Frances Jensen - The Teenage Brain - A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults

What you don’t want to do is ridicule, or be judgmental or disapproving or dismissive. Instead, you have to get inside your kid’s head. Kids all have something they’re struggling with that you can try to help. They can be all over the place: forgetting to bring their books home, crumpling important notes in the bottom of their backpacks, misconstruing homework assignments. Sometimes—or most of the time—they are just not organized, not paying attention to the details of what’s going on around them, and so expecting them to figure out how to do their homework can actually be expecting too much. Your teenagers won’t always accept your advice, but you can’t give it unless you’re there, unless you’re trying to understand how they’re learning. Know that they are just as puzzled by their unpredictable behavior and the uneven tool kit they call their brain. They just aren’t at a point where they will tell you this. Pride and image are big for teens, and they are not able to look into themselves and be self-critical.

That’s what this book is all about—knowing where their limits are and what you can do to support them. So that you won’t get angry or confused at your teens or simply throw your hands up in surrender, I want to help you understand what makes them so infuriating. Much of what is in this book will surprise you—surprise you because you probably thought teenagers’ recalcitrant behavior was something they could, or at least should, be able to control; that their insensitivity or anger or distracted attitude was entirely conscious; and that their refusal to hear what you suggest or request or demand they do was entirely willful. Again, none of these things are true.

The journey I will take you on in this book will actually shock you at times, but by the end of the journey I promise you will gain insight into what makes your teens tick because you’ll have a much better understanding of how their brains work. I make an effort in this book to reveal, wherever possible, the real data from real science journal articles. There is much data out there that has not been “translated” for the public. Even more important, the teen generation is one that holds information in great esteem. So when you talk to teens, you owe it to them to have actual data. I inserted as many figures into this book as I could where the actual science is shown, and I point out where it applies to our knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of being a teen. There are lots of myths about teenagers out there that need to be debunked: this book is an attempt to chip away at those myths and explore the new science that is available to inform us.

For this book to be truly effective, however, you must remember a simple rule: First, count to ten. It became a kind of mantra for me when I was raising my sons. But it means more than just taking a deep breath. Let me explain. In leadership courses I’ve taken for my professional career, one theme that is always emphasized is the Boy Scouts’ motto, “Be prepared.” I learned in these seminars that the average time an American businessperson spends preparing for a meeting is about two minutes. We probably spend more time just scheduling those meetings than actually thinking about what we’re going to say or do in them. I don’t mean the big presentations. I mean the one-on-one encounters, which we too often step into cavalierly without taking much time for reflection beforehand. When I heard this statistic, initially it shocked me, but then I thought about my own professional world, where I am the head of a large university neurology department and have my own lab with many graduate and postgraduate students, and I realized, Yep, that’s pretty much what does happen. Not a lot of time is devoted to planning or “rehearsing” for all those one-on-one encounters with colleagues and staff, and yet it’s these more personal, more direct interactions that often play a pivotal role in the success of an organization. Similarly, the impression you give others in these encounters can affect the direction your career takes; this is why it’s so important to plan ahead, at least for more than just a few minutes, and think about how the other person will react during one of these meetings. In your mind, go through what you want to say, step by step, and imagine the range of responses. Now imagine that the other person is your teenage son or daughter. Being prepared for both positive and negative responses will help guide you as you consider your options about what to say or do next. If you appear hotheaded or mentally disorganized, you lose credibility, whether it’s with a colleague, an employee, or your teenager.

For parents or teachers, or anyone who has a caring relationship with a teenager, reading this book will arm you with facts—and with fortitude. Changing the behavior of your teen is partly up to you, so you have to come up with a plan of action and a style of action that fits your household and your kids, as well as your needs and wants. Remember, you are the adult, and if your child is under eighteen, you also are legally responsible for that “child.” Certainly the courts will hold you accountable for your child and, by extension, for the environment you provide for him or her. So take the lead, take control, and try to think for your teenage sons and daughters until their own brains are ready to take over the job. The most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes. This is the last part of the brain to develop, and that is why you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.

But the most important advice I want to give you is to stay involved. As the mother of two sons I adore, I couldn’t physically maneuver them into doing what I wanted them to do when they were teenagers, not in the way I could when they were small children. Eventually they were simply too big to just pick up and put down where I wanted them to be. We lose physical control as children leave childhood. Our best tool as they enter and move through their adolescent years is our ability to advise and explain, and also to be good role models. If there’s anything I’ve learned with my boys, it’s that no matter how distracted or disorganized they seemed to be, no matter how many assignments they forgot to bring home from school, they were watching me, taking the measure of their mom as well as all the other adults around them. I will talk much more about this later in the book, but just so you know, it all turned out okay in my life and the lives of my sons. Here’s the bottom line on my two “former teenagers”: Andrew graduated from Wesleyan University with a combined MA-BA degree in quantum physics in May 2011 and is now in a joint MD-PhD program. Will graduated from Harvard in 2013 and landed a business-consulting job in New York City. So, yes, you can survive your teenagers’ adolescence. And so can they. And you will all have a lot of stories to tell after it’s all over.

In July 2010 I received an e-mail from the frustrated mother of a nineteen-year-old who had just finished his freshman year of college. The mother had heard me give a talk to parents and teachers in Concord, Massachusetts, about the teenage brain, and her e-mail expressed a wide range of emotions, from sadness to confusion to anger, about the boy, whose behavior had suddenly become downright “weird.”

“My son gets angry easily,” she wrote. “He puts a wall around him so he would not talk. He stays up all night and sleeps all day. He stops doing things he used to enjoy…. He was once charming, intelligent, outgoing. These days, good mood is rare. I thought I did all that hard work to raise him, to send him to a very good college, and it all ended up like this.”