Divergent by Veronica Roth

On a late Friday or Saturday night, loud thumping music is heard from down the street and one can assume that the racket is caused by a group of teenagers having a house party. This party is their form of experimenting, mostly with drugs, alcohol, and various sexual partners. This experimenting is part of a long lasting tradition of teenaged risk taking, a tradition where teens tend to walk on very thin ice. In the book Divergent by Veronica Roth the main character, Beatrice or Tris for short, takes many risks in her new faction and home called the Dauntless. She jumps and zip lines off buildings, volunteers to have knives thrown at her face, fights boys nearly twice her muscle mass, and so much more. For her the effect of risk taking is positive: it leads to a sense of belonging and welcome into the Dauntless community as the highest ranked initiate, but the effects of skating on such thin ice do not always work out so well. Teenaged risk taking can have various causes and consequences. Risks like binge drinking, smoking, unsafe sex, and wild partying obviously have negative connotations because of their detrimental effects, but there are many lesser known positive effects of risk taking.
Risk taking is often thought to be simply due to peer pressure, but it can be caused by both physiological and psychological changes and other outside influences. The deepest, most profound reason for a daring action is the physiological basis of teenaged risk taking. In the teenaged brain the “blossoming and pruning” phase of development in the prefrontal cortex, the PFC for short, is not yet complete when the child is entering puberty, as experts once thought it was, and the prefrontal cortex is what controls the ability to think ahead and con...

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...hough, not the drugs and the alcohol. Risks and gambles are a part of life and cannot be avoided, only compromised with.

Works Cited

Kittleson, Mark J. “Teen Drug Abuse Risk Factors and Risk Taking.” The Truth About Drugs, (n.d.). Facts on File Health Reference Center. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
Kittleson, Mark J. “Teens, Risk Taking, and Alcohol Abuse.” The Truth About Alcohol, (n.d.). Facts on File Health Reference Center.Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
Pickhardt, Carl. “Surviving (Your Child’s) Adolescence: Risk Prevention in Adolescence.” Psychology Today. Psychology Today, 27 Dec. 2009. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
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Roth, Veronica. Divergent. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2011. Print.
Walsh, David. Why Do They Act That Way? New York: Free Press, 2004. Print.