When parents allow children to take appropriate risks, they minimize the chances that teens will choose inappropriate risks, like drug use. Michelle Icard is the author of Middle School Makeover: Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years. She knows that middle school can be a difficult experience for children and their parents.

Icard reports that many parents of kids moving between elementary and middle school are “totally dreading it”. She suggests that parents worry less about kids who are engaging in safer risk-taking. Transitions to middle school can be seen as an important time to let kids begin to develop a separate identity. This is a process that repeats itself again when heading to high school and then college.

Testing Limits

Testing limits can be difficult on parents (and kids), but it is a necessary part of growing up. Around the age of 11, our brains begin to go through some reorganization. The prefrontal cortex (responsible for judgment, decision making, critical thinking, impulse controls, among other important actions) takes a step back. At the same time, the amygdala (emotional center) takes over.

This leads to the type of drama we expect to see in teenagers. The prefrontal cortex does not develop fully until a person is approximately 25 years old.

As parents, it seems concerning that just as we are letting go of some of our control and influence over our children, they are becoming more impulsive. Adolescents’ brains are wired to worry less about risks compared to adults’ brains. This helps them become independent of us as they grow up and move away from our homes. Icard says, “becoming an independent adult, after all, requires a lot of bravery, something impulse control tends to squelch.”

Appropriate Risks

Ultimately, independence and risk taking can be good qualities, if we can guide our teens and tweens to appropriate risks.  Practicing safer risk taking when they are young, helps teens make the right choices as they get older and make more important (and permanent) decisions.

Appropriate risks include: listening to new styles of music, dyeing their hair, or making new (safe) friends. Competitive sports, trying out for a play, joining a new club, and dressing in Goth style are additional examples of safer risk taking. These will all help the brain fulfill its desire to take risks. At the same time, they help keep teens away from the really risky things (like drugs and premature sexual experiences) that getting older also introduces them to.