What happened to my child?

This post gives insight from Dr. Frances Jensen and Emily Nutt’s book The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adult

If you’ve got a pre-teen or teen, I’m going to guess you’ve said “who is this kid?” about your own child. While your child or teenager’s personality was once fairly predictable, you now find yourself less of a savant. Your child has become unpredictable. The good news: it’s normal.

As our children grow, we expect growth spurts and puberty. What we don’t expect, or even consider, is that the teenage brain is growing, too.

In The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults, Dr. Frances Jensen and Amy Ellis Nutt explore the every changing teenage brain. If you’re looking for some concrete answers to their impulsivity, indecision, and unpredictability, this book serves as a guide to help understand your growing child.

While psychology has always sought to understand the teenage brain, we haven’t had much tangible evidence until the last 20 years. No one was willing to let researchers crack open their teenagers’ brains (although I’m sure my parents might have been willing to let them check for mine as I grew up). It took technology, like MRI, CT, and PET scans that allowed researchers to see what we suspected for years: that just like the rest of the body, the brain continues to change and grow. The average brain is not done developing until age 24!

As Dr. Jensen explains, the last part of the brain to develop is the frontal lobes. The frontal lobe serves the brain as its highest executive function. The frontal lobes help us to plan, understand, exhibit proper emotions and judgment and are the home of our personality.

Seeing how the frontal lobes are the last to develop, do you see why you may not understand your teen’s thinking or judgment?

One of the best things we can do, according to do Dr. Jensen, is to function for our teen’s lack of fully developed frontal lobes. Jensen writes “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.”

So, we need to help our teens when they act impulsively or out of this world. Remembering, teens aren’t without brains. According to Jensen “Contrary to that popular misconception, a person’s reasoning abilities are more or less fully developed by the age of fifteen. In fact, adolescents appear to be just as adept as adults in their ability to logically assess whether a certain activity is dangerous or not.”

We just need to be ready to give feedback and direction when asked or when the situation requires it. Typically, it’s best to wait to be asked to do so OR when you feel your teens have tried their options.

I’d encourage all parents to read about the development of their children and our brains. Doing so will remind you as our child changes, so do their brains.  

I highly recommend The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Dr. Jensen and Amy Ellis Nutt. It’s practical and easy to understand and includes stories from Dr. Jensen raising her two boys. Clicking this affiliate link and will benefit England Therapy. https://amzn.to/3nvJeJw