I read this summary in the Marshall Memo (Kim Marshall, vol. 601, 2015). Thought many of you would be interested.
Are Adolescents Hard-Wired to Be Crazy?
In
this article in The New Yorker,
Elizabeth Kolbert asks why adolescents take so many risks – for example, her
three teens told her about a supposedly fun pastime known as a “case race” in
which pairs of kids compete to see who can drink their way through a case of
beer fastest (the preferred case size is a “thirty rack”). “And what goes for
drinking games also goes for hooking up with strangers, jumping from high
places into shallow pools, and steering a car with your knees,” says Kolbert.
“At moments of extreme exasperation, parents may think that there’s something
wrong with their teenagers’ brains. Which, according to recent books on
adolescence, there is… [A]dolescents suffer from the cerebral equivalent of
defective spark plugs.”
According to
author/neurologist Frances Jensen, teens’ frontal lobes aren’t fully developed;
that’s the part of the brain that controls executive function – planning,
self-awareness, and judgment – which acts as a check on impulses from other
parts of the brain. The frontal lobes aren’t fully myelinated until people are
in their twenties, sometimes thirties, which leads Jensen to advise parents,
“You need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired.”
Of course teens’ reaction to parental hectoring is predictable. When Kolbert told
her teenage sons that she was thinking about calling the parents of their friends
about safe-party protocols, one of them said, “Why even have kids if you’re
going to do that?”
Temple University psychologist
Laurence Steinberg has a different explanation for adolescent behavior: the
brain’s nucleus accumbens – the
pleasure center – reaches its maximum size and sensitivity during the teen
years. In addition, as puberty arrives, kids’ brains sprout more dopamine
receptors, making them more sensitive to enjoyment. According to Steinberg,
“Nothing – whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an
ice-cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening,
hearing your favorite music – will ever feel as good as it did when you were a
teenager.” This, he believes, is why adolescents do so many crazy things and
why the mortality rate of 15-19-year-olds (mostly from accidents) is nearly
twice that of children 1-4 and three times that of kids 5-14. “The notion that
adolescents take risks because they don’t know any better is ludicrous,” says
Steinberg. Rather, it’s that the potential psychic and physical rewards are
much, much greater. Adolescent risk-taking is also more prevalent when there are
other teens around. A teen driving a car with peers is four times more likely
to get in an accident as when driving alone. And, Steinberg adds, “the
recklessness-enhancing effect of being around peers is strongest when
adolescents actually know there is a high probability of something bad
happening.” This is also why the age-crime graph looks like the Matterhorn,
rising steeply during the teens, peaking at eighteen, and falling after that. Some
psychologists have used this as an argument against imposing life sentences on
teens who commit violent crimes – they probably will outgrow their criminal
tendencies.
Why are teens’ brains wired
this way? Scientists believe that as humans emerged from primate ancestors millions
of years ago, there was an evolutionary payoff for adolescents to venture
outside their natal group for mates. “The reward for taking chances in
dangerous terrain was sex followed by reproduction,” explains Kolbert, “while
the cost of sensibly staying at home was genetic oblivion.” Teen brains are
still wired the same way, but “Many recent innovations – cars, Ecstasy,
iPhones, S.U.V.s, thirty racks, semi-automatic weapons – exacerbate the
mismatch between teen-agers’ brains and their environment. Adolescents today
face temptations that teens of earlier eras… couldn’t have dreamed of. In a
sense, they live in a world in which all the water bottles are spiked. And so,
as Jensen and Steinberg observe, they run into trouble time and time again.”
Kolbert’s twin 16-year-olds
spent part of their summer taking 30 hours of required driver’s ed classes.
This “completely misses the point,” she says. “Sixteen-year-olds are dangerous
drivers. Their rate of fatal crashes per mile is three times as high as the
rate for drivers age twenty and over, and nearly twice as high as the rate for
drivers eighteen and nineteen. Sixteen-year-olds will still be a hazard after
listening (or, more likely, not listening) to thirty hours’ worth of cautionary
tales. They actually do understand that driving is dangerous; the problem is
that they’re having too much fun to care. The only way to bring down their
accident rate is to prevent them from getting behind the wheel.” She and
Steinberg agree that the age for getting a license should be eighteen. The same
logic applies to educational programs to prevent smoking, doing drugs, and
problem drinking. The billions of dollars spent on these efforts make very
little difference, says Kolbert. It would be better to spend the money on
sports and arts programs to keep kids busy and under adult supervision.
Thinking about her boys,
Kolbert concludes, “Yes, adolescents in the twenty-first century pose a great
risk to others and, statistically speaking, an even greater risk to themselves.
But this is largely because other terrifying risks – scarlet fever, diphtheria,
starvation, smallpox, plague – have receded. Adolescence evolved over a vast
expanse of time when survival at any age was a crapshoot. If the hazards are
new, so, too, is the safety. Which is why I will keep telling my kids scary
stories and why they will continue to ignore them.”
