The Teenage Brain Blog

I'm pretty excited that my book, “The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults," was just released this past week.

This book was a result a result of my own parenting experiences, and I delved into the science as I struggled to understand my own kids. As a novice parent of teenagers, I would marvel at the disconnects: the ability to be so focused on a sport or a math test victory concurrently with major lapses in judgment, planning, misguided acts and pranks with no consideration of the consequences. Most of all, my kids were not predictable anymore, neither to me nor even to themselves. I consciously made the decision to remain curious rather than angry by all the unexpected things that happened on a near daily basis. I was experiencing the process up close and personal, rather than my usual interface, which was as a physician seeing teen patients. It took almost no time for me to begin to delve into the scientific literature on brain development- one I knew well.

Hopefully this can help update not only parents, teachers, counselors, but teens themselves about the largely unappreciated hidden strengths and weaknesses of the teen brain. It’s all information from research that is less than 5-10 years old, so will hopefully be news to many who read it. I use research facts in the context of scenarios that are common to those of us living with (or as) teens and young adults.

In a nutshell, some points that come up in the book include answers to some of the following questions:

• What dictates brain development? The brain is the last organ in your body to mature, and it takes until mid to late twenties to complete.

• Why are teens better learners than adults?

• Why are there such differences between girls and boys during adolescence?

• Adolescents may not be as resilient to the effects of drugs as we think they are!

• Can multi-tasking still affect adolescents?

• Are adolescents not really lazy when they won’t wake up early- what’s going on with their circadian clocks?

• Emotionally stressful situations may impact adolescents more than adults, how can we protect them?

• Teens at a point for novelty seeking – and risk taking behavior is part of their natural state. Their frontal lobes are not fully “connected,” and hence, they tend to not have rapid ready access to judgment, insight when it comes to split second decisions.

This is the first teen generation that has had this much information about the unique capacities of their brain state. My hope is that they use this information, as teens are at a point of self discovery…they crave information about themselves. I have found that they have been really interested in the topics I present in this book, when I have given talks to high schools, etc.

While there are obvious controversies flying around about how different the teen brain is, one thing that is certain is that the world teens live in is extremely different from any other environment in human history! The amount of stimulation that comes the way of a teen these days is unprecedented. Social networking, internet connectivity brings with it not only access to useful information and positive relationships, but ready access to possibly inappropriate stressful information and images, increased ability to purchase drugs and other illicit materials, and social disruption and stress including online bullying. It’s a lot to manage at such an impressionable time in one's psychological development. As adults that surround our kids, we should be informed and mindful about how we guide our teens. After all, our frontal lobes are indeed connected!