Recently I've been exploring wide-spread and enduring beliefs about teenagers. This month I was thinking about how we as a society often explain the risky behaviour of adolescents, by saying, Oh, they think they're going to live forever, and I wondered, do they really? Teens are infamous for their poor decision making, renowned as reckless drivers and as users of alcohol and drugs. Research reports that forty percent of adolescents didn't use a condom the last time they had s

Recently I've been exploring the myths we tell ourselves about teenagers. Last month, I discussed why we perceive teens as selfish; this month I wanted to put another common complaint under the microscope: teens are lazy. Certainly, they can seem this way. They sleep in late; they put off doing homework, they forget to take out the trash (again); they are more content to play video games than to think about the future. So, what's going on here? Well, to be honest: a lot of th

I love working with teens. I love their optimism, and their energy and their resiliency. I love their way of looking at the world and their ability to be flexible and inquisitive. Often, when I tell adults how much I like being with teens, they roll their eyes and comment on how they don’t see them in the same way. Sometimes they will say, “better you than me,” or “you couldn’t pay me enough to work with teenagers.” Teens are incredibly misunderstood. This is not a new thing.

This summer I wrote a post about how the delayed released of melatonin effects the sleep patterns of teenagers, and why this means all schools should have a delayed start. So imagine my excitement when I heard this report about about what happened in Seattle when they pushed back the start time for school. Grades and attendance both went up! And teens were sleeping more! Have a listen here: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/12/676118782/sleepless-no-more-in-se

All this summer I’ve been exploring the effects of the developing adolescent brain on adolescent behaviour. Recently I came across this article on NPR about how these very same changes impact what teens are reading. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, says teens love dystopian fiction, because “(Teen) brains are very responsive to emotionally arousing stimuli. During this time, there are so many new emotions and they are much stronger than those kids exp

For the past two months, I have been exploring some of the effects that normal brain development has on adolescent behavior. In today’s post, I want to examine the repercussion of the increase in oxytocin receptors that occurs during adolescence, and how parents can respond to this. Oxytocin is sometimes called the love or the cuddle hormone, because when we hug or kiss someone, when we have sex, give birth, or just bond socially, our oxytocin levels rise. The abundance of th

This summer I am exploring some of the effects that the adolescent brain has on adolescent behaviour, and today I wanted to look at what happens when melatonin release is delayed. Melatonin is also known as “the darkness hormone” and it help all people fall asleep. In adults, it is released at about 10 pm, but in teenagers it is released three hours later! (1) This three hour delay means that your teenager is liable to have a hard time falling asleep, and an even harder time

Over the next few weeks, I will continue exploring different aspects of adolescent development, and the ways in which these effect adolescent behaviour. This week, I want to look at the effect of myelination, the process during which nerve cells are coated by fatty lipids. Myelination actually begins at birth in the brain stem, but at the beginning of adolescence, myelination starts to occur in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for, “motor function, problem solving, sp

So much has been written -and read!- about the development of very young children, as if once we've got our kids sleeping and eating their vegetables, the battle is over, and yet adolescence presents brand new challenges for parents that are no less rooted in their biological development. Exaggerated activity in the nucleus accumbens relative to pre-frontal cortex activity is one of the important ways adolescents differ from children and adults. The nucleus accumbens is assoc