Are teenagers then inherently bigger risk takers than adults?
Yes and no. Adults do take risks, but often within a different context than adolescents. For example, the majority of pregnancies in adult American women, as in American teenagers, are unplanned. But adults are more likely to have completed their education, to be economically stable, and to have a
stable relationship with the baby's father. Many experts believe that some degree of risk-taking is a normal part of adolescence. This is called "exploratory behavior," and it is part of finding out who you are, and what life is like.
But adolescents usually can't incorporate experience into risky situations. They don't have as much experience in solving problems -- they don't have the background. For instance, it's probably easier to avoid an accident when driving at night if you have hundreds of hours of daytime driving under your belt.
And when teenagers are in situations that are new and/or stressful, they tend to revert back from abstract thinking to concrete thinking.
So kids tend to steer their way through tricky situations using this less conceptual, or developed, thinking?
Yes, and that's one reason why a lot of prevention programs -- for sexual activity or pregnancy prevention or substance abuse prevention -- focus on teaching kids the skills that they need in new situations, sometimes even rehearsing the situations. They imagine scenarios they could find themselves in, and practice handling them.
