Risky Behaviors
Still, kids need to test themselves. Joy F. remembers when her 13-year-old son Aaron announced, from the back seat of the car, that he was drunk. “We’d been to a family gathering and he’d been pressured by older cousins to drink wine,” Joy says. Wisely, Joy tabled any discussions until the next morning, when Aaron was sober. Then, sitting him down, she asked him if he had heard a “little voice inside him that warned him it might not be a good idea to drink.” Yes, he told her, he had. “Every time you ignore that voice,” Joy told her son, “It will get fainter until one day you won’t be able to hear it.”
Paying attention to that little voice (otherwise known as reason) is what teens are learning to do, but a certain amount of risk — of stretching into the unknown—is necessary to find out who they are. Years ago, boys were tested in coming-of-age rituals where they became men under strict, practiced procedures. Bob M. was perplexed by his 13-year-old son Tom’s behavior. “Suddenly, Thomas is slamming doors and throwing tantrums like a 4-year-old. I took him to buy a new bike, and when I reminded him to wear his helmet, he threw his hands up in the air, stomped around the store, flinging himself around. And, mind you, I was buying him a new bike at the moment.” But Bob also feels that today’s teens should be given better choices for risk-taking behavior, like a challenging adventure. He takes Thomas camping up in Canada, and they don’t bring cell phones. They pack their food and supplies or fish for meals. And they spend time together.
Other parents are perplexed by their children’s amorphous behavior. “Ethan and Lizzie text — oh I don’t even know — hundreds of times a day,” says Ethan’s mother, Lori F. “They can’t seem to live without each other, pining, constantly figuring out ways to see each other. They’re obsessed, and they’re only 14!”
Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, studies the connection between love and brain development. Fisher believes that the giddy love-high that teenagers like Ethan and Lizzie experience is rooted in the brain system and comes from the effects of two crucial chemicals, norepinephrine, and dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is heavily involved in the pleasure-reward circuit in the brain and kicks in when we enjoy something and want more of that good feeling — like a drug-high, thrill-seeking behavior or new love. “The prefrontal cortex develops slowly,” Fisher says. “Teenagers have strong desires but not the brain power or experience to go with them.”
Help Along The Way
Dr. Ron Dahl, a pediatrician and child psychiatric researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, conducts studies to figure out how kids alter the way they make decisions as they move through puberty. “Many of the more complex cognitive-emotional experiences are happening for the first time in adolescence. These new experiences are creating new patterns of neural connections. Adolescence offers a period of scientific opportunity. It is a chance to identify key development processes in puberty and adolescence that are amenable to intervention.”
Dahl says this same “intense passion” can be harnessed for positive behavior and recommends activities like music, theater, and dance to reinforce these synaptic connections.
The question then becomes, How do we help these young adults plagued by poor decision-making, recklessness, and emotional outbursts? A father and teen survivor himself, Dahl has this advice for parents of teens:
- Don’t take your teen’s behavior/rudeness personally: It’s rooted in biology.
- Be present, though that doesn’t mean break their door down if they slam it in your face. When they talk, listen, make eye contact and observe your teen with interest.
- Stay connected as Bob does with Thomas. Stay the course anyway.
Parents Should Stay Sane By
- Getting eight hours of sleep.
- Avoiding yelling.
- Guiding them by the example of your behavior.
- Getting exercise.
- Focusing on the behavior, not the person.
- Letting the rope out a little bit at a time and know that they will test it.
Raising teenagers can be crazy-making. So it’s important to remember that they are still in the process of brain development. It is also worth noting that this new frontier of science opens up huge opportunities for potentially modifying certain behavior problems and patterns before teens enter adult life.
There is a proverb that goes, “Raising teenagers is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.” But have faith. Most kids come through just fine. Both inside and out, they’re blossoming into interesting, independent grown-ups, ready to take on the challenges that lie ahead of them in adult life.
This article was originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of Brain World Magazine.
