It’s Official! Teenagers Can’t Help It and Adults Should Learn We Aren’t Bad People.
I knew it wasn’t my fault and now it’s in the Newspapers, it must be true!
The full article explains that, like during an infant’s “terrible two’s”, a teenager’s brain re-models itself for a second time. This is when the frontal lobes of the brain (where ‘reasonableness’ goes on) get rewired and processing is re-routed via the amygdala, which is the primal part of the brain where instantaneous and emotional reactions to threats occur. Hence quick, fiery tempers and emotional responses abound.
Check this excerpt out.
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…
So [PARENTS] if you want to know what NOT to do, here’s five sure-fire ways to salvaging your relationship with your teen…
- STOP asking “What’s wrong with you?”
- DON’T raise your voice
- FORGET about being a career coach
- DON’T ‘leave them to it’
- NEVER SAY: “I never spoke to my parents the way you do.”
Please read the full article written by Tanith Carey in The Telegraph. It’s an interesting read from both a parent’s and a teenager’s point of view.
