
Adolescents’ rich and nuanced relationship with risky behaviour - wizzard0
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02170-3
======
ergothus
When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about
you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already
primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" \- material that had
no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so
few, though I didn't know that then).

Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It
was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute
"no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on
experiences I _did_ have into a broader area.

Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that
peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly
calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that
any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was
better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from
losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me
material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I
will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success".

Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why
crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one
statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had.

I highly recommend it to all parents.

~~~
jcsnv
>I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on

This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have
impacted my younger self

~~~
ergothus
I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data
- If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how -
not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have
no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.

~~~
dllthomas
I mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that
sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...

~~~
BoorishBears
Robbing a bank has a poor average payoff, so not likely to be able to retire
on it.

Becoming a CEO and indulging in embezzlement on the other hand...

~~~
ergothus
I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my
intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know
that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my
mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been
bothered that I _failed_.

As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think.
Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this"
(prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to
"what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and
why I brought the story up in relation to the article.

As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and
"what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those
connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average
adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was
probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a
temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build
my own bridges.

In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide
reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on
your own. mindblown.

------
njarboe
Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful
in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high
risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues
to engage high risk for high reward activities.

Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close
with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to
today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling
voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from
another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that
one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family.

These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there
is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier
countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills
for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for
entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it
is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open
fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any
productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc).
Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for
people again.

~~~
seibelj
Oil rigs are a similar situation today - high pay, relatively high risk, and
you'll be away from family living on the ocean for weeks or months at a time.

~~~
stevenwoo
The difference is a lot of jobs in oil are manual labor that do not require a
college degree and can be high paying if one is willing to go to where the
jobs are, even on land.

------
artur_makly
As a parent of a budding 5yr old.. I am starting to think about this upcoming
phase in terms of where to raise him.

Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large
major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia
(population ~150k)

I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and
remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer
camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city.

I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of
activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that
Bariloche will have to offer.

On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow
up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on.

On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into
trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a
parent.

What are your stories??

~~~
DoreenMichele
I was a military wife. We moved a lot. Where you go is less important than
your parenting policies.

My oldest has had sleep issues from birth and was a boatload of trouble in the
form of _curiosity killed the cat_ and _you can 't tell me no._ He's a
handful.

From age 2, he was taught to keep himself entertained and out if trouble so I
could sleep a little while he was up nights. He was taught to tell me when he
spilled stuff in the middle of the night so I could clean it up. He did not
get in trouble. He only got asked what he spilled so I could clean it up
properly.

I gave my kids a lot of latitude and worked with them to make sure their needs
were adequately met. I did a whole lot of dealing with the woman in the mirror
and trying to not hang my crap on them. I facilitated their interests and made
sure they were reasonably safe.

I did things like rent Jurassic Park and watched it first, then watched it
with them so I could pause it and warn them about icky surprise scenes. They
very much wanted to see it they weren't that old. I made it as comfortable and
not traumatic as I could and let them have their way.

I started with laying that foundation from birth. By the time they were teens,
we had a good relationship. They never went through rebel teen crap. They
didn't need to. There was nothing to rebel against.

~~~
kraig911
Wow you were an awesome mom. I'm going through the same motions with my
daughter. She's 4. Non-verbal autistic. Trying everything under the sun to get
her to talk AND sleep. Feeling kind of hopeless right now but I am trying to
be positive. She genuinely loves me though and wants me to hold her all the
time.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I spent the first 12 years of my first child's life trying to make it possible
for him to sleep decently. Off the top identity head:

ASD kids are picky. Try to keep foods on hand that are healthy and that the
kid likes. Let them eat what they want from what is on hand.

Hey them a good multivitamin. Disney Princess Gummy vitamins worked well for
my kids.

Make sure they get outside every single day for some physical activity. You
may have to work at making sure this happens at the right time of day as well.

Kids need to be both physically tired and mentally tired to sleep. ASD kids
have trouble getting the mental stimulation they need. Video tapes and video
games sometimes serve them well.

Don't substitute physical exhaustion alone for physical tiredness plus mental
tiredness. This can cause night terrors, where they wake up screaming after an
hour.

Be accommodating of their weird preferences as much as possible. My oldest
slept all kinds of weird places when he was little.

I have had a parenting blog in the past. I have fantasies I will eventually
get back to that.

Best.

------
stcredzero
When I was 5, I knew it all. But I was wrong, and I realized how stupid I was
at 5 when I was 10. Then, I thought I had it all figured out and I knew I was
way smarter than the adults. Except, I realized at 15 how much of a stupid kid
I was at 10, but I knew I had everything figured out by then...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact)

~~~
nicoburns
Interestingly I still consider myself to have been quite capable/rational from
age 4 onwards.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I was at my best at age 4. It has been all downhill from there.

------
bitL
Reinforcement Learning: Exploration vs Exploitation with epsilon-decreasing
strategy.

I am wondering if we are indeed some kind of optimization algorithm ran for
somebody else to validate some model they need in their "real" universe.

------
John_KZ
I like how they compare a teenager's risk of contracting AIDS with a 10 year
old, but not with a 30 year old. Nice cherry-picking. All I see is an article
trying to explain risk-taking of the youth as a pathology. You might agree
with that, but I think it's just retarded.

------
kaycebasques
There was nothing nuanced about my risky adolescent behavior. I give thanks
about once a month for the good fortune of not ending up in a dumpster.

------
tristanj
wizzard0, why didn't you use the original title, as per HN guidelines? Your
title doesn't match what I read from the article at all. Environment is only
mentioned once and culture isn't mentioned at all.

~~~
sctb
We've just updated the title from ‘A lot of teen risk-taking is
environment/culture influence, not just “age”’ to part of the subtitle, which
hopefully represents well the article without the “Sex and drugs...” bait.

~~~
wizzard0
Yep, I decided to submit under a more neutral tone because the "Sex and drugs"
part felt too sensational, but the result got too opinionated. Will try better
next time.

UPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were
watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an
environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the
social one, and that includes peer pressure.

------
GuiA
Original title is _”Sex and drugs and self-control: how the teen brain
navigates risk”_ , and seems better than the editorialized HN title.

