I was intrigued by much of what I read in this book. I got a
copy from the Hennepin County Library. It
gives good recommendations on how to deal with this sometimes very
misunderstood population. I will call them teenagers in this review, even
though the brain normally isn’t fully mature until 26 years old.
The book has extensive references to scientific literature,
with 18 pages of notes and 24 pages of bibliography and resource links. The emphasis is on reasons for teenage
behavior and how parents and other adults in these people’s lives can help them
cope with the immaturity in their brain.
Mixed into the extensive discussion of brain areas and maturation
cycles are good recommendations. These
are what I am going to focus on in this review.
Realize that this review is not a
good substitute for reading the book.
Learning needs to be structured in order to be understood
well and to be retained. So, be sure to
give your efforts to teach some structure.
Teenagers need to experiment and make mistakes, as they have
been doing since birth. The structures
that need to be in place to keep infants safe (a crib, a playpen, some
barriers, etc.) are much simpler and more successful than the structures that
teenagers need to keep safe (parental guidance, curfews, constant reporting of
locations, requiring parents be home when parties are on, etc.) Fortitude is required of parents to maintain
contact with and understanding of their teenagers.
Adolescence begins at puberty. A lot of talk of raging hormones is
misguided. Teenagers can’t control their
behavior well because the brain circuits are incomplete.
Because they can’t see long term, you need to tell teens
about the bad choices they might make and the consequences in great
detail. For instance, distracted driving
can have very bad consequences.
Many teens try and do multi-tasking. Many teenagers think they can focus their
conscious mind on more than one thing at a time. What they really are doing is “continuous
partial attention.” A good example is
distracted diving. Bad things that can
happen are detailed in the book.
There is an extensive discussion of early brain formation
and that the brain grows by connecting neurons.
After a while it has too many and it must prune the connections. Also, it will accelerate the flow of thought
by adding white matter (myelin) to “grease the wires”. Myelin can make connection 100 to 3000 times
faster.
A myth is that IQ is static.
It is not. Between 13 and 17
about a third of people increase their IQ, a third lower their IQ and a third
stay even. The studies that show this
didn’t include any data gathering on what the people who gained were doing
differently than the others.
There are a lot of best
practices for parents of teens –
·
Write down your instructions for teens and limit
them to 1 or 2 points – not 3-5 points
·
Encourage teens to write their appointments in
calendars so they learn to stay structured
·
Set limits on just about everything
o
Internet socializing
o
Insist on knowing their logins to social
networks and email
o
Review their actions and talk about what they
are doing – You need to keep them safe
·
Treat them as adults as the earn it, and set
high expectations that they will act as adults.
·
Hold them to the standards you set and
reward/punish them for that.
·
Brain is an explanation – never an excuse
·
Repeatedly remind them that they are responsible
for their own behavior
Unlike positive information, negative information is
processed in the prefrontal cortex – a late developing part of the brain. Thus, negative information is not learned
with as much alacrity as positive information.
Learning gets harder after adolescence. However, the more you learn, the easier it is
to learn the next thing.
Sleep is an important topic for teens, as they are very
different from young children or adults in their sleep patterns and need for
sleep. They are “owls”, working later
and staying up into the night. Infants
and children are “larks”, waking early and getting to sleep early. When teens must get up to go to school, they
shrink their sleep periods. The school
schedules are usually on the normal adult sleep pattern, not the kid’s natural
schedule. Studies in Minnesota show
that moving school start times back to at least 8:40AM increased scores on
standard exams and improved overall learning.
Brain pruning takes place during the sleep periods. Adolescents need more sleep than younger or
older people. You lose long-term potentiation
(LTP) when you don’t get awake/rest cycles.
This means you don’t get long-term memories formed and thus learning is
impaired.
All-nighters for exams are counterproductive. You are better off studying all through the
term, reviewing the material right before your normal sleep time, and then
sleeping normally before an exam.
During sleep, memories are restructured and sorted by
emotional importance. If you miss this,
you get less able to recall events.
Sleep deprivation can cause various mental health problems.
Adolescents use a lot of stimulants, legal (energy drinks)
and illegal. They have generally
negative consequences for teens.
You should avoid arguing with teens before bed – it can lead
to sleep deprivation and impact performance the next day.
Teens often exhibit “suboptimal choice behavior”. They use criteria for making choices that are
flawed or not correctly calculated. The
best predictor for teen behavior is the anticipation of a reward despite the
risk of other outcomes.
Moving on, the book talks about addiction. Addiction is a specialized form of memory;
memory of the pleasure of the use of the substance. Dopamine is the chemical released by pleasurable
events, etc. and it is a reward.
Teenagers get addicted faster, have stronger addictions, and rehab fails
more often in teens.
Smoking tobacco is obviously physically bad for you. In a study of Israeli military young men,
smokers were shown to have lower IQs than nonsmokers. But, teens end up smoking as a form of
rebelling against authority and as a form of bonding with their peers. To overcome this, parents should drill
teenagers on the consequences of smoking.
Also, all adults around teens should stop smoking themselves.
An unavoidable fact is that parents of teenagers share
parenting with all the parents of their kid’s friends. You need to monitor what is happening when
your kids are at their friend’s houses and encourage the other parents in good
parenting ways.
If various drugs were tools, alcohol is a sledgehammer. And this is exacerbated by the fact that
teens consistently overestimate the amount others drink. So, they think they can drink more than they
really can.
Adults
think:
- 1.
Youth have immature bodies and brain is not as
good at handling the effects of alcohol.
- 2.
Teens bodies are resilient and they can bounce
back faster.
Neither of these is true.
Teens handle the sedative effects of alcohol better than adults. The teenage brain, however, is devastated by
alcohol; damage to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional functioning is common
after alcohol consumption. Long-term
potentiation is affected as well.
Adults often think that if they start their kids drinking
alcohol at home, they will learn how to use it responsibly. But, studies show that the more teens drink at
home, the more alcohol they consume outside the house.
Pot is not inconsequential, as some believe. It damages brains because the active
ingredient, THC, disrupts the development of neural pathways. Studies show pot usage lowers IQ. Teens are more likely to become addicted to
pot. Parents are big in stopping pot –
Expectations should be high to avoid pot usage.
Parents should repeatedly tell teenagers to avoid pot usage, and they
should regularly talk about it. And,
hard core drugs like heroin are worse and teens are more likely to be badly
affected.
Stress is a fact of life, but it is especially bad in
teens. Much of a teenager’s response to
the world is driven by emotion instead of reason. Learning is badly affected by stress. Parents can mitigate some of this by verbal
and physical reassurances during stressful incidents. Some incidents may be confusing to
teenagers. Make sure they understand
what is happening and how it is likely to affect them. One bit of advice is that you may need to recognize
that you aren’t the best listener for your kids – maybe an aunt or uncle, or
adult friend is a better person for your kids to talk to at times of stress.
Nobody likes to talk about mental illness, but many mental
illnesses start in the teenage years.
Watch for behavior changes that seem to cluster or are associated with
other symptoms; they may reflect mental illness. It is better to be safe than sorry – take
your teen to a provider if you have any doubts.
In the internet age, various warning signs like isolation from friends,
and preoccupation may be more difficult to detect. Parents will need to be proactive. Check their internet activities. Ask questions about their friends, their
activities and how they are feeling.
The internet can be addictive in itself. There is a new disorder to be studied in the
latest DSM 5.0 (the “bible” of mental health): Internet Gaming Disorder. It isn’t formally a diagnosis, just listed
for further study. Parents should
organize no-internet pauses to force teens to do other things. You will also want to watch for bullying
online.
Gender is important in that girls mature at an earlier
age. This leads to them doing better
than boys on SATs and other tests in high school. There is no evidence of cognitive differences
except timing of maturation.
The book addresses concussions as having long-term impacts
on brain function. An often missed
symptom is confusion after a brain injury.
You need to avoid hits to the head.
The book talks about how teenagers are going to make
mistakes and we need to make it safe for them to do that. But, sometimes bad decisions are crimes, and
the criminal justice system is going to kick in. The fact that the brain will mature later
isn’t much of a defense in court. But,
it is a reason for what happens.
Due to the delayed maturation of the brain, a gap year
between high school and college may be very good for the potential
student. If used to get work experience
or a year abroad, it can lead to better college outcomes.
Finally, neuroscience is being rapidly developed. This book
is not the final word on the adolescent brain.
Keep in touch with the continuing research and applications of
neuroscience.
And, be tolerant of misadventures and keep calm as your
teenagers are growing up and getting better.
Don’t be shocked when teenagers do something stupid and don’t know why
they did it. Communicate and relate to
your teenagers continuously. Emphasize
the positive, and encourage them to try different things. Learn different things yourself – try using
texting to reach them.
Just reading this review is a poor substitute for reading
this book.
