Printed: 10/10/08
My sons will tell you one of the chief annoyances of being the child of an opinion writer strikes whenever I research an editorial like the one to the left of this column.
I appear beside them, loaded with fresh examples of irrational teenage behavior, and insist they remove the earbuds and listen. Then I say, “Promise me you won’t ever do anything that stupid. Right now. Out loud.”
So they chant the promise, complete with eye rolls, and finish – every time – with, “Come on, Mom. We’re not idiots.”
And they’re right. For the most part, I have been blessed with sensible, level-headed sons, at least on questions like, “Would you ever inject vodka directly into your veins to speed the effect?”
What’s alarming, of course, is that some kids would, and do – because, as the familiar theory goes, they hold an intrinsic, adolescent belief in their own immortality. Someone will say it at every funeral of a young person under age 21: teenagers do stupid things because they cannot imagine injury or death arriving for them personally. They think the risks don’t apply to them.
Which leads to something else I learned about irrational teenage behavior: the myth of immortality is itself a myth.
According to an online report from Newsweek, the latest scientific research suggests teenagers, if anything, overestimate risk when they contemplate such activities as having sex, trying drugs or driving drunk. The risks simply don’t stop them. They weigh risk versus benefit and decide the benefits trump.
In fact, teenagers will actually go through the risk-evaluation process on activities adults automatically dismiss as insane.
Newsweek quotes behavioral scientists who interviewed hundreds of American adolescents with such questions as: Is it a good thing to drink Drano? Set your hair on fire? Swim where you’ve seen triangular dorsal fins?
Teenagers give the correct answer as often as adults (memo to sons: that would be “no”). The unsettling thing is they have to think about it first. A greater area of the teenage brain lights up, indicating some kind of purposeful calculation. No intuitive leap to the obvious. They take time for a quick cost-benefit analysis.
However dismaying this may be, it is instructive news. For one thing, since teenagers already overthink risk, psychologists say piling on more details about risks they’re fully aware of is unlikely to make a difference. Better to work on eliminating opportunities for risk, they say, until kids can transition to the intuitive leaps to the obvious that supposedly arrive with age and experience.
That “supposedly” was my word, not theirs, because I can’t help but see parallels between this story and the avalanche of adult news regarding financial crises and congressional rescues.
There’s been much wailing about all the banks and mortgage lenders who ignored the colossally obvious risk involved in shoveling loans at people who could not pay them back.
Be assured: the problem wasn’t a lack of risk analysis. The lenders knew the risks. But like the teenager who climbs into the car with a drunk driver because his friends will desert him otherwise, they decided – or the government decided for them – that the perceived benefits trumped.
The goal, back in the late 1990s when credit requirements were first eased, was to escort more minorities and working-class renters into homeownership. Borrowers lined up for mortgages that were then sliced and sold all over the world, “spreading risk.”
Everyone – the banking industry, Congress, the Clinton and Bush administrations – took credit for the housing boom. It went on for so long that the occasional doomsayer warning about the “moral hazard” of “excessive risk” seemed laughably quaint.
No longer, of course. And once again, we’re hearing that the benefits – now of rescue – outweigh the risks.
We can only hope that this time around, the lessons learned from this fiasco will transition America’s leaders to the intuitive reasoning that traditionally arrives with age and experience.
They can start by repeating together, out loud, right now, just so we can hear you: “I promise I won’t ever do anything this stupid again.”
