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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       1

       Entering the Teen Years

      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.”

      The woman ended her e-mail with a simple question: “How do I help him?”

      Letters and e-mails and calls like these are what prompted me to write this book. Nine months after that mother asked how she could help her son, I received a similar e-mail, this time from the mother of an eighteen-year-old girl. Her daughter, who had once seemed so levelheaded, she wrote, had let her grades slip in high school. She became defiant, ran away from home, and was hospitalized for depression. “This year has been difficult for us,” the mother wrote. “Sometimes it seems as if she has been replaced by an alien. It is because of the behavior and the things that she says. She is a completely different person.”

      I knew how these women felt. At one time, I felt helpless, too. Because I was newly divorced as my older son, Andrew, entered adolescence, I was painfully aware that my children’s future, as well as their present, was largely up to me. There was no pulling my hair out and saying, “Go talk to your father about it!” When you’re a single parent, the buck stops with you. As parents, we want to open a few doors for our kids—that’s all, really. To gently nudge them in the right direction. During their childhood, everything seems to go pretty much by plan. Our kids learn what’s appropriate and what isn’t, when to go to bed and when to get up in the morning, what not to touch, where not to go. They learn the importance of school, of being polite to their elders, and when they are physically hurt or emotionally wounded, they come to us seeking solace.

      So what happens when they reach fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old? How is it that the cute, even-tempered, happy, and well-behaved child you’ve known for more than a decade is suddenly someone you don’t know at all?

      These are a few of things I say to parents right off the bat: The sense of whiplash you are feeling is not unusual. Your children are changing, and also trying to figure themselves out; their brains and bodies are undergoing extensive reorganization; and their apparent recklessness, rudeness, and cluelessness are not totally their fault! Almost all of this is neurologically, psychologically, and physiologically explainable. As a parent or educator, you need to remind yourself of this daily, often hourly!

      Adolescence is a minefield, for sure. It is also a relatively recent “discovery.” The idea of adolescence as a general period of human development has been around for aeons, but as a discrete period between childhood and adulthood it can be traced back only as far as the middle of the twentieth century. In fact the word “teenager,” as a way of describing this distinct stage between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, first appeared in print, and only in passing, in a magazine article in April 1941.

      Mostly for economic reasons, children were considered miniadults well into the nineteenth century. They were needed to sow the fields, milk the cows, and split the firewood. By the time of the American Revolution half the population of the new colonies was under the age of sixteen. If a girl was still single at eighteen, she was considered virtually unmarriageable. Well into the early twentieth century, children over the age of ten, and often children much younger, were capable of most kinds of work, either on the farm or later in city factories—even if they needed boxes to stand on. By 1900, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, more than two million children were employed in the United States.

      Two things in the decades spanning the middle of the twentieth century—the Great Depression and the rise of high schools—not only changed attitudes about the meaning of childhood but also helped to usher in the era of the teenager. With the onset of the Depression after the stock market crash of 1929, child laborers were the first to lose their jobs. The only other place for them was school, which is why by the end of the 1930s, and for the first time in the history of American education, most fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were enrolled in high school. Even today, according to a 2003 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, Americans regard finishing high school as the number one hallmark of adulthood. (In much of the United Kingdom a teenager is treated as an adult even if he or she does not finish high school, and in England, Scotland, and Wales it is legal not only to leave school at age sixteen but to leave home and live independently as well.) In the 1940s and ’50s, American youth, most of whom were not responsible for the economic survival of their families, certainly did not seem like adults—at least not until they graduated from high school. They generally lived at home and were dependent on their parents, and as more and more children found themselves going to school beyond the eighth grade, they became a kind of class unto themselves. They looked different from adults, dressed differently, had different interests, even a different vocabulary. In short, they were a new culture. As one anonymous writer said at the time, “СКАЧАТЬ