Your Teenager Is Not Crazy Read online

  Does that mean you should become your child’s cruise director, constantly providing exciting excursion options for them? Gasp! Do I have to become my daughters’ clown after all?

  By no means! Understanding the neurobiological realities can, however, secure our compassion for adolescents who want to explore, try new things, and experience higher highs. They’re facing very real drives and desires. This knowledge can also enable us to help teens harness the power and potential of their push toward novelty.

  Psych 101

  Consider this: if your teenage son never tried anything new, he would never move out. If your adolescent daughter wasn’t motivated by the hope of some pleasurable outcome, she wouldn’t pursue higher education, a challenging career, or marriage and motherhood. Adolescents’ drive for reward, and their sensitivity to it, are essential for the transition from dependence to independence. Because they push teens to learn in new ways, unique surroundings, and different social interactions, novelty- and sensation-seeking actually play a crucial role in your teen’s acquisition of social, physical, and cognitive tools necessary for adult life. In other words, hidden within “I’m bored” is the seed of some amazing personal growth.

  How can parents help in this process?

  Fuel the fire of curiosity. Remember the wise words widely attributed to satirist Dorothy Parker: “the cure for boredom is curiosity.” We imagine some skeptical parents out there are shaking their heads. “But my son isn’t curious about anything!” Don’t be too sure. Maybe you just think what he’s interested in isn’t “worthwhile.” Too often we want our kids to be interested only in things we consider “time well spent” or “valuable for the future,” but curiosity doesn’t always work that way. You may need to stretch your idea of what’s worthy of spending time and money exploring. If your teen likes skateboarding, find a new skate park or a skate museum. Get a book or magazine about skateboarding. You may be surprised to discover that your adolescent is fascinated by baking, volcanoes, or gardening. Of course, not all activities are equally edifying, so discernment is required. We’d be leery of fueling the fire of a curiosity about horror films, for instance. The key is to harness curiosity and direct it positively. Your teen’s drive toward novelty will emerge in some way. You cannot hold it back, but you can help direct its flow.

  Allow for course correction. As we encourage our adolescents to try new and different things, we must also keep in mind that experimentation doesn’t equal lifelong commitment. Teens benefit from the freedom to try various activities, and your support makes a big difference, even if that means allowing your teen to stop something you value. It was very difficult for me (Jerusha) when our daughters no longer wanted to take piano lessons. Growing up, music was a huge part of my family’s life, and I wanted the girls to be able to play instruments and sing with us. If I hadn’t surrendered my desire and allowed the girls to pursue other interests, our older daughter may not have become an artist, nor would our younger daughter have discovered her passion for gymnastics. Not only is she growing physically skilled, she’s also reading a biography of an Olympic gymnast, and the story of hard work and perseverance is one we’re excited for her to focus on!

  Don’t think of this as a problem to be solved. As far as you are able, resist the urge to “fix” your teen’s boredom with work or the “same old” activities. Adolescents need enough down time to sort through what they’re actually thinking and feeling, and sometimes feeling bored is precisely what launches them into exploring things that ultimately help them grow. Of course, teenage experimentation and the desire for fun can drive us crazy. That’s a given. Buying into the misguided idea that the brain’s natural and healthy push toward new and thrilling experiences should be tamed, however, is detrimental to all. The adolescent mind is full of tremendous power and potential. The development of creative expression shouldn’t end as we grow older; indeed, adolescence should be a time of burgeoning curiosity and fulfillment.

  Make spending time together an enjoyable priority. It may surprise you to learn that teens identify “not having enough time together with their parents as one of their top problems.”5 The vast majority of teens also report that they think highly of their parents (roughly 86 percent say they do) and like being with them (approximately 77 percent agreed with the statement, “I enjoy spending time with my mother or father”).6 Why, then, do our teens so often complain when we want to have a family night or ask immediately, “Can I bring a friend?” when we plan to go somewhere? Part of the answer lies in the fact that parents want to do the same things over and over again. To help our teens harness the power and potential of this important season of life, we should expose them to new things, particularly things that expand their view of the world. This takes time and effort beyond “Let’s have a Friday movie night.” It may mean sacrificing financially in one area so you can take your kids to that concert or cultural event. It’s worth it.

  Enjoy the highs with your teen. When dopamine is released in your son’s or daughter’s brain, a powerful sense of being alive surges through them. This is a wonderful feeling and one that many adults have forgotten. Trying something new with your adolescent may give you a rush like you haven’t had in some time. Even more importantly, it will bond you together in significant ways.

  Faith 101

  Many teens experience the increased activity in their brain’s reward systems as a longing they can’t quite identify, a hunger they can’t satisfy, a restlessness with the status quo. Under healthy circumstances, the physiological changes in your teenager’s brain motivate them to engage in activities and with ideas that increase their zest for life, making them more open to change and willing to try new ways of doing things. Adolescents can be movers, shakers, and even world changers, ready to risk in ways adults feel averse to, captivated by things adults dismiss as irrelevant or too daring.

  One way teenagers seek novelty is by pushing away from what they’ve known thus far. It’s inherently rewarding for them and often terrifying for their parents. During adolescence, your son will process many thoughts, beliefs, perspectives, and intentions he’s never had before; your daughter will have adventures of which you know very little, if anything at all. These realities can be frightening for involved, loving parents.

  This is part of letting go and allowing God to make something new in your teen. He didn’t create another you when he brought your adolescent into the world. God populates the world with the novel and unique in every birth! He also designed the brain to seek novelty during adolescence, when teens can still be protected by parental oversight but can also explore much of the world before stepping into adulthood. Don’t squander this remarkable gift. Don’t distrust it. Instead, wade into the churning waters of your child’s heart and mind.

  In the busyness of our daily lives, it’s easy to get frustrated with teenage boredom or curiosity. Bottom line, we sometimes don’t want to be bothered with it; it takes too much effort, and we can’t figure out what they want anyway.

  We must not settle for this. One of our chief purposes as parents is to cultivate our children’s hearts—the place of deep intimacy with God and with others, engaged with the world God created. An adolescent’s expanding desire for new and different things opens a window of tremendous spiritual potential. This is the time to explore new forms of worship, try different bands or Bible studies, or expose them to Christian visual artists or speakers. Do this with your child. Talk to him or her about it. The possibilities are powerful.

  You draw out the heart of your teen when you refuse to allow the “same old, same old” to overtake their spiritual life (or your own). Five different times in Psalms and once in Isaiah, the Lord commands us to sing a new song (see Pss. 33:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1; Isa. 42:10). God is not afraid of novelty; on the contrary, he desires it for and from us. We should engage with our children in the same way, drawing their heart from the deep waters within and nurturing the exciting potential.

  Try It Today: Do Somet
hing New with Your Teen

  Over the next twenty-four hours, try something new with your teen. Stop at that ethnic restaurant, bakery, or grocer that you’ve passed a hundred times and pick out a unique snack. Better yet, grab a sampler platter. Test the flavors with your teen, and have fun with it if one or both of you starts smoking at the ears or racing for a glass of water as a new blend of spices rockets across your taste buds.

  Take your teen to a go-cart track after school. Try on a style of clothes you’ve never worn. Listen to a new genre of music. Your imagination sets the only limits. Don’t throw in the towel if your son or daughter doesn’t seem into this at first; your attitude makes a big difference, so stay positive and pray that great memories can be made.

  5

  That Could Be Epic

  We called it the airplane field, and legends were made there.

  Sprawling acres of abandoned and mostly demolished government housing, peppered with the crumbling concrete remains of foundations and roads, overgrown with weeds and covered with motorcycle-carved pathways, the airplane field was our adolescent playground.

  I (Jeramy) can still hear the throaty, percussive idle of my Yamaha 125’s two-stroke engine, its high-pitched pinging at full-throttle acceleration. I can almost smell the acrid mixture of oil-gas exhaust and feel the crisp bay air whipping across my teenaged cheeks.

  One day, two popular kids from school wandered into our wonderful wasteland. As a ninth grader, I was far from an outcast, but I also wasn’t as popular as these guys. I’ll be honest: I wanted to impress them, so when they turned to the sand jump and asked, “Can you take that thing, or what?” I popped off, “Wait right here.”

  About twenty feet tall and leveled to a plateau on top, the sand jump was one of the bigger obstacles the airplane field offered. The popular kids moved to the side as I buzzed away, giving myself about the length of a football field to get the bike wide open, into sixth gear.

  Engine screeching, dirt flying, wheels spinning, I launched—and that really is the only applicable word here—into the air as I hit the jump at full throttle. I will never forget looking down at those guys with their heads fully titled back, staring slack-jawed at me flying through the air. As the bike began to descend, it hit me: I’m either gonna be epic or in the emergency room.

  As the ground rushed up to meet me, the bike hit with such ferocity that it repeatedly bounced several feet in the air, trying to correct forces that the 125’s poor suspension couldn’t account for rapidly enough.

  Somehow, by the grace of God, I didn’t wipe out. And for that moment, I was epic.

  Bio 101

  I (Jerusha) distinctly remember adults in my teenage years making comments like, “Teenagers think they’re invincible. Wait until you’re older; then you’ll understand.” This never quite made sense to me. When I tried to get my parents’ Mazda up to 110 mph on the freeway coming home from prom at 4:30 a.m., I didn’t think I couldn’t die. The fact that I could made it more exhilarating.

  Of course, I look back now and immediately think two things: one, I was a complete fool, and two, my kids probably are going to do something equally foolish someday. Lord, please preserve them!

  For the adolescent brain under construction, the combination of novelty and risk is a tantalizing concoction, stimulating production and a powerful release of the pleasure neurochemical dopamine. As we read in the last chapter, lower baseline levels of dopamine in the adolescent brain lead teens to seek new and thrilling activities. At the same time, adolescents often add a lack of impulse control, and the chemical results can be the neural equivalent of a Fourth of July fireworks finale.

  According to adolescent brain researchers, impulse control is among the last areas to mature in teenage brains.1 It’s part of the brain’s regulatory system, serving to rein in full-throttle drives and desires, as well as coordinating with other brain structures to exercise sound judgment. As parents, when we hear about teenage antics, we often chalk up the behaviors to an invincibility complex and an underdeveloped neural “brake system.” These things are important, but there’s more going on.

  As Jeramy took the sand jump and as Jerusha pushed the pedal to the metal all those years ago, a unique and significant cognitive dynamic came into play: hyperrational thinking. Many teenagers are prone to this thought process, which takes the strong emotional bias of adolescence, the drive for danger, a still-developing regulatory system, and a maturing prefrontal cortex, then rolls it into one fascinating (and, for parents, often infuriating) ball. (Note: Since some teens are risk averse, hyperrational thinking doesn’t apply to every teen. Understanding it is crucial for every parent, however, because even if it doesn’t readily impact your teen, it may play a role in your son’s or daughter’s friendship cluster.)

  According to neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel, with hyperrational thinking,

  We examine just the facts of a situation and don’t see the big picture; we miss the setting or context in which those facts occur. . . . As adolescents we can place more weight on the calculated benefits of an action than on the potential risks of that action. Studies reveal that as teens we are often fully aware of risks, and even at times overestimate the chance of something bad happening; we simply put more weight on the exciting potential benefits of our actions.2

  What does this mean for us as parents? In order to understand adolescents and help our teens develop the incredibly important regulatory system, we can keep a few things in mind:

  Hyperrational thinking isn’t void of reason or reflection. Hyperrationality differs from pure impulsivity in this way. When teens engage in hyperrational thinking, they use a cognitive process that places far more weight on potentially positive results than possibly negative outcomes. In other words, though some parents mistakenly attribute adolescent behavior to a lack of thinking, the adolescent brain actually works very hard to calculate pros and cons. Hyperrationality causes the brain to amplify pros and downplay cons.

  Hyperrational teens are aware of consequences. Adults often try to “correct” hyperrational thinking with education, assuming that if adolescents knew the dangers, they wouldn’t engage in certain behaviors. Studies show, however, that teens are hardly ever oblivious to the risks of potentially dangerous activities.3 Indeed, the negative consequences are fully known, but the positive benefits of a situation—the thrill, the reward, the chance to be epic, if only for a moment—appear greater. For this reason, lecturing your teen about “what could have happened,” isn’t the best approach. Instead . . .

  Focus on motivation more than on specific behavior. It’s easy to concentrate on the apparent craziness of hyperrational thinking, but we must resist this temptation. Of course we need to maintain our child’s safety. But finding out what “pros” an adolescent was after, what drove him or her to engage in an activity, is equally important and in some cases far more important. Increased activity in neural circuits utilizing dopamine in your adolescent’s brain makes the drive for reward incredibly strong. Determine what reward a teen is seeking, and you’ll be better able to address hyperrational behaviors. By age sixteen and under good conditions (i.e., given time, free of pressure, and with adequate physical health), adolescents are capable of calculating the risks and benefits of particular behaviors as well as adults. If we assume teens just “can’t control themselves,” we miss the more complex story at play: teens are developing impulse control and don’t have it down yet, but they are also displaying a stronger—sometimes carefully calculated—preference for immediate rewards.4 Don’t overplay the behavior and fail to figure out what’s behind it.

  Teach in ways that change. If simple education about the potential risks of dopamine-producing activities worked, we should have a wise adolescent population. After all, the United States shells out hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to convince adolescents that they’re not invincible, most often through school-based programs warning them of the dangers of driving and texting, substance abuse, unprote
cted sex, and so on. Statistics show, however, that despite knowing about potential negative consequences, teens still engage in hyperrational thinking and related behaviors. When it comes down to it, information simply isn’t enough. Instead of focusing our attention and resources on trying to transform teens with data, we need to change the circumstances under which they make decisions. Let’s turn our attention to that now.

  Psych 101

  Both adults and adolescents make decisions within a social and emotional context. We never make judgments in a vacuum. Because a teenager’s regulatory system and relationship system are under simultaneous remodeling, hyperrational thinking becomes activated when teens hang out together and even when teens believe their friends will find out what they’ve done. The desire to be epic plays a major role in some teens’ choices and relationships.

  In one study, adolescents and adults were asked to complete a simulated driving course. The goal: reach the end of the track as quickly as possible, thereby maximizing a monetary reward. At different points, the simulation forced participants to make rapid decisions regarding yellow lights. Running through the yellow light certainly increased the likelihood of a speedy finish, but it could also result in a crash, which meant significant delay. Each test subject performed the simulation in isolation and while observed by peers. While playing the game alone, adults and adolescents performed comparably. When the peer observation component was added, things got interesting.

  According to the research, adolescents took a greater number of risks when they knew friends were watching. In addition,

  regions of the brain associated with reward showed greater activation when the adolescents knew they were being observed by peers. These results suggest that the presence of peers does not impact the evaluation of the risk but rather heightens sensitivity in the brain to the potential upside of a risky decision. . . . If the presence of friends had been simply a distraction to the participant, then we would have seen an impact on the brain’s executive function. But that is not what we have found.5