Читать книгу Yes, Please. Whatever!: How to get the best out of your teenagers - Penny Palmano - Страница 11

Now, in contrast to many parents’ popular belief, teenagers do actually have brains, it’s just that they don’t function like an adult’s and that’s not out of our children’s choice.

In the last ten years, neuroscientists have come up with some extremely interesting results which may go a long way towards explaining partly why our teenagers behave the way they do. For most of the past century, it has been assumed that the brain was fully mature by the time a child reached puberty and that teenage angst was caused by their need to assert their independence and fluctuating hormones.

Not unlike our adolescents’ changing body shape, different regions of the brain mature at different times and the prefrontal cortex, which has been likened to the brain police, does not fully develop until early twenties. This region of the brain checks all the information coming from other parts of the brain before releasing it. For instance, we might read something which will arouse a murderous rage in us, but the prefrontal cortex will come along and tell that part of the brain to ‘quieten down’.

As Karl Pibrab, the director of Brain Research and Informational Sciences at Radford University in Virginia, puts it, ‘The prefrontal cortex is the seat of civilization.’

So until the prefrontal cortex is fully developed, most teenagers don’t have the ability to make good judgements, control their emotions, prioritize, or multi-task, as in make the right decision between watching TV, ringing a friend, doing a chore they’ve been asked to do or finishing their homework. This means that they do not intentionally do the wrong thing just to wind parents up. As Richard Restak, a neuropsychiatrist and author of The Secret Life of the Brain said, ‘The teenage brain is a work in progress that we’re only beginning to understand.’ (So what chance do we have?!)

Work by Marvin Zuckerman, a professor of psychology, has found that new experiences, especially those with an element of risk, tap into a part of the teenager’s brain which links with emotional centres that produce feelings of intense pleasure. Add to that the research which shows that during adolescence, the temporary decline in the production of serotonin in their brain will probably make

‘It’s not my fault I haven’t done my English, washed up or let the dog out – it’s my under-developed prefrontal cortex!’

them act more impulsively, and you may begin to realize why our adolescents might still jump into a car with a friend who’s had a drink despite our warnings.

Finally, findings of Francine Benes, a neuroscientist, show that one of the last developments of the adult brain is the nerve coating called myelin, which acts like the insulation on an electric cord, allowing electrical impulses to travel down a nerve quicker and more efficiently. That is why a toddler is less co-ordinated than a ten year old. But this process may not be complete until their early twenties. Some of these nerves that become sheathed during adolescence connect regions of the brain that control emotion, judgement and impulse control. This happens earlier in girls than boys, which probably explains why girls are more emotionally mature than boys, whose myelin levels may not reach the same level until the age of thirty. (Thirty? Surely scientists mean seventy!)