<p>I just recently heard about this info, as I don’t regularly read the Wash Post, but apparently there is some good evidence that even late teens do not have the capacity for judging risk… something that I’ve always put in the category of “it can’t happen to me” attitude of teens. Check this out:</p>
<p>Credit goes to Curmudgeon and Calmom for stimulating my brain to remember this. Does this change your views on the “senior week” and related threads? Just curious.</p>
<p>Wyogal, while it is true that the adolescent brain is still developing into the mid-twenties, it is still a generalization in terms of whether or not a given 17 year old or 19 year old has a good capacity for judging risk. I mean, there is a very wide spectrum of risk-taking vs. risk-averse personalities. And the issue to which a teen is influenced by peer pressure also is strongly influenced by personality. So it still comes down to making a decision based on the parent’s assessment of their own kid, coupled with the parents’ own tolerance for risk or for behaviors like sexual activity and drinking among teens. </p>
<p>For the most part these brain studies tell us what we already know in terms of behavioral and developmental psychology. I mean – do we really need a brain scan to tell us that teenagers tend to engage in riskier behavior than adults? Or that they often exhibit poor judgment? </p>
<p>So, the brain studies are interesting, but only because they give us a clue into the neurological and biological reasons behind behavior we are already well aware of. </p>
<p>Taken to an extreme, the brain studies would provide justification for parents insisting that their children continue to live at home until age 25 – the age when the frontal lobes appear to have reached maturity. But it could be argued that fully-developed brains are only able to make good judgments based on an ability to integrate and learn from experience - depriving the adolescent of experience and practice making their own choices might simply result in an adult brain that was less adept at decision making. We know from other contexts that if a brain is not exposed to certain stimuli during critical periods of development, that the capacity for certain kinds of learning is lost: for example, children deprived of exposure to language during their early years have permanent impairments in their ability to process and use language. </p>
<p>So it may well be that the 25-year-old brain is adept at judging risk appropriately precisely because of all the stupid things that the person did or saw others do at age 18. The biological or evolutionary reasons that kids tend to engage in risky behavior may be in part because that is the time frame when lessons learned will be best retained.</p>
<p>I sometimes wonder if politicians’ brains are not risk averse. I suppose they feel safe in that the 18 - 25 demographic rarely turns out to vote in great numbers. If they continue to “pass more laws,” however, there’s a risk that could change …</p>