Adolescent decision‐making is highly sensitive to input from the social environment. In particular, adult and maternal presence influence adolescents to make safer decisions when encountered with risky scenarios. However, it is currently unknown whether maternal presence confers a greater advantage than mere adult presence in buffering adolescent risk taking. In the current study, 23 adolescents completed a risk‐taking task during an fMRI scan in the presence of their mother and an unknown adult. Results reveal that maternal presence elicits greater activation in reward‐related neural circuits when making safe decisions but decreased activation following risky choices. Moreover, adolescents evidenced a more immature neural phenotype when making risky choices in the presence of an adult compared to mother, as evidenced by positive functional coupling between the ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Our results underscore the importance of maternal stimuli in bolstering adolescent decision‐making in risky scenarios. Prior research showed that mothers could influence teens to make safe decisions during a risk taking task, but it was unknown whether this effect was unique to mothers. In this study, we found that maternal presence, compared to that of an unknown adult, uniquely altered adolescent neural circuitry associated with reward processing and social cognition and helped sway their adolescents towards safe decision making. These findings highlight the continued importance of maternal social scaffolding in adolescence.