The Teenage Brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults. Frances Jensen E.
alcohol levels and the effects on coordination and consciousness. I pointed out that 0.4, which was only a little more than her blood alcohol reached at its height, can be lethal. Turns out she had done about seventeen Jell-O shots that evening—to the best of her memory. There was no point in asking the usual question—“What were you thinking?”—but I felt this was a good teaching moment to show them all how close she had come to a very different end the night before.
The young girl recovered and hopefully learned her lesson, but obviously the consequences of poor decision-making can be, and often are, disastrous for teens. Bennett Barber was sixteen years old on New Year’s Eve 2008 when he left an unsupervised party at a friend’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and began to walk home. It was around 11:30 p.m., snow was falling, and the wind was gusting up to thirty miles per hour. Dressed in jeans and sneakers, Bennett was drunk and disoriented, and although his home was only a half mile away, he became lost. With the temperature plunging into single digits, Bennett eventually collapsed, face-first, into a snowbank. At three o’clock in the morning his mother notified the police, and a search party was sent out into the subfreezing night. Hours later, a firefighter discovered a beer bottle in the snow and followed a blurry set of footprints. When he found Bennett, the boy was semiconscious and suffering from hypothermia. He was also missing a sneaker and a sock. The high school hockey player was taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital, where his core temperature was only 88 degrees and his right foot appeared to be frozen solid. Isolated in a special chamber to raise his body temperature, he was eventually transferred to a burn center for treatment of his frostbite.
Bennett later told his father why it had taken so long for authorities to rescue him. He was trying to elude them, he said. The police report filled in the details:
He remembers seeing all the lights, but told his father that he hid every time someone with a light went by, because he did not want to get in trouble for drinking.
The teenage girl who hosted the spontaneous party when her parents went out for the night initially told the police that Bennett was drunk when he arrived and that she had walked him part of the way home. Not until 5:00 a.m. did she admit the truth, that there had been more than a dozen people at the house, many of them drinking alcohol, all underage, and that she tried to clear them out around 11:30 before her parents returned home. Two girls said they were going to walk Bennett up the street, “but when they went outside with him and he was too drunk,” they took him back inside and left him alone while they helped their friend clean up. That was the last time they saw Bennett.
Teen consumption of alcohol was only half the problem. The other half was the poor decision-making on the part of Bennett and his friends at the party, the lying that led to a delay before the police found Bennett, and even his panic at the thought of being caught by the police. All the teenagers involved exhibited a stunning lack of insight.
What scientists tell us is that insight depends on the ability to look outside oneself, and because that skill arises in the frontal and prefrontal lobes, it takes time to develop. The dynamic changes taking place in the brain are part of what make the adolescent years an age of exuberance. But a malleable, still-maturing teenage brain can be a scary proposition. Anything can happen—much of it not good. Teenagers may look like adults, they may even think like adults in many ways, and their ability to learn is staggering, but knowing what teenagers are unable to do—what their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral limitations are—is critically important.
Learning A Job for the Teen Brain
What did I do wrong?”
Often that’s the second question I get from parents of teenagers. The first question is usually rhetorical:
“How could my [son/daughter] [fill in the blank]?”
Most of the parents who come up to me after a talk, or e-mail me or stop me at the grocery store, are exhausted or exasperated or both, and all of them could fill in the blank in that question with a whole host of perplexing actions, from “Why would my teenage daughter sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to be with her boyfriend after they just spent the whole weekend together?” to “How could my son raid the liquor cabinet of his friend’s parents—and then leave the empty bottles behind to boot?!”
A neighbor of mine with a sixteen-year-old was flummoxed when she caught her son smoking pot in his room when he was supposed to be studying. That was bad enough, she told me, but what astonished her even more was the fact that he had the window wide open (it was the middle of winter, mind you) in order to air out his room—and the wind was blowing the smoke back into the room, under the door and down the stairs, where it wafted toward my horrified friend in the kitchen!
“How could he be that stupid?” she asked me.
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.
Teenagers are different because of their brains and specifically because of two unusual aspects of their brains at this stage of their development. Their brains are both more powerful and more vulnerable than at virtually any other time in their lives. Even as they are learning things faster, their brains are eliminating gray matter and shedding neurons. How both of these facts can be true is because of something called neural plasticity.
Even as a teenager I used to wonder about the brain. Did it make a difference where a person grew up? How he or she grew up? Was the brain at all like the rest of the body—capable of changing depending on what went into it or what it was exposed to? I enjoyed turning these questions over in my head, and when I got to college they turned up again, only this time I began to have inklings of some of the answers.
During one summer while I was still in high school I volunteered at the Greenwich chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC), now known simply as the Arc, which aids people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Some of those who regularly attended the Greenwich ARC were born with Down syndrome, and though they had varying abilities, most were self-sufficient. They were able to swim and to participate in the theater program; some even learned to read and write. Because of Greenwich’s affluence, not only was the local ARC always well funded, but many of the kids came from very privileged backgrounds as well. To this day I remember being astonished when a limousine dropped off a tot for his day of activities with us. These children were really in an unusually enriched situation, and the effects of this gifted environment showed. Despite their handicaps and rather serious diagnoses, they were active and curious and engaged, and many were approaching milestones for reading and arithmetic close to those expected for normal kids their age. I knew that not only were they getting a great day at the ARC, but when they went home, they were often given physical therapy and tutoring there, too.
While at Smith, I had an opportunity to see what life was like for the mentally and developmentally disabled who did not have the same advantages as the children at the Greenwich ARC. I volunteered several hours a week at the Belchertown State School, a seventy-year-old state institution for the cognitively handicapped, located just a few miles from Smith. Belchertown’s residents ranged from children to the very elderly, many of whom had spent most of their lives at the institution. Before it closed in 1992, Belchertown housed as many as 1,500 people, ages one to eighty-eight, living in thirteen dormitories. The hospital was understaffed, even after a local newspaper exposed overcrowding and maltreatment in the 1960s. When I volunteered in 1975, I primarily spent time in the children’s dormitory.