Valerie Henley NF Writing for Children, Adolescents and Families November 16, 2010 Making Sense of the Teenage

Brain: Why They Behave as They Do Your 13-year-old daughter is freaking out on you. She screams out that you hate her, you think she is stupid, you think she's a lousy daughter, a sorry excuse for a human being. And all you did was ask if she would please close the door to the dishwasher so that bugs won't crawl inside and walk all over the clean dishes that you haven't had time to unload yet. Or maybe you asked her to please clean out the pockets of her best ripped jeans before washing them in case they contain coins, pens, or sticky candy, bad food for the washing machine. No matter what you ask of her these days, she freaks out: yelling, crying, and saying things that just don't make sense. And just six months ago, she would have shrugged, muttered okay, and complied. End of story. Now you are facing the stranger that your child has become and you suddenly feel naked, scared, and all alone; a well-intentioned parent, adrift at sea. Before you begin to panic and maybe freak out on your kid, exacerbating the problem, first stop and recognize that you are far from alone. Remember the stories your friends have told you about their own yelling matches with teen sons and daughters. Some of those stories sound just like yours. So you realize, as your friends have too, that something just isn't right here. These kids keep blowing things out of proportion, they misunderstand your good intentions, your moods, your facial expressions, and just basically everything that you say and do. You just can't do anything right. They seem to wish you would disappear off the

Teenage Brain_Original 2 planet and you are beginning to wish that you could! These problems are much more common than you might have guessed. Just take a look at some of the ongoing research on the subject of adolescent/teen brain development. There are three developmental processes that go on inside the teen brain: proliferation, pruning and myelination. Proliferation is the fast growth of brain matter and it also refers to the forming of new connections within the brain itself. Pruning is what you'd probably expect: the "cutting away of unused or unimportant connections," according to a website called "Teen Mental Health." Myelination is the act of insulating the pathways of the brain so that they will work faster and to increase their stability. In childhood, the brain's cells apparently grow new connections as a tree grows extra branches, roots, and twigs, an analogy put forth by Dr. Jay Giedd. The "peak" of this "thickening" process takes place at approximately age 11 in girls and 12 in boys. The human brain is comprised of both gray and white matter but they develop and mature at different rates. During the adolescent years, the gray matter, which Giedd says makes up the "thinking part of the brain" begins to thin as extraneous connections are pruned. Certain scientific studies are focusing on discovering and understanding what exactly guides or controls the growing, thinning, and pruning phases of branches of adolescent gray matter. It's most important to keep "in mind" that the human brain develops in a "back-to-front" pattern The main point of which parents should be aware is that the frontal and temporal lobes, located, naturally, at the front of the head, are the very last sections of the brain to

Teenage Brain_Original 3 mature. The frontal lobe is the home of such functions as planning, organization, judgment, impulse control, and reasoning! The temporal lobes are the seat of emotional maturity, which keeps developing after the age of sixteen. Research done in the last few years has proven that teens have trouble correctly translating emotions in the faces of others. It's been shown that adults and teens in fact use different regions of the brain "...in responding to certain tasks." Results of testing has shown that teens simply process information differently than adults with fully developed brains do. One study that was conducted by psychologist Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and her colleagues at Boston's McLean Hospital displayed pictures of people with fearful expressions to teens between 11 and 17 years of age while their brains were being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The scans of the teens' frontal lobes were then compared to those of adults and the lobes of the teens were found to be less active while their amygdalas, structures in the temporal lobe that help with the ability to discriminate fear and other emotions, were actually proved to be more active than those of adults. However, the older the teen, the more advanced were their abilities to correctly read the facial expressions of others, which showed "...a progressive shift of activity from the amygdala to the frontal lobes." It seems that with age comes a maturing of brain function. Which means, of course, that parents of teens must develop patience, endurance, and wisdom, tip-toeing cautiously into and within the world of adolescent thinking. The evidence of research such as that done in the study named above seems to provide clues as to why teens often ignore warnings about drug and alcohol use. They may be unable to comprehend and accept arguments that adults perceive as logical and persuasive,

Teenage Brain_Original 4 possibly even misinterpreting adult beliefs, concerns, and emotions. According to Frances E. Jensen, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, "The teenage brain is not just an adult brain with fewer miles on it. It's a paradoxical time of development. These are people with very sharp brains, but they're not quite sure what to do with them." Whole sections and synapses of the teen brain remain disconnected during these years. No wonder teens actually feel disconnected from their parents, their immediate environments, and the outer world they live in. No wonder they are so easily drawn into rash, impulsive behaviors that make no sense to those ten and twenty years older than them. The really scary part is the fact that most researchers today agree that the disconnected synapses are often not "reconnected" until sometime between the ages of 25 and 30. When we as a society stop and think about the busy and interactive lives of teens and young adults, we are sobered by the realization that many of these people with "disconnected" brain sections are our own children, our neighbors' kids, fellow students, and even colleagues. Whether we know some of these people or not, we must interact with some of them daily and we must be aware of differences in thinking that we will encounter with these individuals. They are likely to view everything from a different perspective, (not to suggest that they are always wrong or even always influenced by the disconnects of their brain wiring), but we should probably keep this awareness in our minds and hearts as we interrelate respectfully day after day. And with our teens, we will hopefully add that extra measure of love, understanding, and approval they so desperately need and want from us, though they'd probably rather have their limbs pulled off one-by-one than admit it!