Age-based risk orientation

It was just a dream; leave the kids alone

Photo by AJ Yorio on Unsplash

I was driving around a hilly neighborhood in the early morning as the darkness of the sky slowly turned into illuminated tones that allowed me to see more of what was around me. It was no neighborhood that I had been in before, but it looked like an amalgamation of neighborhoods that I had lived in throughout my 46 years. 

Suddenly, the sun broke over the crest of the hill I was driving up, blinding me. I slowed down, uncertain that I would not be able to avoid swiping a parked car or see an oncoming vehicle. I tried to speed up as I lost momentum on the uphill, but I pressed the accelerator a bit too much and the car lurched forward. Simultaneously, I saw a silhouette of a person on a bike in the middle of the road and I slammed the brake. 

As I sat there stationary, the face of the person on the bike came into focus. For some reason they were not riding their bike, they were just sitting on the bike in the middle of the road with both feet on the ground. They looked confused. Perhaps they were shocked that they could have just been hit. Perhaps they were not paying attention and had decided to pick that spot in the road to stop and look at their phone. I mumbled to myself how stupid they were to be hanging out in the middle of the road on a bicycle at that hour.

I didn’t trust myself driving around them given the tight road and my heavy foot. So I sat there and just waited for them to move. Once they did, I began driving again, slowly. 

Suddenly I was no longer driving. It was just a dream. The time was 4 a.m., my alarm had just gone off, and I was still lying in bed. 

I don’t typically remember my dreams. Usually, when my alarm goes off, I immediately jump out of bed and start my day. I am so often focused on what I need to accomplish that I don’t make time to process what had just fully consumed me as I slept. But this morning, I couldn’t get that scene out of my head. 

I considered how I might have driven when I was younger, versus how I drove in my dream, which is very much as I would drive today, minus the driving around aimlessly in the early morning aspect of it. When I was younger I liked to push my limits--driving quickly and admiring my agility behind the wheel. I often joked that I was a great driver, having narrowly avoided numerous accidents. The joke is that only a terrible driver would have had so many close calls. The reality is that when I was younger I was too aggressive and unskilled at driving, but my reflexes were impressive. I came out ahead far more often than not, although my insurance premiums didn’t reflect that. The rewards of driving then were freedom, adrenaline, and the belief that I was getting somewhere fast.

Now that I am older I take more of a risk-based approach to driving. I’ve been in my fair share of accidents, and I better appreciate that the difference between a minor fender bender and a serious injury or death to me, my passengers, or someone else can be razor thin. I know that when I am driving into the sun there are details I cannot pick up on, or that a car passing by me leaves me temporarily blind when driving on a dark road at night. I also know now that there are a lot of younger me’s on the road. I am okay with getting places slower these days.

I wonder if this shift from a reward orientation to a risk orientation is part of the natural arc of aging? 

It is well documented that adolescents often underestimate risks and perceive greater potential benefits from risky behavior. When we are young the opportunities seem endless, and the ticking clock of life is drowned out by the siren call of living life to the fullest, which can often be self-defeating. 

Is there a corresponding mismatch among middle-aged or elderly people? Do we perhaps overestimate risks and underestimate the potential benefits of risky behavior? It makes sense to focus more on downside risks when we are living life for others, whether it is for a spouse or kids, or if we are in positions of leadership and the actions we make impact the livelihood of others. 

I believe people should be able to make their own day-to-day and life decisions based on their own risk vs. reward profile. And society, at times, should provide limitations on risky behavior when it negatively impacts others, such as reckless driving. But to what extent should people dictate to those they have power over what risks they may take if those risks do not harm others? 

The focus on risks over rewards is a burden older people regularly place upon the young. Parents chase after their very young children to make sure they don’t fall and hit their head or put a strange object in their mouth. In doing so, the parents frequently frustrate and inhibit the development of the child. Although to be fair, the fatality rate from accidents for young children is significant enough to justify increased vigilance and intervention.  

But as kids age, parents place firm restrictions on their freedom, such as the ability to engage in risky play and how far children may venture away from the home. In doing so, the parents undermine the autonomy of young people, which, to be frank, can sow the seeds of future depression, suicidal ideation and action, and an inability for those young people to take control of their lives as young adults. And to be fair to kids who think such parenting is overbearing, the risk of serious injury from play or of being kidnapped is extraordinarily small. 

Additionally, parents commonly ally with school teachers and administrators to place tremendous pressure on young people to excel academically. This typically happens around late middle school and high school, but in higher income or more prestige driven environments, this may happen as early as the preschool years. The adults too often fear that failure to navigate through schooling systems to win places at top colleges may lock their adult kids into a life of insecurity, and equally as scary for many affluent or highly educated parents, provide an eternal source of embarrassment because others may conclude that they allowed their kids to squander their advantages.   

Counterintuitively, pressuring kids to excel in the competitive game of schooling frequently results in worse academic outcomes than letting them chart their own paths. The pressure that stems from the fear of kids stumbling academically and being relegated to attending a lower ranked college, or worse an unranked college, or worse community college, or worse going directly into the workforce, can lock the student into a narrow conception of what learning is and leave them with an uninspiring vision of what makes for a meaningful life. 

The fear-based attempts of adults to save the young person from themselves can also create an adversarial relationship that increases rather than mitigates long-term risk. Yes, young people tend to be more impulsive and less concerned about future consequences, and they have less life experience to draw on when making decisions. But browbeating young people to study more, work harder, and sacrifice their own interests for the sake of performance for others rarely results in exceptional performance. It does, however, make it less likely that those young people will seek out adult advice when confronted with difficult and consequential decisions, or when they are in trouble.

Becoming more mindful and slowing down as we age seems natural and prudent. Risk should not be ignored in the pursuit of reward. But we should also temper our desire to reduce risk on those we have power over, particularly children and adolescents. It is not appropriate to try to control and limit young people when the risk in our heads is not reflective of the risks they actually face, and especially when the so-called risk doesn’t risk harming anyone else.