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Home › Articles › Safety Behaviors › Risky Teen Behavior

Risky Teen Behavior

When Your Son's Fun
Turns Dangerous

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  3  

Four-wheeling, surfing, parasailing, roman candle tag, riding BMX bikes off dangerously high ledges: What draws our otherwise sensible teenage boys to ridiculously risky forms of amusement?

Lisa Cole, mother of two from Portland, Ore., wonders the same thing about her 14-year-old son. "He's always been a risk taker, but I've noticed this trait branching out as he enters his teen years," she says. Cole's son is now into snowboarding, skate boarding and rappelling, and like many mothers, Cole wonders what he's going to come up with next.

"I should have known he'd be an extreme sport lover," she says. "Once when he was young, there was a tree out front that he couldn't climb because the lowest branch was too high for him to reach. So what does he do? He leans his bicycle against the tree so he can climb it anyway!"

Why They Do It
Alex Kehaven, Ed.D., a licensed psychologist from New Jersey, believes that such behavior is very normal for teen boys. "Although both genders seek risk in adolescent years, girls take more self-protective roles," he says. "Boys in teen years respond more to rites of passage, needs for power and physical challenges."

Kehaven says that young men naturally respond with extreme behavior, which is further promoted by the media's bombardment of shows promoting "on the edge" behavior. To prove themselves, they often take unnecessary risks. The problem lies with the fact that many teenage boys live their lives under faulty beliefs, operating under the "3 I's" assumption: They believe they are invincible, immortal and infertile.

Daniel Hoover, director of psychology training for the adolescent treatment program at The Menninger Clinic in Houston, Texas, believes that boys are more liable to engage in risky behavior for a number of reasons. "There is research evidence that boys are, on average, more active and more aggressive in their activity, even from birth, than girls," he says. "There is also a demand among male peers to be daring many boys start into extreme sports and risky behaviors because that is what the other boys are doing; boys who are athletic and physically tough are rewarded by having more friends. Not being tough can be a detriment to acceptance by other male peers."

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