Tag: adolescent development

The Adolescent Sleep Cycle

Bora Zivkovic compiles some information on how kids circadian rhythms change during adolescence, and advocates for later school starting hours.

He points out the interesting concept of chronotypes:

Everyone, from little children, through teens and young adults to elderly, belongs to one of the ‘chronotypes’. You can be a more or less extreme lark (phase-advanced, tend to wake up and fall asleep early), a more or less extreme owl (phase-delayed, tend to wake up and fall asleep late). You can be something in between – some kind of “median” (I don’t want to call this normal, because the whole spectrum is normal) chronotype.

— Zivkovic (2012): When Should School Start in the morning in Scientific American (blog).

And how your chronotype gets phase-delayed at puberty:

No matter where you are on these continua, once you hit puberty your clock will phase-delay. If you were an owl to begin with, you will become a more extreme owl for about a dozen years. If you are an extreme lark, you’ll be a less extreme lark. In the late 20s, your clock will gradually go back to your baseline chronotype and retain it for the rest of your life.

— Zivkovic (2012): When Should School Start in the morning in Scientific American (blog).

Building a Metaphor (Actually a Grill)

The grill entering the final stages of construction by Ryan V. and Robert M.. Photograph by Autumn F.

It took us a little more than half a day to build a grill. It’s a simple thing of cinder blocks and sand, located near the soccer field so it’ll be convenient for bbq’s next year.

It took the highschoolers all morning to dig an outline for the base of the grill and lay in the foundation, despite it being a small, three-quarters of a rectangle shape, and only ten centimeters (4 inches) deep at maximum. The local clay is extremely dense and hard.

The foundations took the longest time to build.

But the foundations were firm, secure, and level.

When the base was done, two middle-schoolers — ably documented by a peer photographer — finished all the visible parts of the structure in just half an hour.

The next day, after I’d given them a presentation on cognitive development during the teenage years that I realized how nice a metaphor the grill construction was for the training of the brain during adolescence. The extensive pruning and myelination that typifies adolescence establish neural pathways are the foundation for future mental growth.

Good, strong, level foundations are the basis for a rich and fulfilling life.

Good foundations require some effort, but they're worth it.

Control your Destiny: How the Adolescent Brain Works

During your adolescence, which lasts from your early teens into your 20’s, the brain changes rapidly, you develop new abilities and capacities, and the habits of mind and skills you develop will last long into adulthood.

Abilities: The last part of the brain to develop is the Frontal Lobe. It’s responsible for reasoning and judgement — aka Executive Function. So, it’s somewhat understandable that teens often have poor impulse control — their Frontal Lobe (the prefrontal cortex in particular) is still developing.

The parts of the adolescent brain.

However that’s not an excuse. It is essential for adolescents to be held to account, because it’s only by practicing responsibility that they get to learn how to use their Executive thinking skills.

Because that’s how we learn — by practicing.

When we’re learning something new, brain cells, called neurons, reach out and connect to form networks. As we practice and focus on specific things — certain patterns of movement or certain ways of thought — some of the unused connections get pruned away, while others become stronger. The axons that connect the most-used pathways get coated in myelin, which acts as an insulator to make sure signals can pass quickly and efficiently.

Neurons in the brain transmit information to each other along long axons and across the synaptic gap.

By reorganizing the connections between brain cells, the brain learns and becomes better at what you’re practicing. Thus we gradually transition from novices to experts.

However, there is a cost.

Making strong pathways makes for quicker thinking about the things we’ve practiced, but makes our brains somewhat less flexible at learning new things. We develop habits of mind that stay with us for a long time.

Some of those habits we might not actually want to keep; and there’s also the possibility that we might not develop some habits of mind that we really would like to have.

The development of the frontal lobe during adolescence opens a window of opportunity for learning good judgement/executive function, but it does not mean we actually will learn it. We need to actually practice it.

So, if you would like to know yourself, want to be able to control yourself, and, especially, want to shape the future person you will become, then you’re going to have to figure out: which habits of mind you want to be practicing and which ones you don’t.

Media Profanity and Aggression

This research shows that profanity is not harmless. Children exposed to profanity in the media think that such language is ‘normal,’ which may reduce their inhibitions about using profanity themselves. And children who use profanity are more likely to aggress against others.
–Brad Bushman (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.

Exposure to profanity in videogames and on TV appears to affect how teens view and use profanity, and makes them more aggressive. These are the key results of a paper by Sarah Coyne (Coyne et al., 2011). The full article is available online, but is summarized here.

While the first part, at least, of this result might seem obvious — that seeing profanity desensitizes, familiarizes, and leads to increased use — it’s nice to have some scientific corroboration.

The more disturbing result, perhaps, is the link between profanity and aggression. It’s a moderate effect, but the link appears similar to the connection between war games and aggression.

Profanity is kind of like a stepping stone. You don’t go to a movie, hear a bad word, and then go shoot somebody. But when youth both hear and then try profanity out for themselves it can start a downward slide toward more aggressive behavior.
— Sarah Coyne (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.

Adolescents Versus Their Brains

The part of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning is slow to develop compared to the rest during our adolescence. As a result, adolescents are driven way too much by their emotions and instincts. This means that a lot of the time someone else, teachers and parents usually, have to provide that rationality for them, and help them develop those thinking skills for themselves.

That, at least, was my take-home message after reading David Walsh’s excellent book Why Do They Act That Way. He does an excellent job explaining how the brain develops during adolescence, how it affects the way teenagers behave, and some of the best approaches to dealing with it.

There are a lot of excellent details about how brain development interacts with hormones to create many of the behaviors we find typical of teenagers. Since puberty proceeds differently for girls and boys, Walsh also highlights the differences in the timing of development, and the contrasting results of the different hormones released.

Yet, he also recognizes that adolescent behavior is not solely the result of biology. The effects of neurological and hormonal changes are amplified in industrial societies where kids spend less time with parents, and more time with peers, than in non-WIERD cultures (see The Myth of Adolescent Angst) which leads into his approach to dealing with teens.

To address this unfortunate combination of nature and culture, Walsh advocates a structured approach to parenting, where rules are clear, reasonable, and enforced. This, however, needs to be balanced with the need to keep lines of communication open, which is not an easy trick. Teenagers will want to push you away, but it’s necessary to keep connected to them anyway.

He also emphasizes the need for mentoring good behavior and rational thinking, because, as we’ve seen before, while the developing pre-frontal cortex provides the capacity for formal thinking, it needs practice and training to work well. And, after all, two of the key things we ultimately look for in adults are self-control and the ability to think rationally.

This book is an extremely useful read for parents and teachers (though the first chapter is a bit slow for the impatient). It does a great job of explaining how biology affects behavior, and how to deal with them. I particularly like fact that Walsh has found that teens find it useful to know all this biology stuff too, and it affects how they behave.

Variations on a Theme

102. Hipsters - Rotterdam 2008 from Exactitudes.

In seeking their identity, adolescents try out a wide variety of different personas. These are often closely associated with changing appearance and style. What I find interesting is how the different styles increasingly cross cultures and other traditional divides (like race). This is evident in Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek’s photographic series Exactitudes.

There’s something sad about the loss of local cultural uniqueness to globalization; it’s a bit similar to the feeling you get when you hear about another interesting species becoming extinct. Curiously, however, when Versluis and Uyttenbroek tile together photographs of different people from the same subculture striking identical poses, they not only highlight the similarities between very different people, but also the minute variations that individuals employs to make the subgroup’s “uniform” their own.

26. Preppies - Rotterdam 1999 (from Exactitudes). Girls, "... at Montessori school."

All 128 pictures sets are thought provoking and worth a look. I think they would make useful subjects for students to reflect on (though, warning, there is a little nudity in one of the sets).

(via Brain Pickings)

The Myth of Adolescent Angst

Fortunately, we also know from extensive research both in the U.S. and elsewhere that when we treat teens like adults, they almost immediately rise to the challenge.
— Epstein (2007): The Myth of the Teen Brain in Scientific American Mind.

Is the angst and turmoil we usually associate with adolescence just a result of the way human brains develop, or is it something learned, and depends on the society that shapes our kids? Robert Epstein argues (Epstein, 2007) it’s the latter not the former, and, despite a lot of other research to the contrary, he may have a point. He believes the main problem is that western teens are treated more as children than young-adults, and they spend most of their time socializing with other teens and not with adults.

Cerebral Lobes
Cerebral lobes (image via Wikimeida Commons).

Alex Chediak posts a good overview of the work.

We’ve seen that one of the major problems with most psychological studies is that they only focus on WEIRD people, typically represented by college students in the Western world, who are the easiest people for university researchers to study. Using any such subset must, necessarily, be unrepresentative of the full range of human behavior. Furthermore, since society influences brain development, even studies that focus less on behavior and more on neurological imaging are likely to be affected by the some bias.

A similar argument can be made for studies of adolescence since most studies of adolescence focus on western teens. As a result, separating behavior learned via social interaction, from the regularly progression of genetically programmed brain development is going to be difficult.

Much of Epstein’s argument is based on the book Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry (Schlegel and Barry, 1991), which compared teens in almost 200 pre-industrial societies. Epstein summarizes this and other work to indicate that in pre-industrial cultures:

  • about 60 percent had no word for “adolescence,”
  • teens spent almost all their time with adults,
  • teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology
  • antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.
  • teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the intro- duction of certain Western influences, especially Western-style schooling, television programs and movies.

— Epstein (2007) (my bulleting): The Myth of the Teen Brain in Scientific American Mind.

As a result, teens:

learn virtually everything they know from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or irresponsibly.

Apprenticeship (image by Emile Adan via Wikimedia Commons).

Epstein’s antidote is to treat teens like adults. I agree. However, it’s essential to keep in mind what type of adults we want them to be: responsible and logical, while retaining the creativity we usually associate with childhood. This is something that typifies the ideal of Montessori education, all the way from early-childhood up.