Carnegie Report Warns of Risks To Adolescents

By Ellen Flax

WASHINGTON--Unless schools, health providers, parents, and policymakers join together to help young adolescents, a large proportion of today's teenagers will face troubled and unhealthy lives as adults, a report to be issued this week by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development concludes.

The report--which is expected to have a strong influence on the grant-making efforts of the council's sponsoring institution, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to promote healthy lifestyles among young people--stresses that many young adolescents have adopted risky behaviors that may endanger their future well-being.

"By age 15, about a quarter of all young adolescents are engaged in behaviors that are harmful or dangerous to themselves or others,'' says the report, which was scheduled to be released here at a Carnegie-sponsored...