Unlocking The Teenage Brain

Playing Catch-Up

The differences are dramatic; all these changes mean that a teen's brain needs more sleep time to learn, organize, and store new learning.³⁷ One metaphor to consider is that teen brains resemble blueprints and roughly framed buildings more than a finished home. Instead of thinking about a teenage mind as an empty house that needs furnishings, educators and parents would do better to understand it as the rough framing of a house that still needs wiring, plumbing, flooring, and windows. Avoid treating teenagers like adults; they're not. They have the highest accident rate in cars of any age group. Teens are in a developmental fog and often make decisions even a nine-year-old would call stupid. They have sound biological reasons for the following patterns:

• Susceptibility: Teens are particularly susceptible to the risky extremes of novelty. Novelty juices up their unstable systems with brain chemicals such as dopamine and noradrenaline. They choose short-lasting, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards. Their undeveloped frontal lobes play a significant role in reckless behaviors.
• Lack of planning: Teens have trouble anticipating the consequences of their behavior because they rely on their immature frontal lobes. They don't see options very well. They get confused easily under stress and rarely plan more than one move ahead.
• Emotional stew: Emotions are essential to learning, and teens are still learning how to understand and manage emotions. They are poor at reading emotions and weak at selecting the right friends and getting their minds outside their own world of feelings.³⁸
• Crowd morality: Teenagers will climb the moral ladder only as their frontal lobes develop. To develop a clear moral and ethical compass, one needs real-life experiences, mediated by thoughtful adults. But teens spend an average of twenty-eight hours a week interfacing with digital technology (computers, cell phones, videogames, and television). This time is all unsupervised, most of it alone. To balance this, they often seek friendly (even if it's negative) peer clustering. But they're more likely to engage in risky behaviors when they are in groups than alone.
• Difficulty in self-regulation: Teens face a huge risk of chemical imbalances for behavioral and personality disorders such as anxiety, depression, stress, eating disorders, and shifts in sleep habits. Teens are more vulnerable to all of these than adults and have few coping skills.
• Risk taking: Teens are extremely vulnerable to addiction, and compared with adults they are less cognizant of the effects of drug use and abuse, and their addictions are harder to break. They see drugs as harmless, for the most part, and tend to believe that they can survive anything.

Does all this chaos and change suggest that the teen brain is too big of a cauldron for positive change? No, in fact, it's quite the opposite. For good or ill, the teen brain is highly vulnerable, and that's both a curse and an opportunity. The bottom line is that they have a tough time predicting the future. Figure 4.6 illustrates how teens struggle in being able to predict the likelihood of relatively straightforward risks.

The brain's wild ride means that multiple systems and structures are undergoing massive changes. That affects the very core of our strongest success strategy in life, predictability. Jeff Hawkins has argued persuasively, in On Intelligence, that understanding, developing, and enhancing our capacity to predict is what gives us our intelligence.³⁹ In general, teens are very poor at prediction skills, and that's one reason they struggle so much. Their brains are just not done maturing. For more on the importance of prediction to our daily lives, the lay reader might enjoy Hawkins's book. It's a good, upbeat, well-researched primer.

Brain Maximizer: The natural tendency of the teenage brain is to explore, take risks, and socialize. The parent's role is mediation. Manage the risks, stay highly involved in their lives, ask questions, and reduce opportunities for dangerous activities. Ideally, parents will offer safer alternatives to teens for risk taking, such as camping, sports, school theater, wilderness treks, the use of helmets, and padding for activities such as skateboarding. Remember, their brains are not adult yet, and they will not make mature, measured decisions. For the teenage brain to be maximized, it should be guided carefully through this dangerous time with focus, love, and involvement.