Taking Risks: Should You Worry?
Campus experts advise that some risks can be good — for helping your student to learn, grow, and develop confidence.
By the time your child is ready to enter college, you have already spent a lifetime protecting him or her from risks.
“Watch out for cars!”
“Don’t touch the burner!”
“No running with scissors!”
Now, all of a sudden, your warnings are out of earshot while your UW–Madison student faces new kinds of risks at a distance, without you to hold the net.
This can be a nail-biting time for parents, but the good news is that not all of the risks that students encounter are scary ones.
“You might say risk equals anything that moves you beyond your normal routines of thought, of interactions, or of experiences,” says Aaron Brower, the UW’s vice provost for teaching and learning and a social work professor, who focuses on the transition from high school to college. “Once you move beyond that circle of routine, you now are in the risk zone and those risks could be positive or negative.”
Young adults are typically excited, but also apprehensive, about this. “I think there is some anxiousness and nervousness about a new place, a new environment, meeting new peers,” says Gwen McIntosh, a UW Health pediatrician and a professor at the School of Medicine and Public Health who specializes in high-risk adolescent behaviors. “But I think that risk-taking can be positive in the sense that this is a great chance for students to explore a new area, to take a chance and meet a new group of people, or participate in a new activity that in the long run might be very beneficial for them.”
Calculated Risks
How eager teens are to take risks is a function of
brain development, says Brad Brown, a UW professor
of educational psychology who is an expert on
peer groups and parent-adolescent relationships.
The impulse to be venturesome develops in early
to mid-adolescence, he says, while the capacity
to reason and exercise caution comes into its own
later. “By the time young people get to college, that
frontal portion of the brain is maturing to the point
where typically young people are more thoughtful
in the choices and decisions that they make. And
therefore, risks are more calculated,” he says.
Yet at the same time, Brown cautions, “They’re still 18, they’re still adolescents, and in many cases, the structure that helps individuals either avoid opportunities for risk or helps them think through the consequences of risk, are suddenly removed. That is, parents aren’t there to watch over them.”
This is not an entirely negative thing, Brower believes. “It’s a different environment and a whole new routine, so students are feeling like almost every moment in those first few weeks of class is filled with novelty and risk, in a sense. [As a student, you are] taking different courses, talking with people you’re not used to talking with, going to different kinds of events that you might not have experienced before, trying new foods that you’re not used to, and thinking for yourself in new ways.”
Thinking Like a Student
If these things don’t strike you as particularly risky, look
at them through a teen-ager’s eyes: Will I be rejected
by a new friend or a new group? Will I fail at a new
activity and embarrass myself? Will I waste the time I
could have spent doing something I’d like better?
Sometimes the biggest risk that high-achieving first-year students feel is not the difficulty of any specific activity, but that they’re no longer the proverbial big fish in a small pond, says Eric Knueve, assistant dean and director of the UW’s Center for Leadership & Involvement.
“We get the cream of the crop here — we’re a pretty prestigious university — so the students who come are used to succeeding where they’ve come from, and now they’re put into a pool where everybody’s succeeding. And now there’s going to be a new order that is kind of established, so the fear of ‘Where am I going to fit in that order?’ probably also is on some students’ minds,” Knueve says.
So, what can parents do, from a distance, to cope with the positive-to-negative spectrum of risk?
One way is to begin teaching healthy decision-making processes long before students have arrived on campus. But if you find yourself saying, “I wish I’d known that before,” don’t sell yourself short; you have likely done more to prepare them than you realize.
“I think the biggest challenge for parents in letting their students go to college is having some faith that the years they’ve spent raising their children are going to pay off in terms of those children making smart decisions and developing confidence, and having the ability to say no to certain high-risk situations that might end badly, should they pursue them,” says McIntosh.
Learning from Mistakes
Communicating clear expectations about avoiding
truly dangerous behaviors, such as excessive drinking,
is key, says Brower. At the same time, he urges
parents to be “unambiguously encouraging” of
constructive risks — not inadvertently making fun of
a different kind of activity, but asking questions about
how it’s going and why they like it. And perhaps most
important, Brower says, is for students to reflect on
the results of the experience, whether good or bad,
so they learn something from it.
Letting young adults learn from their mistakes might be agonizing for parents, but it is part of the process of transitioning from the control they have during the high school years. Brown advises parents to “make sure that when their children move to college, they have shifted to more of an advisory role rather than a directory role … to help young people think through decisions, but not try to make the decisions for them.”
He empathizes with parents who are finding it tough to let go. “Don’t feel as if there’s something wrong with you if you find this to be a hopefully exciting, but also nerve-wracking, time in trying to help the kids, not knowing quite what the best thing to do is,” he says.
Keep Talking
“I think the best attitude is one of cautious optimism,”
McIntosh adds, stressing the importance of ongoing
dialog. “I think when parents are overly anxious about
certain risk behaviors — drinking, drugs, sex, whatever
it might be — that can really discourage a child or a
young adult from talking to their parents about what
they might be worried about or what they actually are
seeing when they arrive on campus.”
Perhaps a useful lesson from all of this is that, if you want to encourage your students to take more positive risks, revel with them in the ones that pay off.
“My favorite thing about this work is being able to sit with students and hear the excitement they have about something that maybe they’ve explored for the first time, or something they’ve always done, but never on this kind of scale,” Knueve says. “That’s really fun.”
— Bill Graf, University Communications