There isn’t a parent with a teenager who hasn’t been told ‘You’re ruining my life’ or ‘I hate you’ at some point. But if that’s not bad enough, their behaviour can get even worse if we fail to understand the brain changes triggering these outbursts. A major new study, just published by Berlin’s Max Planck Institute, is the latest to find that teenagers go through the same rewiring between the age of 13 and 17 as they did when they were toddlers. Second time around however, when they match you for size and are using much more colourful language, it can be much harder to handle.
As a parenting author, looking at the bigger picture of children’s mental health, I know we can also end up losing our connection with our teens when they need us most. So if you want to know what NOT to do, here’s five sure-fire ways to salvaging your relationship with your teen, and make this period even more turbulent.
1. STOP asking “What’s wrong with you?”
There’s nothing wrong with this question, if you genuinely want to know. However all-too-often, it’s a rhetorical outburst, blurted out by parents who have run out of patience.
Worse still, it sends the message you think there is something fundamentally defective about your child, which can never be changed.
What’s actually ‘wrong’ with teens is that the frontal lobes in their brains, which controls impulses, reasoning and planning, are the last to be rewired for adulthood.
While this re-arrangement is going on, decision-making is re-routed via the amygdala, a primal part of their brain which reacts instantaneously and emotionally to any perceived threat.
Neuroscientist, Dr. Frances Jensen, author of new book ‘The Teenage Brain’ says: ‘Teenagers make much more sense when you understand that the frontal lobes of the brain – the part responsible for judgment, impulse control, mood and emotions – is the last part to fully develop.
‘So the brain just doesn’t know how to regulate itself yet. They’re like Ferraris with weak brakes. ‘
Of course, it’s easy to assume that this doesn’t matter because teens never listen anyway, but, on the contrary, they are hypersensitive to our opinions of them. Pretending not to care is their defence mechanism.
To confused adolescent, such despairing comments from the parent who is supposed to love them the most, can cut deep.
Such messages get turned inwards into negative self-talk.
These voices can be very hard to silence once they take hold in a teen’s malleable brain, just as it is laying down the pathways which will influence their future mental health.
Instead one of the greatest gifts you can give your teen at this age is not only an understanding of what is happening inside their mind, but also the concept of ‘a growth mindset.’
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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