The Day After
The day after Bedlam I went to 7-11 and picked up a newspaper. Mainly I was after the sports section, because really, who wouldn’t want to relive that glorious night? As I was rummaging through the various sections, my eyes fell upon the cover of Parade magazine. The photograph depicted a pretty young girl wearing black nail polish and Uggs engaged simultaneously in texting, listening to her I-Touch, and thinking about nine totally unconnected things. The title of the article was Inside the Teenage Brain. Given that I’ve made a career out of working with the teenage brain, I immediately resolved to read that article- just as soon as I finished the sports section.
The piece focuses on the work of scientists who’ve been spending a lot of time looking at PET and MRI scans of kids twelve and up. This research bears out (thank God) something we’ve been telling parents for years: your kids aren’t playing with a full deck. But the research does more than that; it tells us which cards they’re missing.
Scans show that synaptic brain activity begins to rapidly expand at around twelve years old. Until this research we didn’t know that happened. The kids then use this brain power to focus intensely on the things that interest them while that brain activity falls off in the areas that don’t hold their interest. This, the research postulates, is why we detect such wild and infuriating personality changes in our kids at that age. They forget much of what is in their heads (who they were) in favor of whatever it is that twelve year olds are told they like (who they become). And Waa-La! It’s like magic: dark, filthy, evil magic. Oh, and let’s not forget that your kids’ pre-frontal cortex developments are taking their sweet time so they have trouble with things like planning, impulse control, organization and general civilized behavior. Don’t worry though; the new research suggests that this process will only last until their LATE TWENTIES.
The research also sheds light on why teenagers freak out on us over the smallest inconveniences. The first problem is that, because they never think to use the pre-frontal cortex they actually do have, they rely almost exclusively on their amygdala which is responsible for emotion. This leads to the second problem which is that they have difficulty with empathy. The amygdala allows us to feel our own emotions but isn’t much help in deciphering those of others. This is why when you come home to a dirty house, they don’t understand why you just want to leave.
And all this is going on inside your kids’ heads even before you send them off to school to be influenced by their peers. Before they turn on MTV and Family Guy. Before they start texting, and facebooking, and internetting. . .
Quinton is a Licensed Professional Counselor at Edmond Family Counseling and can be reached at 405-341-3554.
