Can schools really help reduce youth risk-taking behavior?
Teen pregnancy, substance abuse, dating violence, drunk driving. These are a few of the risky behaviors we associate with youth. These are also topics that are frequently discussed with students in schools. As a society, we have come to assume that young people will learn about the negative effects of these phenomena in the classroom, and as a result will ultimately avoid engaging in “risky behaviors.” But both empirical and anecdotal evidence clearly show otherwise.
Youth Risk Taking Behavior: The Role of Schools, a policy brief written by the Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, makes recommendations about what role schools should have in countering students’ harmful risk taking. (It is important to note that not all risky behaviors are harmful. For example, telling someone how you feel, or trying out for a sports team involves risk, yet neither is usually viewed negatively.)
This report notes that the two strategies schools typically employ to try to combat harmful, risky behaviors in youth are (1) to adopt strict disciplinary guidelines, such as a “zero tolerance policy,” which focus on punishment, and; (2) to create interventions, such as health curricula, intended to educate youth in order to dissuade them from engaging in harmful activities.
The first strategy, which utilizes “negative consequences and control techniques” (p.11) to reduce harmful behaviors, is discouraged by the brief’s authors who state that such practices can actually push students towards risky activities by fostering negative values and pushing out the very students who need the structure of a school community the most. Concerning the second strategy, the report cites research that finds little evidence of the success of most prevention programs. Those programs that have been shown to be successful return very small effects of a limited scope.
Ultimately, the report suggests that increasing school connectedness is the best way to reduce harmful behaviors. The theory is that problem behaviors arise from the ways in which youth interact with their peers and the community. Therefore, if students feel a “positive connection to their school and are fully engaged in classroom learning,” (pp?) they will be less likely to engage in unhealthy activities. Specific recommendations for policy and school planning are:
- Minimize the conditions that threaten students’ feelings of competence and interconnectedness. This includes reshaping school rules in order to reduce emphasis on punishment and social control.
- Maximize conditions that increase students’ self-esteem, competence, and connectedness. This includes creating a school environment that encourages active engagement in learning, and reaching out to those students who have been disengaged from the classroom experience.
By creating a positive learning environment, the authors believe that youths’ negative behaviors will decrease both on and off of school property.
We encourage you to post your reactions to this commentary below, including your responses to these questions:
- Where/how do you draw the line between positive and negative risk-taking in youth?
- Do sex education and drug awareness programs work in reducing risky youth behavior?
- Should teaching risk reduction be primarily left to the schools?
- In light of recent shootings and other reports of school violence, do you feel that a zero-tolerance policy can create safer learning environments?
- Do you believe that increasing student engagement in learning will lead to a safe school environment and healthier youth?
Your thoughts…
Comments:
 I wholeheartedly agree. We have an adopted FASD daughter. She was put in an SBD classroom, without going thru the IEP team. The teacher was a first year female that constantly put kids in a closet (which is against the law the way she did it). She and one aide treated the kids very poorly. I finally had to pull her out of school for 8 months. Before I got her out, she was taught by another student about street life. As a result, she ended up as a prostitute at age 13, trying to find accceptance. I found her, and she has just recently returned home from about 1 1/2 years in inpatient psychiatric treatment. Our family has been forever changed. I truly believe that if she'd had an experienced, caring teacher and staff, this would not have happened. She had previously struggled with her disabilities, but had staff that cared about her, and she blossomed. Schools need to not just "teach" zero-tolerance, they need to show the students by their actions and attitudes a better way. Posted Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 06:59 PM
I agree that caring and consistent human relationships are an important element for youth. We remember our favorite teacher/s all our adult lives as well as family members who were a consistent part of our lives. I think it was the book THE TIPPING POINT that discussed the number of people in any institution-be it work, school, church-influenced the relationships between participants to the point of success or failure. Up to a certain number of people everyone in the building will know everyone else and therefore the bond is greater between all levels of people from the "top to the bottom." If there are too many people the relationships don't develop to the extent that everyone is known and valued. The degree of "connectedness" between people influences mental health for all of us. Just a thought.
Posted Wednesday, September 12, 2007 by Kris at 06:32 PM
This article was interesting because it pushes us to think beyond our conditioning. We live in a culture that prizes individuality, but requires conformity. We get expert individuals to create norming institutions and use the power of government to commit individuals to those institutions. That's how we got public schools. Originally we wanted to get individuals to read, figure and think for themselves so they would be capable of fulfilling the function of citizen. That evolved into stamping out worker drones for industry, then became a confused place where kids watched rockets on TV while being baffled by teachers confused by New Math. Then the Future Scientists quit, we haven't had functioning parents in three generations, and the schools have no clear mission other than to be everything to a bunch of organisms who are required to spend time there. After about eight years of being required to be there, the captives reach a developmental stage requiring they revolt. This isn't the time for an institutional response. Each kid has an individual crisis of some kind. No program is going to get at it, except perhaps superficially.
Now, humans take risks all their lives in order to learn things. Positive risk taking becomes something the kid survives to learn from, and negative, the kid doesn't learn. If we leave risk reduction to schools we are fools because kids take risk across all environments. If you look at risk-taking as an essential part of learning, then risk management in any environment should include looking at what individuals have risked, how they went about it, what the outcome was, and how it could have been done better. It is likely that the schools are the only place most kids could encounter structured analysis like this because most of them are left to raise themselves and only some of them get deemed crazy and get individual time with anyone where this could happen. On to danger. Zero Tolerance is dumb. The more coercive a regime, the more rebellious the peasant. Schools are endangered because they are the only coercive regime in most of the kids' lives, and the coercion has limits the kids know well. It is too big to be fair. Add Zero Tolerance and you now have arbitrary rules with no room for discretion. It is the ultimate invalidation. Adolescents are hypersensitive to invalidation. Any prior calluses they got to protect them from bullies is now gone, and the school becomes just another bully. Quit listening to people, they get frustrated and are liable to shoot somebody. What to do? I heard "increase student involvement." Another programmatic solution to a gang of individual problems. What's student council? Crisis Resolution teams? Hall monitors? All sops. Is the next program another sop? If so, it will only work when the adult advisor treats the kids like real people. I am not against programs, I'm all for them when they work. Look at DARE. Everyone thought that would be great. Then a big study of a whole bunch of them showed that most of them flopped so the DARE initiative was invalidated. But maybe a few, say, one in 50, worked. (Not enough to turn the numbers around, alas.) Why? Those few had adults that treated the participants as real people and connected with them. They weren't "cool," they were real. Real makes the difference, one person at a time. And it's in short supply. There you have it. Posted Saturday, August 11, 2007 by I like cats better! at 09:18 AM
This is a gem of an article as it speaks to a truth many mental health professionals know well. Punishment and "teaching" values are poor ways to shape behavior in youth. My only disappointment with the article is that it didn't develop the point about better engaging "at risk" youth. Those of us clinicians who claim success in our work with youth know that engagment and development of a positive relationship is a necessary if, not alwyas sufficient, engredient for emotionally hurting youth as they make choices regarding their behavior. The concept of riskiness of behavior is a slippery concept. The article was very correct that risk taking can be postive for youth. I would go so far as to say that failure to take risks can be developmentally as harmful as choosing risks with obvious potential for negative consequences. What the article didn't develop was the concept of why youth choose certain risk behaviors, and not others, as a function of their relationships with adults and other peers. Competing and being the best, most courageous and, sometimes, outrageous player in ones peer group is developmentally normal. The question is what court are youth playing on. If provided engaging activities such as sports much of this normative developmental energy can be focused in a direction that is not harmful. Even competition with ideas can work as positive risk taking behavior - and schools could do much better in fostering outrageous and irreverent thoughts and providing a safe playgound for such thinking. Such intellectual activities are often not encouraged by schools. Far to often schools fear the consequences of youth challenging conventional wisdom. Beyound better utilization of our social institutions we must understand some basic trughts about adolescence. Constructive adults, even with the best relationships with youth can't always be there for advice. It is incredibly important that youth have time with peers NOT under the close supervision of adults to explore such key risky issues as sexuality and peer group morality. At certain points in their development many youth are bound to explore certain non adult endorsed activities (drinking, use of drugs engagement in sexual activity) that a youth is not prepared to handle. What lessens such risks for youth growing up in a permissive environment are firm and functional connections with adults. Positive relationships with parents always are first of course. But in the course of adolescent development youth need to specifically NOT relie on parents. At moments any adult BUT parents will do better; ie youth leaders, coaches, counselors and certainly teachers who can be non-judgmental. Youth glom onto alternative adults as mentors. Such adults play to a youth's strengths and have very postive expectations of their young mentees. They who show confidence in a youth's ability to make good choices. But they also are full of 3rd person examples of dangers of certain behaviors, or the "immaturity" of what some youth do, or the consequences of getting in trouble, etc. Such talk in the context of a truely fun, playful, irreverant, informal and loving relationship with a "cool" adult is what cuts down on risk taking that can be disasterous. Youth engage in extreme behavior not because they are dumb and uneducated, or just plain bad, but because they feel worthless and uncared for. Some don't have parents who are prepared to provide them with the love and acceptance they need in the course of dealing with severe problems. But even youth growing up with all the advantages can make poor judgments, especially at those moments, common in adolescent development, when parents have lost credibility. In the course of normal conflicts parents can seem completely irrelevant and judgmental - even as they are being good parents; setting limits and doing exactly what they should be doing to try to protect their adolescent children. At these times youth need to figure things out on their own - with their peers AND their constructive adult allies who they know care for them greatly. A system of care, including schools through their various activity programs, occasionally through special education programs, and through the talents of the many teaching and counseling staff who could serve as mentors, should be designed to provide the natural supports youth need to grow up safe. Community cohesion - where there is an expectation that certain youth oriented adults, including teachers, will function as mentors, or as natural supports as well as other youth leaders, neighbors, relatives, older peers, etc. - is the essential principle for shaping the risk taking of youth.
Charles Huffine, MD Posted Friday, August 3, 2007 at 05:24 PM
I believe that more student engagement in the learning process will go a long way in securing a more positve learning enviroment. Posted Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 06:33 AM
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