Hardwired for risk – why ‘boys will be boys’
Male teenagers indulge in dangerous behaviour more than girls – and their brains are to blame.
On Monday, my household had its latest black eye. My younger teenager was trying to “body”, or knock over, his big brother for fun – he ended up slamming his sibling’s face into the oven door.
On Tuesday, school was out and my older son had some friends over in the evening – one arrived bloodied, in pain, and unable to walk; he had to be picked up by his parents. It turned out he’d broken his leg jumping out of a window in a disused building.
As a mother of teenage boys, you get used to bruises, cuts and broken bones. I know young men who have experimented with making bombs out of fireworks, had competitions to see who could jump off the highest edifice, played on railway tracks, jumped bikes through home-made rings of fire, “roof surfed” on the top of friends’ cars on motorways, and run down Tube escalators at speed.
The tragic cost of this risky behaviour has been made evident in the past few weeks. Boys injured themselves “tombstoning” off rocks into the sea in Torquay, another group were filmed jumping off Tower Bridge in behaviour the RNLI deemed “extremely dangerous” and many others have headed to perilous waters such as reservoirs, quays and dams to swim. In total, during the heatwave, seven teenage boys drowned as they sought to cool down with friends at places which often had warning signs on them. Last year, 39 young people died in drowning accidents – nearly 90 per cent were male.
All teenagers indulge in risky behaviour, but studies have shown male adolescents do it more than girls. A recent investigation by University College London’s Institute of Education showed that in every case of risky behaviour – from graffiti to drug taking, shoplifting to assault – boys indulged in it in higher numbers.
It’s why teenage male drivers are deemed a higher risk than females – with one study showing 9.2 million young male drivers die in traffic accidents for every 100 million vehicle miles: nearly double the death rate of 5.3 million for young female drivers.
The reason is complicated; a mixture of the way our brains work and the differences in how men and women evolved. External influences – friends especially – play their part, as do romances and showboating. One of the interesting things about teenage male behaviour is that, according to several studies, their risky behaviour calms down if they are with a girlfriend.
‘The stage where the decision-making bit of the brain hasn’t evolved fully is longer for boys’
One reason for this difference is the rate at which boys’ brains develop in comparison to girls’, says Dr Frances Jensen, chair of the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the New York Times bestselling book The Teenage Brain. “The brain is the most complex organ in our body and takes the longest time to develop from back to front – it can take into the second and third-plus decades to finish the process,” she explains. “The element that really comes into play in the teenage years is the social bit of the brain. This is involved with reward, peer pressure, immediate gratification, and a lot of those things will go into somebody deciding to jump into some water in the wrong place.
“The part of their brains which isn’t developed is the prefrontal lobe which helps you consider things like risk, decision making, empathy, judgment. So they are dealing with a social brain but without the adult executive function which would help them think, ‘That’s a really bad idea.’
“And what we do know from measuring brain development and the connections to the prefrontal lobe is that boys are on average about two years behind girls. You see it in the classroom; by 18 the girls are all organised. So this stage, where the social element of the brain is really developed and the decision-making bit isn’t, is prolonged for boys and often comes at the time when they are starting to drive cars and drink alcohol
which makes it even harder for them to make sensible decisions.”
While the parents of girls have to worry about eating disorders, navigating social media pressure and sex attacks, the parents of boys have the added stress of violence. And while both sexes can behave stupidly, teenage boys do it more.
One theory about why there is this difference in male and female brains and behaviour is to do with the way humans evolved – and adults need to bear that in mind, says Dr John Barry, the former chairman of the male psychology section of the British Psychological Society.
“Males were designed to be the sex who were taking risks in terms of hunting, in terms of defending the village,” he says. “From a young age, you see that boys do things like play-fighting so that they are geared up for hunting and defending. The influx of testosterone in their teenage years means they are faster and stronger and want to use that, and they are also beginning to be interested in romantic relationships.
“When it comes to being around someone they might be attracted to, they want to display their abilities. Calling it showing off is trivialising it; they need to show they are someone who is brave, can be a defender, and who will take risks. Or they might be doing it with their friends; this is a process of them honing their skills.
“It is important to remind ourselves that they are not just silly maniacs running around the place taking frivolous risks – there is a reason behind it. I know it’s a horrible phrase but it doesn’t mean it isn’t true; boys will be boys.
“But there is, of course, a terrible downside to all of this, which is that risks can go wrong and lead to outcomes which are heart breaking.”