Healthy risk taking is a valuable experience. Healthy adolescent risk-taking behaviors that tend to have a positive impact on an adolescent’s development include participation in sports, the development of artistic and creative abilities, volunteer activities, travel, running for school office, making new friends, and constructive contributions to the family or community, among others. Inherent in all these activities is the possibility of failure. Parents must recognize and support their children with this.
3. Negative risk-taking behaviors that can be dangerous for adolescents include drinking, smoking, drug use, reckless driving, unsafe sexual activity, disordered eating, self-mutilation, running away, stealing, gang activity.
4. Unhealthy adolescent risk-taking may appear to be rebellion, an angry gesture directed at parents. Often risk-taking whether healthy or unhealthy is an attempt by the adolescent to separate and test out an identity.
5. Red flags that help identify dangerous adolescent risk-taking can include psychological problems such as persistent depression or anxiety, which goes beyond mere typical adolescent moodiness, problems at school, engaging in illegal activities, and clusters of unhealthy risk-taking behaviors, such as drinking, smoking and driving recklessly, stealing and running away, disordered eating and self-mutilation.
6. Since adolescents need to take risks, parents need to help them find healthy opportunities to do so. Healthy risk taking can help prevent unhealthy risk taking.
7. Parents need to help teens assess positive and negative risks, anticipate the consequences of their choices and develop strategies for diverting their energies and developing healthier activities when necessary.
8. Parents need to pay attention to their own current patterns of risk-taking Teenagers are watching and imitating whether they are aware of it or not.

*Adopted from The Romance of Risk by Lynn Ponton, M.D.