Ep 94: Why Teens Run Wild & How to Keep Them Safe

Dr. Jess Shatkin, author of Born to be Wild and expert in the
field of child and adolescent psychiatry, clues us into why teens
run wild and how we can help keep them safe. A still-developing
brain and high levels of hormones mean parents have their work
cut out for them!


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Full show notes


We have the “talk” with our teens and make sure they at least
attend health class. We push our teens to get adequate sleep and
nutrition. We put our teens through D.A.R.E. and make clear drugs
and alcohol are not acceptable. And vandalism and stealing are
against the law--we shouldn't even have to mention that to our
teens.


So Why--why! we wonder, Why do teenagers still do these things!?
And for Chrissake why is it always teens doing the misbehaving?
You rarely see groups of 25 year old's, 40 year old's or (spry)
80 year old's participating in reckless and risky behaviors.


Adults--from parents to deans to coaches--devote so much time and
energy into trying to teach adolescents the risks of misbehaving.
From broken bones to trauma, we want to help our teens avoid
threats to their physical and mental health—so why don’t teens
act accordingly? Why are teenagers more likely to take risks than
any other age group? Do they really think they’re invincible?


Teenage risk taking is more complicated than just a single
platitude. It’s not just the fact that teen brain’s executive
regions are under construction: an influx of hormones muddles
things up along with intense peer pressure, whether real or
perceived.


To understand the interaction between the biology and neurology
of the teen brain, this week I spoke with Dr. Jess Shatkin,
author of Born to Be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks, and How We Can
Help Keep Them Safe. As a practicing psychiatrist in Manhattan
and Vice Chair for Education and Professor of Child &
Adolescent Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the NYU School of
Medicine, Dr. Shatkin has been entrenched in the workings of the
teenage brain for decades.


Dr. Shatkin was curious as to why teenagers make risky decisions
even in his early days. The youngest of eight, he watched his
older siblings morph and change, from tame tweens to wild teens
to mature twentysomethings and adults. When Dr. Shatkin himself
was a teen, he realized that he was making decisions he logically
wouldn’t otherwise, had he been younger. And with older siblings
to look up to, he knew he wouldn’t always feel so, well, wild.


While teenage risk taking is more common than we’d like, it turns
out teens don’t actually think they are invincible, as many
adults have come to believe. We’d be wrong to assume teens feel
as invincible as we think they act.


When researchers actually began to ask teens if they think
they’re invincible, a curious pattern emerged. Teenagers actually
tend to overestimate the risk they face from certain activities.
When prompted, most teenagers will say they believe they are
around 90% likely to get pregnant from one instance of
unprotected sex (the real number is somewhere around 20%). Some
young people do believe that they are invincible, but from Jess’s
studies, this is not due to age, but instead the personality of
the individual. It’s the adults, in fact, who are more likely to
feel a false sense of invincibility.


So then why are teenagers more likely to take risks if they are
so certain that negative consequences will arise? As Jess
explained to me, this can be largely attributed to evolution.
Adolescence is when our body starts to develop the need to seem
attractive to potential mates as well as adjust to any new
changes in the environment. We suddenly experience an influx of
hormones which encourage us to impress our peers by exhibiting
our affinity for danger.


Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we want our peers to see us
as cool, interesting, and sexy--good qualities in a viable mate.
In one study Dr. Shatkin and I talked about, researchers used
financial choices to assess young people’s changes in decision
making. Every students who participated was given two options:
get $200 immediately, or wait six months and receive $1,000.
$1,000 is 4 times more than the $200--the choice should be easy!
And for students that made the decision alone, it was. They all
selected the delayed reward of the $1000. However, when the
researchers had a student make the exact same decision but in
front of one or more peers, the majority of students switched to
taking the immediate $200. Even when the researchers just made
participants think there was a peer watching from behind a
one-way mirror, the students took the immediate reward. It was as
if the logical processing power of the brain was turned off in
the face of a peer nearby.


As parents, this might be alarming. The study has implications
far beyond just missing out on $800. What if your teen follows
their friends to a college that is exorbitantly expensive just
because it is ‘cooler’? Or what if they put their life on the
line when driving a peer home? You want your children to become
responsible, respectable independent thinkers, not impulsive risk
takers who are frighteningly susceptible to peer pressure! You’ve
already warned them about the dangers of teenage risk taking and
yet, they seem to insist on getting into trouble.


When it comes to helping our kids develop ways to muster through
tempting risks, Dr. Shatkin reminds us that the language we use
is of the utmost importance. Just telling kids that activities
are risky does not make them less likely to participate in them.
Take for example the high rates of teen pregnancy among teens who
have been given the simple message of “don’t,” with no education
around it.


Simply inundating teens with the same warning messages over and
over, doesn’t lead to changed behavior. Instead of repeating how
risky having unprotected sex is, you could have a conversation
with your teen about what your teen could say or do when they
find themselves in a heated and compromising situation. See our
interview with Dr. Lisa Damour on helping teens develop more ways
to say ‘no.’


And what is it that drives teens to seek out these risky
situations? The answer is a hormone we more regularly associate
with matters of lust: dopamine. But dopamine is not just for
lovers. It is a vital hormone that drives us to take action,
getting us excited about possibilities. Dopamine
is intricately linked to reward circuitry and is at elevated
levels during the teen years. Readers may already be familiar
with the studies that show teens' brains look similar to the
brains of gambling addicts under fMRI scans.


Dopamine spikes when we sense a reward is near--like thinking
about an upcoming vacation or how impressed your peers will be if
you snuck into your neighbor’s pool and did a cannonball. If you
haven’t planned that vacation yet, dopamine will keep you busily
scheduling and booking things, and you might even get a little
spike in dopamine when you tell other people about it. The
difference for a teen might be they are wildly excited about the
vacation, particularly if it can make them seem ‘cool’ to their
peers. They might develop a bug for traveling if they firstly
enjoy their time traveling and if they receive the ‘reward’ of
peer approval when they come back and regale their p...