Last week's The Wall Street Journal article, "What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind," highlighted the disconnect between the physiological changes taking place in the human brain during adolescence and the lives most teenagers live. The problem, researchers are finding -- including our previous Agenda guest, former Psychology Today editor-in-chief Robert Epstein, who made the same argument in his book "The Case Against Adolescence" -- is that puberty is happening earlier and earlier, while the responsibilities of adulthood are being postponed until later and later.
Why is this a problem? As Alison Gopnik's article points out, what happens during puberty is that chemicals associated with emotion and motivation are activated.
Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship.
Puberty is also the time when the brain is taught to control such emotions, mostly through the process of learning. Experience and repetition are the best way to mold the brain into coping and controlling these new urges, and handling and mastering the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.
The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences. The pediatrician and developmental psychologist Ronald Dahl at the University of California, Berkeley, has a good metaphor for the result: Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
Which goes a long way in explaining the sometimes bewildering behaviour of teenagers.
