
DATE: Thursday, October 2, 1997             TAG: 9710020813

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review 

SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

``ROMANCE OF RISK'' IS A GUIDE FOR TEENS AND PARENTS

HERE, IN ONE book, is a collection of nightmares - each parent's worst. The teen-agers in these pages have zeroed in on direct paths to self-destruction: doing drugs, mutilating or starving themselves, having unprotected sex. Theirs is a mantra of living for the moment.

It would be hard to read this book and fail to see something familiar in the troubled teens and their frightened parents.

What unfolds in ``The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do'' is a series of 13 case studies and the therapy that rose to the challenge, as told by Lynn E. Ponton, a practicing clinical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. A renowned teacher and lecturer on adolescent development, Ponton is also a professor at the University of California-San Francisco and the mother of two teenagers.

Ponton has some answers to teen risk-taking, but more important, she has a different take on it. She doesn't believe that the risk-taking is part of some power struggle with parents, some inevitable adolescent rebellion. Her way of looking at the behavior makes it less scary.

``American culture is defined at least in part by risk-taking - westward expansion and the settling of the western frontier were all about risk,'' she writes. ``Had the settlers known what kinds of dangers awaited them in the terrain ahead, would they have been able or willing to move forward?''

Teens are going to take risks, and that isn't all necessarily bad.

``Experimenting with new behaviors and feelings can promote more complex thinking, increase confidence, and help develop a young person's ability to reassess and undertake risks in the future,'' she writes.

But the risks must be guided. Her book is, therefore, a handbook for parents on how to offer up healthy risks - travel, activities, physical and educational challenges. Her hope is that parents and their children will see risk-taking as a tool to shape futures.

Ponton's book cannot help but be compelling to anyone interested in teens. These are real people sharing their innermost secrets - parents desperate to save their families, teen-agers on quests to figure out who they are.

But, occasionally, Ponton and her thoughts get in the way. Rather than step aside and let the stories unfold, she interjects her comments and breaks the flow.

The first person we meet is 14-year-old Jill, a runaway bored with her parents and their life in South San Francisco. She only ``felt alive'' while running the streets with her friends, a group called the Rainbow Family of Living Light whose members often took LSD and refused to use electricity.

She was lonely, it turned out. She needed a better sense of family and more excitement. Her parents expanded their roles in her life, spending more time with her on the computer, being around when she got home from school. Jill made a video to commemorate her life with the Rainbow Family, and at 16 she entered an arts program.

There was no storybook ending for Jill, but she is alive and happier and making better choices.

Another story is that of Joe, a high school senior who ran the family car off the road into a ravine after one of many drunken parties with friends. Although he kissed the ground after he emerged from the totaled car essentially unscathed, he quickly forgot his fear and probably would have returned to old habits had his family not intervened.

His story is a battle with alcoholism framed against a backdrop of party-oriented peers and parents who were never around. It turns out his father had a problem with alcohol, as did his father before him. Joe's father kicked his own habit and remained blind to the risks Joe was up against.

Joe and his father starting going to Alcoholics Anonymous together, and Joe's mother went to Al-Anon. The family grew closer and healthier.

Ponton brings some of America's most vexing social problems to the forefront through the words of those who lived them. And then she offers hope.

Welcome the risk-taking, Ponton advises. Just be around to shape it.

That makes sense. It's what good parents already do. But here's a step-by-step guide that is a worthwhile reference book. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do''

Author: Lynn E. Ponton

Publisher: Basic Books. 307 pp.

Price: $25