Believe me when I say that I feel lucky. My kids are largely healthy, and although they have at times kept me up at nights, I know that my suffering has been relatively mainstream and minimal. I also am wise enough and bald enough to know that much of this is the fortuitous result of a happy combination of socioeconomic good fortune and sheer dumb luck. Sure, my wife and I haven’t made any major mistakes, but I’m well aware that things can go awry in a heartbeat despite our best intentions and actions.
Do you recall your parents teaching you to drive? I remember that my mom often used what I came to refer to as the “parental fantasy brakes.” When she saw me do something stupid behind the wheel of the car, she’d slam her right foot onto the floor in front of the passenger seat at exactly the spot where the brake pedal would have been if she were sitting where I was next to her.
I keep that metaphor in mind when I parent. I am constantly trying to discern when I ought to put my foot on the fake brakes versus when I really need to make the car stop. After all, kids are going to do dumb things. This means that parents have a particularly difficult job. We have to let our kids do some of these things so that they can learn what not to do on their own, but we also have to put the brakes on fast when things get too hairy. We can’t, of course, know when something dumb is being planned. And if we put on the brakes too hard or too often, we might paradoxically tempt our kids to take more ill-advised risks instead of making prudent decisions.
[Read: Picking Your Battles.]
Again, think of your own childhood. There are very few of us who didn’t do some stupid, impulsive things as we negotiated the treacherous waters of own adolescence. I tried, for example, to climb a water tower next to my high school. It had to do with a girl (of course), and it had to do with the unique physiology of my brain at the time. I got caught by the police and the officer was nice enough to bring me back to my home. He had about half a smile on his face when he dropped me off at my house without talking to my parents.
Why, literally on a brain level, do adolescents seem to suddenly lose any semblance of reasonable perspective and judgment? Understanding the answer to this can help us to make sense of our kids’ behavior, and, more importantly, of how to react to them when they stray too far into the danger zone.
To begin with, we need to note that what neuroscientists characterize as normal brain development continues until around age 26. That means that your kids will continue, though in a declining fashion, to have the capacity to show poor judgment a lot later than we typically expect. In making sense of this, it’s helpful to think of the brain in terms of two major compartments. I know this is way oversimplified, but just hear me out.
The first compartment is what scientists call the limbic apparatus. This is the primitive region of the brain, governed by a wordless and excitable despot called the amygdala. Amygdala is Greek for “almond,” and the amygdalae (we have one on each side of our brain) are shaped like little almonds. They’re job is to perceive all of existence through the binary scope of fight versus flight. From an evolutionary perspective, the amygdalae make up the most advanced parts of a crocodile’s brain. We humans, though, don’t often behave like crocodiles. That’s because we have more advanced compartments to “talk” to the amygdalae. These compartments rest in our frontal lobes. The frontal lobes tells the amygdalae what do with all of its excitement.
[Read: The True Essence of Adolescence.]
Keeping all this in mind, here’s an approximation of my brain’s conversation when I tried to climb that water tower back when I was 16 years old:
Frontal Lobes: I’d like this girl who has caught my attention to think that I’m cool and brave, and she seems to think that about this other guy who advertised with great fanfare that he climbed that super-big water tower next to our high school. And wait a minute, isn’t that the same girl getting into the guy-who-climbed-the-water-tower’s blue Mustang? Now’s my chance!
Amygdalae: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
Frontal Lobes: OK, OK, I hear you, amygdalae. Are you saying I ought to climb the water tower too?
Amygdalae: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
Frontal Lobes: You’re right! You’re the loudest thing yelling in my brain, so you must be right! I’m gonna climb that water tower!
Amygdalae: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
Frontal Lobes, but now in a much quieter voice : Gee, Steve, usually when the amygdalae get this excited, it works out better if we just wait a few minutes.
Amygdalae: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Frontal Lobe, capitulating : She’s looking at him. Right at him! I gotta do something! OK, OK. Gonna go climb that stupid water tower.
What if the same thing happened to someone in their 30s? Would the same internal conversation happen for an adult? The answer to that is … sort of.
The teen brain has pretty bad insulation along the tracks that lead from the amygdalae to the frontal lobes. The insulating protein along the axons and dendrites is called myelin, and the myelin isn’t totally in place along the telephone wires that allow the primitive brain to talk to the advanced brain. That means that the amygdalae don’t need to scream as loudly for teens to take action, since the frontal lobes can’t sit on the fight or flight reflexes of the amygdalae in teens nearly as effectively as they can for older adults.
So how do we stop this from happening with our kids? First of all, we can’t 100 percent of the time. But we can listen for those times when their primitive brains are screaming and then try super-hard not to respond in kind.
If your kid wants to do something particularly dumb, and if he or she is particularly revved up about it, you might be tempted to respond in a similarly revved up way. Your amygdalae will try to talk to their amygdalae. Except remember that the amygdalae don’t have any words. They just scream a lot.
So lower your voice.
Talk calmly.
Sooth your impulsive child’s primitive brain. That’ll give your child’s frontal lobes a fighting chance to get in on the conversation. Had my amygdalae been soothed, my 16-year-old frontal lobes would have taken a deep breath and said something like, “Climbing the water tower is really dumb and pretty dangerous. Don’t do it.” And instead maybe I’d have picked up my guitar and wrote a bad but heartfelt love song.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
This parenting stuff is hard precisely because we care so much that we often recruit our amygdala for reinforcements when our kids drive us crazy. But then you have an argument between two crocodiles. That almost never goes well.
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Why Teens Do Dumb Things — and How You Can Stop Them originally appeared on usnews.com
