The Romance of Risk

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Lynn Ponton is a psychiatrist at the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco. Her career has been spent helping distressed teens and their families. She is particularly interested in risk-taking behaviors and why young people are so fascinated with them. The Romance of Risk presents the stories of thirteen of her patients, all teenagers who were doing dangerous things, including running away, cutting, starving, drinking, taking drugs, fighting, and having unprotected sex. Most of the young people learned to understand why they were taking such unhealthy risks and started living safer lives. Many of them worked out the troubles they had been having in their relationships with their parents.

Dr. Ponton is trying to promote healthy risk-taking and to help adults redirect young people from unhealthy risk taking. She sums up her message in the last paragraph of her introduction: “In learning how to assess risks and make reasonable choices, young people begin to realize just how powerful they can be, how much control over their own lives they do have, and what promise their futures hold. Risk-taking becomes more than romance then; it becomes a vital tool that adolescents can use to shape their lives.”

We who work with teens who have been abused or neglected in childhood must remember that foster youth typically feel that they do NOT have control over their own lives and that the future does NOT hold much promise for them. They often have not learned how to assess risks or make reasonable choices and have had no responsible adult to set clear limits against which they can measure their own power. Risk-taking can be particularly dangerous for such young people, which is an important reason why they need mentors as well as advocates in their lives. Any of you who are CASA for a teen (or have a teen close to you in your personal life) will learn a thing or two from this book. When you become discouraged, remember that patterns are extremely difficult to change and require “an active team effort, including individual and family therapy, collaboration with school and the probation and social service departments, and the assistance of other caring adults.” (Pg. 152).

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.