The Teenage Brain…

May 2nd, 2007

There have been some interesting articles re studies on the teenage brain recently…

Article o1: “Risky teen behavior is all in the brain”

A new review of adolescent brain research suggests that society is wasting billions of dollars on education and intervention programs to dissuade teens from dangerous activities, because their immature brains are not yet capable of avoiding risky behaviors.

The analysis, by Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, says stricter laws and policies limiting their behaviors would be more effective than education programs.

“We need to rethink our whole approach to preventing teen risk,” says Steinberg, whose review of a decade of research is in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. It’s published by the Association for Psychological Science.

“Adolescents are at an age where they do not have full capacity to control themselves,” he says. “As adults, we need to do some of the controlling.”

Read the entire article…

Article 02: Why adolescents sleep in, take risks, and won’t listen to reason

Over the past decade, scientists have started to grasp exactly how distinctive the adolescent brain is and how crucial the years between ten and twenty- five are in terms of its development. And their discoveries have implications not only for parents, educators, and the medical community but also for policymakers. “I wouldn’t disagree with Rob Reiner that the first three years are important,” says Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child-psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “I would just say that so are the next three and the next three and the next three, up to twenty-five and perhaps even beyond.”

This news may not come as a surprise to the mother who still lies awake at 3 a.m., waiting for her basement-dwelling, twenty-two-year-old post-grad son to come home. What science suggests is that “adulthood” as we have defined it doesn’t necessarily signal the end of childhood development — or of parental worries.

If the media is to be believed, the stereotypical teen is a selfish, volatile, rude, rebellious hormone-head, capable of little more than taking outrageous risks, ingesting too many harmful substances (legal and otherwise), committing crimes, crashing parties, trashing houses, and generally being a layabout. Of course, this is a gross misrepresentation: many teenagers pass through adolescence smoothly and happily, without becoming parents themselves, dropping out of school, or acquiring a criminal record instead of a degree. Still, there’s a stubborn tendency in the culture to ascribe every negative teen moment to “hormones.” Recent brain research, however, relieves hormones of much of the blame for this period of “storm and stress,” as psychologist G. Stanley Hall, father of adolescent research, called it.

Read the entire article…