How to teach children about risk

Lessons in the rational appraisal of danger may be the secret to a happier, healthier life – and they can be mastered through a few simple steps.

When you're in charge of a small child, even the most idyllic setting can turn into a danger zone.

In the first years, there is the risk of being hit by a car, falling into a pool or pond, or being bitten by a dog (most commonly, the family's own). The potential perils change with the child's age: alcohol, drugs, violence and untreated mental health issues can endanger the wellbeing of teens and young adults. Road traffic injuries remain a major risk, too. And then there are the invisible dangers, such as air pollution, which are often especially hard to detect and address.

Eventually, we all need to be able to appraise risk ourselves, so that we can navigate the world safely without the guidance of our parents or guardian. Without those skills, we are far more likely to make rash decisions that can result in poor health, financial distress – and even a criminal record.

How do children learn these lessons? And what can parents and guardians do to set their children down a safer path in the world – and perhaps pick up a few tricks for themselves, too?

With a growing body of literature devoted to the psychology of risk, we can finally answer these questions. Psychologists have now identified why children often fail to spot elemental dangers, the reasons that teenagers seem to be set on gambling their future for a few moments of thrill-seeking, and the educational barriers that can prevent people from learning – even as adults – to appraise risks rationally.

Each developmental stage will need a different approach. But with the right guidance, it is possible to teach children and teens to develop high "decision-making competence", with enormous consequences for the rest of their lives.

"These skills that underlie our destiny can be taught," says Joshua Weller, a psychologist at Leeds University who specialises in risk taking. "They can be nurtured and developed through lots of different methods."

The glass floor

Babies are born with surprisingly little innate knowledge about even the most basic dangers. As many parents will know through terrifying experience, babies who are first learning to crawl will attempt to push themselves off the edge of a bed or changing table without a moment's hesitation. Studies suggest that fear of height only comes from experience, as the child learns to pay greater attention to their peripheral vision. It is only after a few weeks of independent movement that they will start to show signs of anxiety – such as a racing heartbeat – when, for example, they see a sharp drop through a glass floor.

As social sponges, young children often learn to recognise danger vicariously, by noting others' facial expressions and body language. Chris Askew at the University of Surrey, UK, for example, showed eight-year-old children pictures of three unfamiliar Australian marsupials – the quoll, quokka, and cuscus, that were paired with either a photo of a frightened, a photo of a smiling face, or no photo at all. In follow up tests, they reported feeling more scared of those animals that had been paired with the frightened faces and were much more reluctant to open a box that reportedly contained the animal in question. And the effects were long lasting, with further tests revealing that they were more likely to associate fear-related words with those animals for months after the original exposure.

Simply recognising a danger is often not enough to keep a child safe, however, since their developing brains may not be quick enough to react to the problem at hand. Research shows that we don't learn to fully integrate our senses – such as sight and hearing – until we are around 10 years old. That makes it hard to recognise the speed at which a car, for example, is approaching. Young children's developing brains also tend to be more easily distracted, meaning that they may simply forget about the potential danger.

When it comes to things like road safety, parents are often advised to establish routines – such as always looking left and right multiple times before crossing or waiting for the green man to appear on the traffic lights. Repeated practice should mean that these behaviours become habitual, so that the child will eventually perform them without the need for constant reminders.

Growing rationality

Guiding teens through adolescence presents its own difficulties. The teen brain is known to undergo large structural changes, which seems to increase the sensitivity of their dopamine signalling – a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. This was once thought to make teens much more impulsive than younger children, as they actively seek out risky situations that could give them a bigger dopamine hit.

Yet laboratory experiments, which have attempted to examine the cognitive processes involved in risk appraisal, suggests that this is doing teens a deep injustice. These studies often take the form of gambling tasks. They might be given a multi-coloured spinner with an arrow in the middle, for instance. If the spinner lands on the correct colour, they have the chance of winning $10 (£9) – but there is a 50% chance of not winning anything. Or they could opt to take a smaller, but guaranteed pay-out of $5 (£4.50).

Contrary to the expectation that adolescents are inevitably drawn to risk, such studies show that teens tend to be more cautious, opting more often for the small sums of guaranteed income, compared with their younger peers. "When we provide adolescents with the opportunity to avoid taking risks, they actually choose the safe option more often than children," says Ivy Defoe, an assistant professor in the department of child development and education at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who recently published a paper reviewing the scientific studies of adolescent risk-taking.

From these results, Defoe concludes that teens aren't necessarily hardwired to rebel. It's often simply a matter of the situations that they find themselves in. As they gain independence away from the watchful eyes of their parents, there are many more opportunities to act rashly – whether that's attempting to shoplift, trying an illegal drug, ing a gang, having unprotected sex, or racing their friends on the motorway. "Access to risk-conducive situations increases dramatically during adolescence and during emerging adulthood," Defoe explains – and sometimes, it is hard to resist the temptations that brings.

Decision-making competence

When trying to help a teen navigate their newfound freedom, it's worth ing that there are considerable differences in risk appraisal between individuals at any age. There is large variation in people's performance on the laboratory gambling tasks, for example. So while, on average, teens may not be drawn to danger, a considerable proportion may frequently throw caution to the wind.

In many cases, this may result from generally poor reasoning skills. To investigate this possibility, psychologists have also developed a more comprehensive "decision-making competence" (DMC) test. This includes questions that test someone's abilities to follow basic logical rules when weighing up the pros and cons of different options, as well as measures of common cognitive biases that might skew someone's understanding of risk. For example, it presents participants with two separate statements about condoms. One says:

Imagine that a type of condom has a 5% failure rate. That is, if you have sex with someone who has the HIV virus, there is a 5% chance that this type of condom will fail to prevent you from being exposed to the HIV virus.

The other says:

Imagine that a type of condom has a 95% success rate. That is, if you have sex with someone who has the HIV virus, there is a 95% chance that this type of condom will prevent you from being exposed to the HIV virus.

The two statements would be presented apart, in different sections of the test, and in each case, the participants have to assess whether condoms are a successful way of reducing the risk of contagion.

Each of these statements express the same risk information, but many report the condoms in the first example to be ineffective, while they say that those in the second are effective. This is known as the "framing bias". If you show this kind of inconsistency in your answers, it suggests you may not be used to assessing statistical information critically and focusing on the specific details of what is being presented; instead, you just go with the gist based on the way it is presented, which can be misleading.

Other questions test the consistency of people's risk perception. The participants might be asked to guess their chances of dying within the next year, or within the next 10 years. Logically speaking, the probability given for the first question must be less than the second, since the risk of dying accumulates over time, but not everyone's answers reflect this. Once again, this may reflect a general inability to think logically about probabilities.

Finally, the participants are questioned on their general knowledge of common risks – and their confidence in their answers. Someone who was irrationally certain about their knowledge would be marked down compared to someone who recognised their influence. This is important, since it's often our inability to judge our own abilities that puts us in the most dangerous situations.

These questions may all sound rather academic – but people's performance on the decision-making competence scale has, in psychological jargon, "ecological validity". "It predicts many outcomes down the road," explains Weller, who has conducted many of these studies.

When the decision-making competence test is rolled out in teens, for example, the low scorers tended to have higher drug use, and showed more delinquent behaviours such as regular rule-breaking at school. When tested in adults, meanwhile, it seems to predict everything from missing a flight to catching a sexually transmitted disease or filing for bankruptcy. Importantly, this is largely independent of their IQ. Decision-making competence is not just a measure of raw brainpower, but specifically how well someone is able to appraise situations.

Learning to think

Both Defoe's and Weller's research suggest that parents and teachers may need a sophisticated approach to guiding pre-teens and adolescents through life's risks. Rather than simply imposing strict rules that eliminate the child's exposure to risk, it could be for more useful – in the long-run – to help them hone their decision-making and thinking skills.

Perhaps most important is the encouragement of self-control and emotional regulation – since so many dangers are the result of impulsivity. Practices such as mindfulness may be helpful, as can metacognitive practices – such as teaching children to imagine the consequences of their actions.

Along the way, parents can encourage the use of critical thinking – strategies such as looking for evidence that contradicts their assumptions. Schools can also help children and young people learn to make better decisions. In one trial of 10th graders in Oregon, history teachers and students examined historical events in of the decisions faced by historic figures, for example taking the role of steel workers deciding whether to strike for higher wages. The study found that the approach increased the students' academic performance, as well as their scores on the decision-making competence test.

Weller emphasises the need for a multi-pronged approach. "I don't think there is one single thing that should be prescribed," he says. The aim is to use whatever means possible to get children and adolescents to start thinking about risk and danger in a more analytical way.

By the time they reach adulthood, they should be prepared to deal more rationally with life's dangers – and eventually use those skills to protect their own children, too.

David Robson is a science writer and author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA). He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.