Recently our 13 year old teenager has me concerned about her attitude. I realize teen hormones can be a little off at times, however observing other teens, I see many similar characterists among them.
The most concerning trait I have been observing for some months now is a distinct look of bewilderment and lack of concentration which I was acknowledging as possible anxiety or panic.
I came across a study this week written in the newspaper which may help define some of those traits which she is displaying.
I would like to share this with anyone who has teenagers with hopes that others may be able to comment.
Enjoy,
Devad.
There's a reason teenagers sometimes seem crazy, writes MICHAEL VALPY. Underneath that baseball cap, there's a brain that's still under construction

(Courtesy The Globe & Mail

by Michael Valpy

Saturday, May 10, 2003 - The Globe & Mail, Page F8

Denise arrived home from work to find three letters waiting for her. One said her teenage son had made his school's honour roll, a second said he had been selected to play in an outstanding youth orchestra and the third said he was suspended from school for cutting history class to hang out downtown.

The mother of twin teenage boys was appalled by her sons' tantrums, stomping of feet, slamming of doors, name-calling and fighting. The parents of a 15-year-old were horrified to discover their daughter was sneaking out of the house at midnight to see a 24-year-old man she had just met.

These stories come from a fascinating new book by New York Times medical science and health editor Barbara Strauch, titled The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids.

Ms. Strauch brings a good-news message, so to speak, to parents of teenagers: You aren't imagining things -- your sons and daughters really do have wonky brains and can be periodically, briefly insane.

Recent research in Canada and the United States is revealing that previous notions of the adolescent brain as a finished piece of work are wrong, and that the shibboleth of attributing teenagers' aberrant and flaky behaviour to hormones is, at the very least, an incomplete explanation.

In fact, the adolescent brain goes through a biological remodelling as critical to human development as that which takes place during the first two years of life -- a discovery with profound implications for educators, behavioural scientists, pediatric health professionals and, with luck, bewildered and desperate parents.

Virtually every particle of the teenage brain is under reconstruction: Nodes, lobes, neurons, synapses, the long strings of axons that are the pathways for electrical signals speeding (or, in the case of teenagers, jolting and backfiring) from one part of the brain to another and the itsy-bitsy dendrites that carry chemical messages between neurons.

Nature should post "Sorry for the inconvenience" signs on their foreheads.

What the body is doing is rebuilding teenagers' brains so they can be adults. The process makes life trying for adolescents and everyone around them, tossing teens into a cauldron of cognitive mayhem, stormy moods, grunts, bizarre reasoning and the inability to conceive of the future beyond Friday night.

The brain weight of a six-year-old is 95 per cent the weight of an adult's, which is what has led neural scientists in the past to assume the teenage brain was a done deal.

But six years ago, child psychiatrist and neuroscientist Jay Giedd of the U.S. National Institutes of Health was looking at the results of teenage brain scans he had had analyzed by the Montreal Neurological Institute when he suddenly realized the brains he was studying were undergoing major changes.

The grey matter, their outer layer, was thickening -- going through a period of overproduction of cells, or what neuroscientists aptly describe as "exuberance" -- and then dramatically thinning down, "a level of change that was supposed to be largely over by kindergarten," Ms. Strauch writes.

Dr. Giedd told her, "Basically I thought I was wrong. I thought the numbers were off.

"There was so little information out there, and what was there said that this overproduction was over long before teen years. I just kept looking at the data. Then after about six months of looking at more brain scans, I thought, 'Hey, this is for real.' "

Since then, research into the teenage brain has become as exuberant as the object being studied. Every cell and dendrite is being peered at -- from Dr. Giedd's continuing research and the work of Tomaz Paus at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who is examining adolescent neural connections between the brain's important speech areas, to the studies of neuroscientists like University of Chicago's Peter Huttenlocher, who's counting teenage synapses.

Teenagers, it is now known, experience short-circuits in the neural wiring to their memory function and have difficulty understanding facial expressions, instructions and jokes (forget about using irony; it's not that many don't get it, they can't get it).

One of the reasons for the impaired abilities is that teens use the brain's primal, emotional fight-or-flight centre rather than the brain's rational centre to decode signals from the social world around them, with frequent and fractious misinterpretations.

To illustrate, Ms. Strauch describes what happened to teenagers who underwent brain scans while being shown the face of a man in fear.

The part of their brains that lit up the brightest as their minds worked to make sense of the image was not the prefrontal cortex, the centre of rational judgment used by the adult brain to sort out complex nuances of emotions. It was the amygdala, an almond-shaped knot in the middle of the brain that is one of the key areas for instinctual reactions such as fight or flight, anger or "I hate you, Mom."

Research also suggests that the connections between the left and right side of teenagers' brains are incomplete, affecting their abilities to link speech and written language to thought. Synaptic gaps in the brain development of younger teens can render them largely incapable of abstract thinking, and put algebraic equations, puns and the normal, inherent contradictions in life beyond most of their grasps.

Brain chemistry accounts for their preference for staying up late and sleeping late -- useful information for work-whacked parents desperate to get to bed while their teenage offspring are prowling bright-eyed around the house.

Sleep researcher Mary Carskadon at Rhode Island's Brown University has discovered that melatonin, the natural hormone that regulates speech (in this case the explanation is hormones), doesn't begin flowing into teenage brains until about 10:30 p.m., after most of their parents' brains have decided to call it a day. Add to this the fact teenagers need about 10 hours' sleep, two hours longer than adults, and you realize they are likely to be in perpetual sleep deficit.

Why the late-flowing melatonin? Researchers aren't sure, but they've hypothesized that it has to do with some primal survival mechanism.

Most significant of all, teens' prefrontal cortex -- the brain's executive decision-making function, its CEO, its policeman, its planner, strategizer and centre of judgment -- doesn't work properly (which is why the amygdala is employed to decode the social world, sort of a temporary detour while the main highway is being repaired).

The prefrontal cortex is still a work in progress during the time that teenagers need it most, when they begin dewy-eyed forays of exploration into the world on their own. Indeed, the frontal lobes, with their software of reason, risk assessment and impulse control, are pretty much the last region of the brain to reach full development, not until their owners are past 20.

All of which means your teenaged children may be taller than you, have deeper voices (something fathers tend to find difficult) and at times may even sound more reasonable -- as any parent knows who suddenly realizes her son or daughter is persuading her to accept some totally goofy idea -- but much of the time their pilots are missing from the flight deck.

Their adult physical appearance is a Potemkin Village sham. Everything inside their skulls is a muddle, as chaotically disorganized as their bedrooms, backpacks and school lockers.

Moreover, the research reveals that while the adolescent brain is growing in huge spurts, it's also pruning earlier growth it no longer needs, clear-cutting millions of grey-matter cells in accordance with its modus operandi of "use it or lose it."

The brain is thought to work by overproducing cells, retaining those that are put to use and eventually tossing out the rest. According to this theory (not completely accepted in the world of neuroscience), these periods of rapid, almost explosive growth -- or exuberance -- occur when the brain is being primed to acquire new skills.

What this pruning or thinning means, says Dr. Miriam Kaufman, director of the adolescent medicine clinic at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, is that not only does the brain shape behaviour but behaviour seems to shape the brain.

In other words, for the teenager engaged in sports or music or reading, the cells and connectors necessary for those actions will flourish and become hardwired to the brain's scaffolding. And if the teenager's primary activity is playing video games or sofa-flopping, it will be the brain cells enabling those activities that survive, while others wither.

"The research is reinforcing the kinds of things we've been thinking about," Dr. Kaufman says. "But until now, when you've talked to people about improving mental health [of children] there's been so much push on the first two years. Teens have been thought of as geriatric."

Ms. Strauch reports that the research has led at least one neural scientist, Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Boston's McLean psychiatric hospital (she did the study with the face of the man in fear), to revamp her parenting techniques: "I used to ask my daughter to put a dish in the dishwasher and brush her hair and pick up her clothes, and then I'd get angry that she only did one of those things. Now I don't expect her to hold so much information in her head. She does one thing, and I expect that now."

Interestingly, many educators have intuitively understood that changes were taking place inside teenage brains, but until now have lacked the substantiating evidence.

In the 1980s, when Anne Kerr was a classroom geography teacher, she would take her Grade 9 students on a walking tour of the school's neighbourhood and then ask them to draw a bird's-eye map of it.

"One-third of the class could do it," she said. "The majority couldn't. They could draw houses on the street, but not a bird's-eye view."

The expectation at that time, she said, was that all Grade 12 students could discuss theoretical philosophy and do complex algebraic equations. "But in fact only 20 per cent of 18-year-olds could go from concrete to formal [theoretical abstract] learning. This was astounding to me as a classroom teacher. That's what's so exciting about this research."

Ms. Kerr, now principal of Ursula Franklin Academy, a Toronto public high school, found herself with so many questions she couldn't answer about the workings of the adolescent brain that she took a sabbatical in 1992 to study what was then known about it.

"I learned so much. It's enabled me to do so much more -- and we still don't know enough about the brain. There's still a tremendous amount of room for research."

What Ms. Kerr and her staff try to work with as a teaching methodology is what she calls the zone of proximal development -- figuring out what stage of development a student's brain has reached and tailoring teaching to fit that stage. Needless to say, it is an approach that doesn't fit comfortably with rigidly standardized curricula and grading.

"How do you go from concrete to formal learning? There's no straight line," she says. "The brain develops in spurts and plateaus. The spurts require stimulation. The plateaus are a period of consolidation."

Ms. Kerr learned to say this to students: "Your head is a jungle, and there's a road crew in there that's working, and we've got to stimulate you to keep that road crew working. You need someone like me to meet you where you're at."

Dr. Kaufman of Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children says one of the strongest messages that comes out of the new knowledge about the brain's pruning process is that schools and parents should be pushing music, language and sports skills at teenagers to ensure their brains don't toss out the cells needed for those activities.

"We're talking about cycles [in the brain's growth]," she says. "If you're not reading, if you're not learning another language . . . this is going to influence changes in the brain."

Is there a list of do's and don't's for parents?

Certainly yelling at them doesn't help. "Abstract thinking comes and goes with stress," Dr. Kaufman says. "We have to be making sure that all our interactions with teenagers are developmentally appropriate." She refers to parenting guru Barbara Coloroso's model: Set limits and be respectful.

Columbia University child psychiatrist Peter Jensen, the father of five teenagers, says he has learned to replace the parenting jackhammer with subtle nudges and hints at possible outcomes of risky behaviour and then leave his offspring alone to test-drive their newly connecting prefrontal cortexes.

"When my oldest child was a teenager, I was always trying to be in control, always trying to be her forebrain. I am trying to raise the fifth one differently -- giving structure, but also giving more choices to her own forebrain, choices she can make herself."

The experts say: Expose them to as many experiences as you can. Those experiences shape the brain. The experts say: When your teenagers grunt and yell at you, remember that you grunted and yelled at your parents. The experts say: Let your teenagers know their brains are works in progress.

Barbara Strauch says: Let them sleep in.

That is a totally cool article, dude. I told my hubby "Now I know what is wrong with me! I never grew up. I still have a teenage brain!" LOL! No, really, that was very interesting. I'm always trying to get my hubby to understand this stuff but he is still working on his frontal cortex himself.

Reena

Great article. I knew I wasn't the crazy one