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

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      One man foresaw it all more than one hundred years ago. The American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall never used the word “teenager” in his groundbreaking 1904 book about youth culture, but it was clear from the title of his fourteen-hundred-page tome—Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education—that he regarded the time between childhood and adulthood as a discrete developmental stage. To Hall, who was the first American to earn a PhD in psychology, from Harvard University, and the first president of the American Psychological Association, adolescence was a peculiar time of life, a distinct and separate stage qualitatively different from either childhood or adulthood. Adulthood, he said, was akin to the fully evolved man of reason; childhood a time of savagery; and adolescence a period of wild exuberance, which he described as primitive, or “neo-atavistic,” and therefore only slightly more controlled than the absolute anarchy of childhood.

      Hall’s suggestion to parents and educators: Adolescents shouldn’t be coddled but rather should be corralled, then indoctrinated with the ideals of public service, discipline, altruism, patriotism, and respect for authority. If Hall was somewhat provincial about how to treat adolescent storm and stress, he was nonetheless a pioneer in suggesting a biological connection between adolescence and puberty and even used language that presaged neuroscientists’ later understanding of the malleability of the brain, or “plasticity.” “Character and personality are taking form, but everything is plastic,” he wrote, referring to pliability, not the man-made product. “Self-feeling and ambition are increased, and every trait and faculty is liable to exaggeration and excess.”

      Self-feeling, ambition, exaggeration, and excess—they all helped define “teenager” for the American public in the middle of the twentieth century. The teenager as a kind of cultural phenomenon took off in the post-World War II era—from teenyboppers and bobbysoxers to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. But while the age of adolescence became more defined and accepted, the demarcation between childhood and adulthood remained—and remains—slippery. As a society, we still carry the vestiges of our centuries-old confusion about when a person should be considered an adult. In most of the United States a person must be between fifteen and seventeen to drive; eighteen to vote, buy cigarettes, and join the military; twenty-one to drink alcohol; and twenty-five to rent a car. The minimum age to be a member of the House of Representatives is twenty-five; to be president of the United States, thirty-five; and the minimum age to be a governor ranges among states from no age restriction at all (six states) to a minimum age of thirty-one (Oklahoma). There is generally no minimum age requirement to testify in most courts, enter into a contract or sue, request emancipation from one’s parents, or seek alcohol or drug treatment. But you must be eighteen to determine your own medical care or write a legally binding will, and in at least thirty-five states those eighteen or younger must have some type of parental involvement before undergoing an abortion. What a lot of mixed messages we give these teenagers, who are not at a stage to weed through the logic (if there is any) behind how society holds them accountable. Very confusing.

      So what does being a teenager mean? Man-child, woman-child, quasi-adult? The question is about much more than semantics, philosophy, or even psychology because the repercussions are both serious and practical for parents, educators, and doctors, as well as the criminal justice system, not to mention teens themselves.

      Hall, for one, believed adolescence began with the initiation of puberty, and this is why he is considered the founder of the scientific study of adolescence. Although he had no empirical evidence for the connection, Hall knew that understanding the mental, emotional, and physical changes that happen in a child’s transition into adulthood could come only from an understanding of the biological mechanics of puberty.

      One of the chief areas of focus in the study of puberty has long been “hormones,” but hormones have gotten a bad rap with parents and educators, who tend to blame them for everything that goes wrong with teenagers. I always thought the expression “raging hormones” made it seem as though these kids had taken a wicked potion or cocktail that made them act with wild disregard for anyone and anything. But we are truly blaming the messenger when we cite hormones as the culprit. Think about it: When your three-year-old has a temper tantrum, do you blame it on raging hormones? Of course not. We know, simply, that three-year-olds haven’t yet figured out how to control themselves.

      In some ways, that’s true of teenagers as well. And when it comes to hormones, the most important thing to remember is that the teenage brain is “seeing” these hormones for the first time. Because of that, the brain hasn’t yet figured out how to modulate the body’s response to this new influx of chemicals. It’s a bit like taking that first (and hopefully last!) drag on a cigarette. When you inhale, your face flushes; you feel light-headed and maybe even a bit sick to your stomach.

      Scientists now know that the main sex hormones—testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone—trigger physical changes in adolescents such as a deepening of the voice and the growth of facial hair in boys and the development of breasts and the beginning of menstruation in girls. These sex hormones are present in both sexes throughout childhood. With the onset of puberty, however, the concentrations of these chemicals change dramatically. In girls, estrogen and progesterone will fluctuate with the menstrual cycle. Because both hormones are linked to chemicals in the brain that control mood, a happy, laughing fourteen-year-old can have an emotional meltdown in the time it takes her to close her bedroom door. With boys, testosterone finds particularly friendly receptors in the amygdala, the structure in the brain that controls the fight-or-flight response—that is, aggression or fear. Before leaving adolescence behind, a boy can have thirty times as much testosterone in his body as he had before puberty began.

      Sex hormones are particularly active in the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. That explains in part why adolescents not only are emotionally volatile but may even seek out emotionally charged experiences—everything from a book that makes her sob to a roller coaster that makes him scream. This double whammy—a jacked-up, stimulus-seeking brain not yet fully capable of making mature decisions—hits teens pretty hard, and the consequences to them, and their families, can sometimes be catastrophic.

      While scientists have long known how hormones work, only in the past five years have they been able to figure out why they work the way they do. Because sex hormones are present at birth, they essentially hibernate for more than a decade. What, then, triggers them to begin puberty? A few years ago, researchers discovered that puberty is initiated by what appears to be a game of hormonal dominoes, which begins with a gene producing a single protein, named kisspeptin, in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates metabolism. When that protein connects with, or “kisses,” receptors on another gene, it eventually triggers the pituitary gland to release its storage of hormones. Those surges of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone in turn activate the testes and ovaries.

      After sex hormones were discovered, for the rest of the twentieth century they became the dominant theory of, and favorite explanation for, adolescent behavior. The problem with this theory is that teenagers don’t have higher hormone levels than young adults—they just react differently to hormones. For instance, adolescence is a time of increased response to stress, which may in part be why anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, typically arise during puberty. Teens simply don’t have the same tolerance for stress that we see in adults. Teens are much more likely to exhibit stress-induced illnesses and physical problems, such as colds, headaches, and upset stomachs. There is also an epidemic of symptoms ranging from nail biting to eating disorders that are commonplace in today’s teens. We have a tsunami of input coming at teens from home, school, peers, and, last but not least, the media and Internet that is unprecedented in the history of mankind. Why are adults less susceptible to the effect of all this stimulation? In 2007, СКАЧАТЬ