Growth Through Taking Healthy Risks

Teenagers crave and seek risks. It helps them to develop and grow. We often think of risk-taking as dangerous, but taking risks is not always negative. Healthy risk-taking—like mountain biking, skiing or gymnastics—helps kids build confidence and strengthen leadership skills.

But, as parents, it is not always easy to accommodate our risk-craving kids.

Janine Fernandes-Hayden, the executive director of The Circle Education, has a son who is a downhill mountain biker. He discovered the sport eight years ago during a family trip in Whistler:

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Our visit coincided with Crankworx, the world’s largest mountain bike festival. Watching the action, my son found himself mesmerized by it all. Whistler is a mountain bike paradise and my husband, and I agreed that our son could join a bike camp while we were there, to develop skills and bike awareness.

The next year, when we returned to Whistler, Crankworx was happening again. My son witnessed kids flying over the jumps and he said very longingly, with me standing next to him, “Oh, the one thing I want to be in life is a professional mountain biker…”

I recognized that I needed to compromise. Where did these fears come from anyway? When I was young, I didn’t shy away from adventures. In my 20s, when I lived in South Africa for close to a year, I went white water rafting on the Zambizi River and flew in a microlight aircraft over Victoria Falls. But that changed when I had children; my tendency to seek out new or thrilling experiences diminished. I became risk-averse, particularly in physical domains. I tried not to have this rub off into my parenting, but it has been a push and a pull.

And yet, as the executive director of an educational non-profit organization, who works with youth all the time, I know that kids and teenagers crave and seek risks. It’s part of growing up. Taking calculated risks is good for their brain development, their creativity and their confidence. In fact, the adolescent brain is wired to take risks, owing to their limbic system (think dopamine!) developing more rapidly than the part of their brain responsible for impulse control and judgment. What this means is, whether we like it or not; they will take risks.

Mountain biking is what experts call a healthy risk. It can be challenging, but with the right gear, training and guidance, it doesn’t have to be dangerous. Providing your kids with healthy outlets and activities, which can also be performing on stage or living a year abroad, can teach them how to calculate and mitigate risks.

My son is now part of a mountain bike team and participates regularly in downhill and enduro races. It is hard as a parent to see your kids undertaking risky endeavours. I admit that my fear sometimes prevents me from being encouraging and positive, but I also see what mountain biking is giving him. My son is a timid child and this risk-taking has opened him up to developing more confidence in other areas of his life. If you can ride down a mountain and jump over bumps, other things can seem less difficult.

Mountain biking also taught him how to calculate risks and learn his limits. And I must admit, I encourage him to take guided risks on a mountain bike, with a coach, wearing a helmet and protective gear, and appease his risk-taking cravings, steering him away from unhealthier and far more destructive alternatives.

As my son progresses with mountain biking, I am in the process of “building a bicycle while riding it” with my views on risk-taking. I try to ask myself the same questions and apply the same lessons that we teach youth in the programs that are offered through my work: What kind of choices do you make and why? What are your boundaries and limits?

It is important for kids to learn this at a young age. So ideally when they are beginning to hang out with friends, they have that processing in their brains. Hopefully, they will carry that through in other scenarios and situations when they become young adults.

Janine Fernandes-Hayden
Janine Fernandes-Haydenhttps://thecircleeducation.org/
Janine Fernandes-Hayden is the executive director of The Circle Education, a non-profit organization that offers evidence-based socialemotional programming in schools in the Gulf Islands. She lives on Salt Spring Island and is mother of four teenagers. Learn more at thecircleeducation.org