it’s in the brain … 122308

A recent study presented last month at a Society for Neuroscience meeting once again reiterated that a teen’s behavior tend to be in line with their brain development or lack thereof.  These findings has been ongoing, but more and more it seem to be confirming the initial findings that came out several years ago.

Sometimes these studies would on the surface seem to remove responsibility from teens for behaviors that are so erratic and at times off-the-wall.  However they are no way advocating such.  These findings must be used in conjunction with other techniques to help teens navigate this period of their lives. Such things as discipline, behavioral modifications, counseling, etc must be implemented for possible success.

Here is the finding on scans done on both teen and adult brains:

Brain scans showed that when teens were asked to do virtual tasks (such as driving a simulated car) in the presence of an audience, their right brains (which deal with social and emotional information) were more activated, whereas when adults were asked to do the same task their left brain (which is believed to control thoughts and actions) was more activated.  Teens took more risks and made more mistakes when they had an audience than when they did not.

One of the key areas of the findings is that teens tend to take more risks and made more mistakes when they had an audience.  In school, a teen would rather fight than walk away because of the audience that they have.  Take that same situation and place it where there were no audience, a teen would more likely walk away if that had been a part of their training.  In class, teens would rather take the risk of acting out to appease their audience with full knowledge of the consequences.  Fight rather than flight is the name of the game for them. These are all based on the emotions rather than the thinking process which is not fully developed.

Some parents of teens even without this information, but based on raw instinct and that parental “check”, have a rule that their teens may not drive with their peers in the car.  In light of this research, that rule may be wise.

What do you think?