The Teenage Brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults
kids with learning tools and accessories like Baby Einstein DVDs and Baby Mozart Discovery Kits. But the adolescent brain? Most people thought it was pretty much like an adult’s, only with fewer miles on it.
The problem with this assumption is that it was wrong. Very wrong. There are other misconceptions and myths about the teenage brain and teenage behavior that are now so ingrained they are accepted societal beliefs: teens are impulsive and emotional because of surging hormones; teens are rebellious and oppositional because they want to be difficult and different; and if teenagers occasionally drink too much alcohol without their parents’ consent, well, their brains are resilient, so they’ll certainly rebound without suffering any permanent effects. Another assumption is that the die is cast at puberty: whatever your IQ or apparent talents may be (a math or science type versus a language arts type), you stay that way for the rest of your life.
Again, all wrong. The teen brain is at a very special point in development. As this book will reveal, I learned that there are unique vulnerabilities of this age window, but there is also the ability to harness exceptional strengths that fade as we enter into adulthood.
The more I studied the emerging scientific literature on adolescents, the more I understood how mistaken it was to look at the teenage brain through the prism of adult neurobiology. Functioning, wiring, capacity—all are different in adolescents, I learned. I was also aware that this new science of the teenage brain wasn’t reaching most parents, or at least wasn’t reaching parents who don’t have a background in neuroscience as I did. And this was just the audience who needed to know about this new science of the adolescent brain: parents and guardians and educators who are just as perplexed, frustrated, and maddened by the teenagers in their care as I was.
When my younger son, Will, was sixteen, he passed his driver’s test. He’d rarely given me cause to worry, but that changed early one morning. A few weeks after getting his license, he had started to drive himself to school in our 1994 Dodge Intrepid—a big, old, safe car. All seemed to go well. As usual, Will left around 7:30, as school started at 7:55. Off he went. Just as I was walking out the door to go to my job, at about 7:45, I got a call from Will: “Mom, I’m okay, but the car is totaled.” Well, first, I was thankful he had the presence of mind to lead off with telling me he was okay, but I had visions of his car wrapped around a tree. I said, “I’m on my way,” and jumped in my car. As I was approaching the school entrance, I saw the flashing lights of the police cars. What had he done? Well, simply put, he had decided that he could squeeze a left turn into the school entrance in the path of rapidly moving traffic going in the opposite direction. This might have worked if there had been another mother like me driving in the opposite direction who would have shaken her head and slammed on her brakes. But in Will’s case that morning, it was a twenty-three-year-old guy, a construction worker in a Ford F-150 on his way to work. He was no more in the mood to give the right-of-way than Will had been to wait to cross the road. So—the accident happened. It was good to know that 1994 airbags still worked in 2006.
There was Will standing by his completely trashed car at the very entrance of his school, looking sheepish as basically the entire school drove by him as students and staff arrived for the day. What a lesson for Will. I recognized that immediately—and was so thankful that he and the other driver had emerged unscathed from this battle of wills as to who had the right-of-way.
What was he thinking? I asked myself, almost reflexively.
Then: Oh, no, here we go again.
This time, however, I quickly calmed myself. I knew a lot more now. I knew Will’s brain, like Andrew’s, like every other teenager’s, was a work in progress. He clearly was no longer a child, and yet his brain was still developing, changing, even growing. I hadn’t recognized that until Andrew made me sit up and take stock of what I knew about the pediatric brain, that it’s not so much what is happening inside the head of an adolescent as what is not.
The teenage brain is a wondrous organ, capable of titanic stimulation and stunning feats of learning, as you will learn in this book. Granville Stanley Hall, the founder of the child study movement, wrote in 1904 about the exuberance of adolescence:
These years are the best decade of life. No age is so responsive to all the best and wisest adult endeavor. In no psychic soil, too, does seed, bad as well as good, strike such deep root, grow so rankly or bear fruit so quickly or so surely.
Hall said optimistically of adolescence that it was “the birthday of the imagination,” but he also knew this age of exhilaration has dangers, including impulsivity, risk-taking, mood swings, lack of insight, and poor judgment. What he couldn’t possibly have anticipated back then is the breathtaking range of dangers teens would be exposed to today through social media and the Internet. How many times have I heard from friends, colleagues, even strangers who have reached out to me after hearing me speak, about the crazy things their teenage kids or their friends just did? The daughter who “stole” her father’s motorcycle and crashed it into a curb. The kids who went “planking”—lying facedown, like a board, on any and every surface (including balcony railings), and then taking photos of one another doing it. Or worse: “vodka eyeballing,” pouring liquor directly into the eye to get an immediate high, or, scared about passing a drug test for a weekend job, ingesting watered-down bleach, thinking it would “clean” their urine of the pot they had smoked the night before.
Children’s brains continue to be molded by their environment, physiologically, well past their midtwenties. So in addition to being a time of great promise, adolescence is also a time of unique hazards. Every day, as I will show you, scientists are uncovering ways in which the adolescent brain works and responds to the world differently from the brain of either a child or an adult. And the way that the adolescent brain responds to the world has a lot to do with the impulsive, irrational, and wrongheaded decisions teens seem to make so frequently.
Part of the problem in truly understanding our teenagers lies with us, the adults. Too often we send them mixed messages. We assume that when our kid begins to physically look like an adult—she develops breasts; he has facial hair—then our teenager should act like, and be treated as, an adult with all the adult responsibilities we assign to our own peers. Teenagers can join the military and go to war, marry without the consent of their parents, and in some places hold political office. In recent years, at least seven teens have been elected mayors of small towns in New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, and Oregon. Certainly the law often treats teens as adults, especially when those teens are accused of violent crimes and then tried in adult criminal courts. But in myriad ways we also treat our teens like children, or at least like less than fully competent adults.
How do we make sense of our own conflicting messages? Can we make sense?
For the past few years I’ve given talks all over the country—to parents, teens, doctors, researchers, and psychotherapists—explaining the risks and rewards that pertain to the new science of the adolescent brain. This book was prompted by the tremendous, even overwhelming, number of responses I have received from parents and educators (and sometimes even teens) who heard me speak. All of them wanted to share their own stories, ask questions, and try to understand how to help their kids—and, in the process, themselves—navigate this thrilling but perplexing stage of life.
The truth of the matter is, I learned from my own sons that adolescents are not, in fact, an alien species, but just a misunderstood one. Yes, they are different, but there are important physiological and neurological reasons for those differences. In this book I will explain how the teen brain offers major advantages on the one hand but unperceived and often unacknowledged vulnerabilities on the other. I am hoping you will use this as a handbook, a kind of user’s manual or survival guide to the care and feeding of the teenage brain. Ultimately, I want to do more than help adults better understand their teenagers. I want to offer practical advice so that parents can help their teenagers, too. Adolescents aren’t the only ones who must navigate this exciting but treacherous period of life. Parents, guardians, and educators must, too. I have—twice. It is humbling, exhilarating, confusing, all at the same time. As parents, we brace ourselves for what will be