• Spring is a time of many milestones for teenagers and their families, and while it's a happy time, it also makes Britton-Hecla Secondary Principal Shad Storley a little nervous.
• "The scariest time for me is at prom and graduation time every time the phone rings," Storley said. "Your heart skips a bit. Kids think they are invincible at times, but (tragedies) can always happen here." 
• They can, and they do. An alcohol-related crash in Faulk County on February 11 involving two people under the age of 21 resulted in a totaled pickup, but luckily the two in the crash only sustained injuries. There are, however, many crashes involving young drivers that do result in fatalities: Of the 112 fatal crashes reported in South Dakota in 2009, 20 of them involved drivers under the age of 21.
• Parents might hear these statistics and shudder, but they might also feel resigned to the inevitable: Teens will be teens, right? They will rebel and take needless risks until experience teaches them otherwise, and there's not much parents can do about it--just give them good information and hope they make the right decision.
• New research on the workings of the teenage brain suggests that parents can do far more to keep their teens safe than just hope for the best. The key is understanding that in certain situations, teens are under intense pressure from their own brains to make unsafe decisions, and the best strategy for parents is keeping kids out of those situations altogether.
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• How teens respond to risk
• Researchers have been trying to figure out why teenagers break rules and seek thrills for decades, and in recent years they've come to some interesting conclusions.
• For example, according to Laurence Steinberg of Temple University, teenagers don't take dangerous risks because they think they are invulnerable. "In fact, the logical-reasoning abilities of 15-year-olds are comparable to those of adults, (and) adolescents are no worse than adults at perceiving risk or estimating their vulner

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