‘Oral sex has become an extension of what teens call “making out” or “hooking up” and for many teens is not considered sex,’ explain the authors in their assessment of adolescent risk-taking. This was news to me, and it made me think. The chapters on risks associated with suicide, drug-related violence and gambling were equally informative and thought-provoking.

One of the most challenging views posed in the book is the assertion that hosting a poker game at home for a teenager's birthday party is likely to have far greater adverse after-effects than poor parental policing of teenage sex. Sex, argue the authors, is natural and essential for the continuation of the species, and teenagers have had sex since the beginnings of time. Gambling, on the other hand, is a hidden and devastating addiction.

The information on what risks teenagers are taking, with whom and how is marvellous, packed with digests of reports and evidence. However, the chapter on possible causes of adolescent risk-taking is disappointingly speculative. By the time readers reach the chapter on preventing adolescent risk-taking, the book has taken a serious downward turn. One of the authors uses an anecdote of a friend who got divorced and whose husband, resisting the divorce, did not want to move out. The upshot was that the husband stayed in the family home and their teenage children witnessed arguing, which the authors believe caused excessive adolescent risk-taking. Their conclusion is that it would have been better for him to leave. This is, frankly, preposterous and the authors (a professor and an assistant professor) ought to know that personal anecdotes are not how causality or theories of prevention ought to be established.

These two rather woolly chapters aside, my main criticism of this book is its Americocentrism. Value judgements are made that simply don't hold in other English-speaking cultures. Furthermore, all the statistics in the book come from the US and at times the narrative extrapolates these erroneously to other parts of the globe. These niggles aside, this book is a refreshingly sensible approach to a potentially emotive subject and avoids colluding with the hysteria that often taints the topic.