As a follow-up of my too long blog on “Incentives to Learn”, I quote from an article appearing in the Science Journal titled “You Might Help a Teen Avoid Dumb Behavior by Nurturing Intuition”. The article is written by Sharon Begley who can be reached at sciencejournal@wsj.com She writes quoting Valerie Reyna of Cornell University “Deliberately weighing costs and benefits often encourage risky behavior. You have a better chance of getting thru to kids if you can get them to pick up, unconsciously, that a behavior is dangerous and intuitively avoid it”. Ms. Begley says “Social acceptance and the allure of rebellion right now outweigh the costs later. Even adults prefer immediate benefits to future ones. Teaching teens to assess risks accurately won’t decrease stupid behavior-they’re already pretty accurate at gauging the consequences. They just aren’t bothered by them. Young people are especially bad at resisting risk when they are with peers and when they make decisions on the spur of the moment. In these cases, the emotional brain hijacks the logical one. Risks area suppressed.”
That’s why so many kids drop out of school; they fail to recognize the risk of not having enough education and/or commit risky behaviors. Many are influenced greatly by their peers. Many parents have no idea of the character of the kids their kids associate with. I don’t believe my wife and I did but we had a lot of success and some failure with our three children, the youngest now 47.
This article mainly discusses why kids drive too fast, drink too much and doing their all to perpetuate the species. Adolescents believe danger bounces off them and they low-ball the chances that it will bring harmful consequences. This explanation implies that when teens do stupid things, it is for rational reasons. That’s the problem; “Adolescents don’t tend to underestimate the probability of major risks nor do they generally have feelings of invulnerability. That’s bad news for parents and schools.”
This brings me back to all our efforts to get kids to see things as we see them. They often don’t. Mature adults manage mostly to avoid risky behavior not because they are better at conscious deliberation, but because they intuitively grasp dangers. They don’t stop and deliberate on the costs and benefits of risky behaviors.
Maybe our approach to getting kids to learn is mostly wrong. Everybody, I believe wants their kids to stay in school, get good grades, go to college, avoid killing themselves in some ill advised risk, and want to keep them out of a group of 3,000,000,000 new cases of STDs that are diagnosed in U.S. adolescents each year. Maybe we are spending too much time looking at kids through our adult eyes; kids with still developing frontal brain lobes that don’t fully develop until the mid 20’s; looking at them thru adult brains.
Raising today’s generations of kids is kind of like playing the stock market. Some parents, and teachers, (stock buyers) know exactly what they are doing; they’ve done their part to raise kids successfully. Other parents and teachers haven’t got a clue how to teach and raise their kids (buy stocks that go down instead of up) and raising kids or buying stocks becomes like another gambling game, a crap shoot whether or not these parents and kids win or lose.
We need to get kids at an early age to grab the gist of something that they can manage. We need to drum into kid’s heads positive images of healthy and wise behaviors and negative images of risky behavior. The idea is to make the thought of risky behaviors to reflexively trigger a no-go decision.
The article concludes “All the evidence, as opposed to folk wisdom, says this is more likely to work than current tactics.”
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