Forget the hormones, neuroscientists have discovered that physical changes in teenagers' brains may account for their strange behaviour. SHEILA WAYMANreports
IF MEN ARE from Mars and women are from Venus, as author John Gray suggested in his mega- selling book, then what planet are teenagers from?
Mercury perhaps? That would be an apt choice, more for the properties of its namesake element, than of the planet. “Volatile”, “unpredictable”, “fickle”, “flighty”, “temperamental” are just some of the descriptions of people with a “mercurial” nature.
Certainly, teenagers inhabit a world of their own. It can be upsetting for parents as they watch their cute, chatty little children morph into sullen and defiant mini-adults.
Traditionally, this transformation has been put down to “hormones”. But in recent years, neuroscientists have discovered that physical changes in teenagers’ brains may have much to do with it – changes probably greater than at any time since they were two years old and the likes of which they will never experience again.
This explanation is some comfort to parents who are disturbed by their teenagers' behaviour, suggests Nicola Morgan, author of the internationally acclaimed Blame My Brain, who will be speaking in Dublin for the first time next Saturday. (November 14th).
“When you understand that so many of the things – if not perhaps, I would argue, all of the things – can be explained, it stops you worrying about it. It stops you thinking, ‘Oh is this because I am a bad parent’, or that they are a bad teenager.” It is simply a temporary and necessary stage.
When MRI scanning allowed scientists to look inside the brains of living people, they expected to see that a teenage brain would be a bit more developed than a child’s brain and a bit less developed than an adult’s brain.
“What they found was significantly different and fascinating,” enthuses Morgan (47) on the phone from her home in Edinburgh. “The main aspect of it is that suddenly there is a huge extra growth of brain cells, neurons, up to 15 or 20 per cent in the early years of being a teenager, by which I mean about the age of 11 or 12, sometimes a bit earlier for girls.
“You have this huge extra volume of neurons; then within the next couple of years you have that same number dying, so you have this huge extra growth and this huge extra pruning back.”
During this time, “you have got bits that had been connected and working relatively well, suddenly not being connected because maybe some neurons were lost in that particular area”.
This explains why sometimes teenagers are no longer able to do things they previously had been able to do quite well. They can become clumsy, seeming to lose some of their motor control. As the brain works on the “use it or lose it principle”, the middle range of teenage years is the time they can most usefully develop and strengthen some skills but they also need to try to avoid losing others, says Morgan. “They have huge opportunities during these years, probably the best opportunities for becoming good at things.”
Brain development is being consolidated in the late teens – although the brain is not fully developed until about the age of 23. “From very roughly 16 onwards up to early 20s, you have the real strengthening of the connections after that loss during the middle stage.”
Overall, you could negatively sum up what is going on in the teenage brain as “chaos”, she says. “But, of course, it is not chaos because nature is doing it brilliantly. The upheaval of the strengths and the weaknesses in the teenage brains during those years is enough to explain a lot of the difficulties that they have.”
The brain is a subject that has long fascinated Morgan, who is primarily an author of teenage fiction.
Early in her career, as an English teacher in a secondary school in London, she became interested in dyslexia and studied for a diploma in teaching people with learning difficulties.
Part of that course involved looking at what might be going on in the brains of people who did not learn in ways that were considered normal.
“You start to see the tiniest specific things that can be different or go wrong in some brains. That is what made me fascinated. I just read everything I could about the brain.”
Years later, when her publishers suggested she might like to write some non-fiction, about something she was passionately interested in, she proposed a book about the teenage brain. At the time, apart from writing for teenagers, and having two of her own at home, she had also just read about brand new research into the teenage brain.
“I was reading scientific journals,” she explains, “and nobody had written about it in the public domain. Because I had the background in understanding neuroscience, I knew where to go to get this research.”
The amazing thing, she says, is that the scientists were “incredibly open to me, an absolute non-scientist, writing about it”, and very generous in their help.
Blame My Brainis written for teenagers, to tell them what is going on in their heads, how long it will last and how best to cope with it. But it is a book parents will find helpful, too.
However, brain activity is not the sole explanation for teenage behaviour, Morgan stresses – nor is she handing them an excuse to behave how they want.
“If we just say to our teenagers, or to ourselves as parents, ‘Okay right, it’s your teenage brain, that is why it is happening, we will just sit around waiting until you are 23 and everything will be fine’, then it won’t all be fine.”
She believes it in fact gives parents a licence to nag their teenagers. Without parents instructing, guiding, setting a good example and saying, ‘No that is wrong what you did’, their brains will not develop self-control.
“Same as with younger children, if you exercise some form of control, they will develop self- control. With teenagers you can and should control them less, but we are the ones who are in control and we set the boundaries, and that is how they will learn self-control.”
Of course, they are going to make mistakes, just as adults who are supposed to have fully developed brains do. “I think we all, as parents, will inevitably make lots of mistakes along the way and adapt as we go. It is trying not to make the same mistake again, which actually develops our brain.”
It is scary for parents with pre-teens, she acknowledges, worrying about how they are going to change enormously in the next few years and what they are going to become. But it does not mean they are going to turn into monsters. “I think we are very negative about teenagers and I think we should try to be a lot less negative,” she argues.
She attributes their bad image to the fact that most people’s experience of teenagers is either in their own home, where we are all at our worst, or what they see in the media, where negative stories are deemed newsworthy.
“So often parents will say, ‘My son or daughter seems to behave beautifully for everybody else and people keep telling me what a lovely person they are. Where is this lovely person?’” If it is any consolation, it is much more important that teenagers behave well for other people, discovering themselves in their interaction with other adults and other teenagers – “and then come back to the house and be relaxed because we let our families see our crabby side”.
Most parents worry about whether their teenager is going to be among the ones who go off the rails. “That is a very legitimate fear,” Morgan acknowledges. “What we know we can’t really do – or if we try we’re going to fail – is control too much of what they become.”
The whole point of becoming a teenager, and not being a child any more, is about becoming an adult and becoming independent.
“You can’t be independent of your parents if you continue to believe everything they say, do everything they tell you and wait for them to give you the instructions about how you’re going to live your life. Evolution provides this teenage period for that very good reason, which is that it creates the situation where the young person can become independent.”
It is a point lost in the increasingly extended practice of “helicopter parenting”, where even at university level, mum or dad continue to hover over students’ lives.
One day your offspring are going to have to make every decision, big and small, on their own, adds Morgan, and learning to do that is a gradual process. “It would be ridiculous to think that you could live under your parents’ wings until you were 21 and then leave and suddenly become independent. It’s not going to happen.”
The scarier the better
Parents should not worry about the depth or darkness of what their teenagers are reading, as it is a perfect way to explore ideas, says Nicola Morgan, a writer of teenage fiction. She believes there is no topic, if it is interesting to teenagers, that couldn’t be covered in a responsible way in teenage fiction.
Her latest novel, Deathwatch, is a thriller about a promising 14-year-old athlete, Cat McPherson, who is being stalked. Touching on issues such as social networking, parental pressure, mental illness, Gulf War Syndrome and phobias, it is a story, a review in the Scotsman newspaper suggested, "aimed at teenage girls who find Twilightand its ilk too wimpy".
For teenagers reading such books, “it is a safe way to explore dark issues”, says Morgan. “If you engage fully in the book you are reading, you experience those same risks, fears and dangers that the characters do. You are in a way practising your risk-taking in an entirely safe environment of the room where you are keeping the book.”
Teenagers seem to revel in going right to the edge, she says, “and exploring not something just dark but the darkest, not something just dangerous, but the most dangerous. It is a bit like watching a scary film – pushing yourself to the edge and entering fully into the emotions and motivations of the characters, but being completely safe”.
When she was a teenager in the 1970s, young readers went straight from children’s books to adult books. Teenage fiction was emerging in the US but, growing up in England, she never had any exposure to it.
“I love the fact that there is now a really, really strong body of teenage fiction because I do think teenagers are different from adults and different from children,” Morgan adds.
“Although I moved easily from children’s books to adult books, there must have been many people of my generation who didn’t and may have been switched off because suddenly they were at age of 14 or 15 with children’s books that were beneath them or adult books with characters who they did not relate to.”
- Nicola Morgan will be the key speaker at the School Library Association's conference next Saturday (November 14th) in Pearse Street Library, Dublin, from 9.30am-3pm. Members of the public are welcome to attend but places must be booked in advance. For more information see www.slari.ie or e-mail secretary@slari.ie.
- Blame My Brain, by Nicola Morgan, is published by Walker Books, £5.99 in UK
- swayman@irishtimes.com
