Parenting from the neuroscience point of view

“The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults” by Frances E. Jensen, MD with Amy Ellis Nutt

This is a very important book about teenage behaviour from their neurological stand point, written by Frances Jensen, a neuroscientist specializing in children’s brain. The book consist of what it feels like 60-65% of crash course about the mechanism of teenage brain, which becomes the crucial framework for the book to explain the intricate details of adolescence behaviour.

“The brain was essentially built by nature from the ground up”, remarks Dr. Jensen, “from the cellar to the attic, from back to front. Remarkably, the brain also wires itself starting in the back with the structures that mediate our interaction with the environment and regulate our sensory processes—vision, hearing, balance, touch, and sense of space.”

And here’s the kicker, “The more complex areas of the brain, especially the frontal lobes, take much, much longer and are not finished until a person is well into his or her twenties.” In other words, teenage brain is still lacking the sufficient development in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain where “actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made.”

Hence, the actually-true expression of being young and stupid, a time when some of the craziest (and sometime fatal) stories occurred.

The book then proceeded to tell many real-life stories about incidents with teenagers, and shows their neurological response to different type of situations, which brings some light to plenty of misunderstandings about teenage behaviour, the risks of adolescence brain, the potential of adolescence brain, on addiction, alcohol and substance abuse, on stress, mental illness, digital invasion, gender matters, brain injuries from contact sports, and many more.

And perhaps most crucially, it also teaches us what we can do with these knowledge, in order to help our teenager kids navigate their adolescence life. This is where the parenting aspect of the book comes to play, where Dr. Jensen says “you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.”

Dr. Jensen herself has 2 “former teenagers”, one of whom graduated from Wesleyan University with a combined MA-BA degree in quantum physics and now enrolled in a joint MD-PhD program, and the other graduated from Harvard and landed in a business consulting job in New York City. Both of whom have a loving relationship with their single-mom. I mean, what more credentials do you need?

Here are 54 of the most important quotes from the book:

The more I studied the emerging scientific literature on adolescents, the more I understood how mistaken it was to look at the teenage brain through the prism of adult neurobiology. Functioning, wiring, capacity—all are different in adolescents, I learned.
Granville Stanley Hall, the founder of the child study movement, wrote in 1904 about the exuberance of adolescence: These years are the best decade of life. No age is so responsive to all the best and wisest adult endeavor. In no psychic soil, too, does seed, bad as well as good, strike such deep root, grow so rankly or bear fruit so quickly or so surely.
Hall said optimistically of adolescence that it was “the birthday of the imagination,” but he also knew this age of exhilaration has dangers, including impulsivity, risk-taking, mood swings, lack of insight, and poor judgment.
Children’s brains continue to be molded by their environment, physiologically, well past their midtwenties. So in addition to being a time of great promise, adolescence is also a time of unique hazards.
Part of the problem in truly understanding our teenagers lies with us, the adults. Too often we send them mixed messages. We assume that when our kid begins to physically look like an adult—she develops breasts; he has facial hair—then our teenager should act like, and be treated as, an adult with all the adult responsibilities we assign to our own peers.
Let them experiment with these more harmless things rather than have them rebel and get into much more serious trouble. Try not to focus on winning the battles when you should be winning the war—the endgame is to help get them through the necessary experimentation that they instinctively need without any long-term adverse effects.
The teen years are a great time to test where a kid’s strengths are, and to even out weaknesses that need attention.
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.
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.
So what happens when they reach fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old?…. 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!
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.
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.
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.
While hormones can explain some of what is going on, there is much more at play in the teenage brain, where new connections between brain areas are being built and many chemicals, especially neurotransmitters, the brain’s “messengers,” are in flux. This is why adolescence is a time of true wonder. Because of the flexibility and growth of the brain, adolescents have a window of opportunity with an increased capacity for remarkable accomplishments.
But flexibility, growth, and exuberance are a double-edged sword because an “open” and excitable brain also can be adversely affected by stress, drugs, chemical substances, and any number of changes in the environment. And because of an adolescent’s often overactive brain, those influences can result in problems dramatically more serious than they are for adults.
A baby brain is not just a small adult brain, and brain growth, unlike the growth of most other organs in the body, is not simply a process of getting larger. The brain changes as it grows, going through special stages that take advantage of the childhood years and the protection of the family, then, toward the end of the teen years, the surge toward independence. Childhood and teen brains are “impressionable,” and for good reason, too. Just as baby chicks can imprint on the mother hen, human children and teens can “imprint” on experiences they have, and these can influence what they choose to do as adults.
The brain of an adolescent is nothing short of a paradox. It has an overabundance of gray matter (the neurons that form the basic building blocks of the brain) and an undersupply of white matter (the connective wiring that helps information flow efficiently from one part of the brain to the other)—which is why the teenage brain is almost like a brand-new Ferrari: it’s primed and pumped, but it hasn’t been road tested yet. In other words, it’s all revved up but doesn’t quite know where to go.
One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time.
Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development.
Parents quickly blame themselves for a teen’s poor behavior, even though they’re not exactly sure how or why they’re to blame. With biological parents, the guilt may come from passing on flawed DNA; and with biological and nonbiological parents or guardians, the guilt comes from questioning how they raised the child. In either case, you, the parent, are to blame, right? Yes, the two scenarios are different, but no, it’s not because of the genes or anything you did or didn’t do or because the teenager was somehow struck on the head and woke up as an alien species from the planet Adolescent.
The brain is programmed to pay special attention to the acquisition of novel information, which is what learning really is. The more activity or excitation between a specific set of neurons, the stronger the synapse. Thus, brain growth is a result of activity. In fact, the young brain has more excitatory synapses than inhibitory synapses. The more a piece of information is repeated or relearned, the stronger the neurons become, and the connection becomes like a well-worn path through the woods.
In later life gray matter declines as a function of degenerative processes, that is, cell shrinkage and death, whereas in adolescence gray matter decline is a product of the brain’s plasticity. (“Use it or lose it.”). So what this means is that memories are easier to make and last longer when acquired in teen years compared with adult years.
Remember, although they look as though they can multitask, in truth they’re not very good at it. Even just encouraging them to stop and think about what they need to do and when they need to do it will help increase blood flow to the areas of the brain involved in multitasking and slowly strengthen them.
This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five. You can also help your teenagers better manage time and organize tasks by giving them calendars and suggesting they write down their daily schedules. By doing so on a regular basis, they train their own brains.
Perhaps most important of all, set limits—with everything. This is what their overexuberant brains can’t do for themselves. So be clear about the amount of time you will allow your teenager to socialize “virtually,” either on the Internet or through texting. Best-case scenario: limit the digital socializing to just one to two hours a day. And if your teenager fails to comply, take away the phone or the iPod, or limit computer use to homework. Also, insist on knowing the user names and passwords for all their accounts.
In fact, it’s virtually a certainty that there will at least be occasional slip-ups, perhaps a lot of them. That’s why it’s up to you to keep tabs, to check on teenagers as they do their homework and spend time on the computer. The more on top of it you are, the fewer the temptations for your adolescents, and the fewer the temptations, the more their brains will learn how to do without the constant distractions.
Adolescents have less ability to process negative information than adults do, and so they are less inclined not to do something risky, and less likely to learn from the ensuing mistake or misadventure, than adults are.
On sleep: Infants and children are “larks”; that is, they wake up early and go to sleep early. Adolescents are “owls,” waking late and staying up until the wee hours of the morning.
Because so much is going on in adolescents’ brains, and they are learning so much and at such a fast pace, teenagers need more sleep than either their parents or their much younger siblings. In an earlier chapter I told you about the pruning that takes place in the teenage brain during puberty. When do you think that actually takes place? Yep, that’s right, when they’re asleep.
Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.
Beginning at around ages ten to twelve, young people’s biological clock shifts forward, revving them up by about seven and eight o’clock at night and creating a “no sleep” zone around nine or ten o’clock at night, just when parents are starting to feel drowsy. One reason is that melatonin, a hormone critical to inducing sleep, is released two hours later at night in a teenager’s brain than it is in an adult’s.
Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories. This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.
Studies have shown that teenagers who report sleep disturbances have more often consumed soft drinks, fried food, sweets, and caffeine. They also report less physical activity and more time in front of TV and computers. Another study found that teenagers who had trouble sleeping at ages twelve to fourteen were two and a half times more likely to report suicidal thoughts at ages fifteen to seventeen than adolescents with good sleep habits.
Adolescence is the time of life when the young separate from the comfort and safety of their parents in order to explore the world and find independence. Experimental behavior is actually important for adolescents to engage in because it helps them establish their autonomy. The problem for teens is that their underdeveloped frontal cortex means they have trouble seeing ahead, or understanding the consequences of their independent acts, and are therefore ill equipped to weigh the relative harms of risky behavior.
So why do teens do some of the crazy things they do? In general, teen brains get more of a sense of reward than adult brains, and as we learned earlier, the release of, and response to, dopamine is enhanced in the teen brain. This is why sensation-seeking is correlated with puberty, a time when the neural systems that control arousal and reward are particularly sensitive. But because the frontal lobes are still only loosely connected to other parts of the teen brain, adolescents have a harder time exerting cognitive control over potentially dangerous situations.
Adults are also better at learning from their mistakes, courtesy of areas in and around the frontal lobes including their developed anterior cingulate cortex, which can act as a kind of behavioral monitor and help detect mistakes. During fMRI experiments, when adult subjects make an error, their cingulate cortex lights up as if to say, “Oh boy, I’d better make sure not to do that again.” This part of the brain is still being wired in teenagers, making it more difficult for them, even when they recognize a mistake, to learn from it.
The chief predictor of adolescent behavior, studies show, is not the perception of the risk, but the anticipation of the reward despite the risk. In other words, gratification is at the heart of an adolescent’s impulsivity, and adolescents who engage in risky behavior and who have never, or rarely, experienced negative consequences are more likely to keep repeating that reckless behavior in search of further gratification.
Because adolescents are hypersensitive to dopamine, even small rewards, if they are immediate, trigger greater nucleus accumbens activity than larger, delayed rewards. Immediacy and emotion, in other words, are linked in the decision to take a risk and in the teen brain’s inability to delay gratification.
So here’s the paradox: Adolescence is a stage of development in which teens have superb cognitive abilities and high rates of learning and memory because they are still riding on the heightened synaptic plasticity of childhood. These abilities give them a distinct advantage over adults, but because they are so primed to learn, they are also exceedingly vulnerable to learning the wrong things.
It’s difficult for teenagers to look into the future because their brains are not yet wired to consider distant consequences, but that shouldn’t stop you from bringing up those consequences and drilling them into your teens.
Adolescents with only short exposure to cannabis show cognitive deficits similar to those of chronic adult users, but with continued use their cognitive impairment does not completely resolve and in some cases can last for months, even years.
Negative emotions—stress, worry, anxiety, anger—have all been significantly associated with higher levels of cortisol. So, too, has loneliness; and this is why in adolescents being alone is also associated with increased anxiety and stress.
Stress is terrible for learning. You know what I mean. A little pressure can be motivating, but once you pass beyond that, stress contributes to inattention and a real inability to learn.
Teenagers as well as children suffering from PTSD are likely to reenact their traumas in their artwork, with toys, or in the games they play. They are also more likely than adult sufferers of PTSD to be impulsive and aggressive.
Research from late 2011 also revealed that adolescents who suffered physical or emotional abuse or neglect had evidence of brain damage, even in the absence of a diagnosable mental illness. Scientists at Yale University found that adolescents had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex if they’d been physically abused or emotionally neglected. Reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex in these abused youths could interfere with their motivation and impulse control, as well as their ability to focus, remember, and learn. Adolescents who were emotionally neglected also showed decreased activity in the parts of the brain that regulate emotions.
There are two rules of thumb parents should remember: Number one, behavioral changes that seem to cluster or are associated with other symptoms should raise your level of suspicion that you might be dealing with something more than just a difficult teenager going through a phase. And number two, it is better to be safe than sorry. If you have any concern that radical or progressive changes are happening to your adolescent, then you must seek help for your child.
By nature, adolescents already have fairly overactive amygdalae, which means they really need their prefrontal cortices to exert even greater control. For teens at risk of an anxiety disorder, however, their still-maturing brains are not yet able to exert that kind of top-down control. For that to occur, brain regions need to “talk” to one another, and there is evidence in animal studies that adolescent brains aren’t doing as much “talking” as adult brains.
Chinese researchers have discovered changes in the brains of college students who spend approximately ten hours a day, six days a week, playing online games. In these online gamers, the Chinese scientists found changes in small regions of gray matter responsible for everything from speech, memory, motor control, and emotion to goal direction and inhibition of impulsive and inappropriate behavior.
Not only is multitasking an impediment to learning, say scientists, it also can prompt the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Chronically high levels of cortisol have been associated with increased aggression and impulsivity, loss of short-term memory, and even cardiovascular disease. In other words, multitasking can wear us down, causing confusion, fatigue, and inflexibility.
The ability to fire off the words actually relies on two distinct brain areas: the parietotemporal area, where speech and language are processed; and the frontal lobe, which controls decision-making. The task the two teens were asked to perform requires both language and rapid decision-making, and at the age of thirteen, girls are simply further along in having those two required brain areas wired together.
Over the past few years, scientists have slowly begun to realize that brain damage can result even from non-concussive blows to the head. All it takes are repetitive strikes of moderate intensity. In other words, thousands of kids playing contact sports who have never had to sit out a game because of a concussion could be at risk of brain damage—brain damage that is going undetected and undiagnosed and will be likely to cause cognitive impairment later in life.
When teenage brains take a hit, the injury isn’t static. Because the teenage brain is still developing, the injury is a trauma not just to a piece of gray matter but also to what would have been had the brain continued to develop without incident.
Teens, we now know, engage the hippocampus and right amygdala when faced with a threat or a dangerous situation—this is why they are prone to being emotional and impulsive—whereas adults engage the prefrontal cortex, which allows them to more reasonably assess the threat.

And here are the 4 messages that Dr. Jensen wrote at the concluding chapter:

Be tolerant of your teens’ misadventures, but make sure you talk to them calmly about their mistakes.
Don’t be shocked when your teens do something stupid and then say they don’t know why. You now know why, but explain that to them—how their prefrontal lobes haven’t quite come online yet. And remember, even the smartest, most obedient, meekest kids will do something stupid before “graduating” from adolescence.
Communicate and relate: Emphasize the positive things in your teens’ lives and encourage them to try different activities and new ways of thinking about things. Reinforce that you are there for them when they need advice.
Social networking tools and websites are an important avenue of communication with your teens. Some parents report that their most successful and meaningful “conversations” with their teens occurred while texting back and forth with them. And if you don’t know how to text yet, ask your teenager.

I’ve purchased this book a while ago, and thought that it will take years before I need to read this as a preparation of my kids entering adolescence. Well, the dreaded [or exciting] moment is finally here. And this book is exactly what I need right now.

It’s been such an eye-opening read filled with abundance of directly applicable information, one that I will surely visit and re-visit in the next couple of years and will highly recommend to other fellow parents.

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