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asks and answers the question in every parent's mind, why are teenagers
reckless? It's due to how the teen brain interprets risks and rewards:
Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship.
What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. In a recent study by the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, teenagers did a simulated high-risk driving task while they were lying in an fMRI brain-imaging machine. The reward system of their brains lighted up much more when they thought another teenager was watching what they did—and they took more risks.
Link (Image: Harry Campbell)
Photo: George Skadding/LIFE Archives
Ah, the life of a teenager. Long before the era of Facebook, texting, and clubbing, there's the hopping soda shop scene. LIFE photographer George Skadding documented the lives of Iowa high school teenagers in the late '40s. Gosh darn it! They're so wholesome!
From Teenagster:
... when I saw these LIFE Magazine photos of teen life in Des Moines, Iowa in 1947, I was pleasantly surprised to see cute sweater sets, co-ed mingling (in cars!), slumber parties and even spin the bottle. (Granted, Des Moines is “the city” in Iowa, so, there ya go.) I stand corrected! That soda shop is bumpin’.
Remember
your first time driving? For most Americans, nothing symbolizes freedom
more than the open road. But that's changing: for more and more teenagers,
freedom doesn't mean a fast car. It means a fast Internet:
If Ferris Bueller had a day off now, would he spend it on Facebook?
Recent research suggests many young Americans prefer to spend their money and time chatting to their friends online, as opposed to the more traditional pastime of cruising around in cars. [...]
But with money tight in many households, and the cost of gas and insurance soaring, some youngsters are having to choose between buying a car and owning the latest smartphone or tablet.
In a survey to be published later this year by Gartner, 46% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would choose internet access over owning their own car. The figure is 15% among the baby boom generation, the people that grew up in the 1950s and 60s - seen as the golden age of American motoring.
Are you bullied in high school because you’re a geek? Don’t worry, it gets better.
Many popular students approach graduation day with bittersweet nostalgia: excitement for the future is tempered by fear of lost status. But as cap-and-gown season nears, let’s also stop to consider the outcasts, students for whom finishing high school feels like liberation from a state-imposed sentence.
In seven years of reporting from American middle and high schools, I’ve seen repeatedly that the differences that cause a student to be excluded in high school are often the same traits or skills that will serve him or her well after graduation.
Examples abound: Taylor Swift’s classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music. Last year, the Grammy winner was the nation’s top-selling recording artist.
Students mocked Tim Gunn’s love of making things; now he is a fashion icon with the recognizable catchphrase "Make it work."
J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has described herself as a bullied child "who lived mostly in books and daydreams." It’s no wonder she went on to write books populated with kids she describes as "outcasts and comfortable with being so."
(Yes, the title is inspired from the It Gets Better Project, which lets LGBT kids and teens know that things will get better … if they can just get through their teen years. Here’s a fascinating story about the project over at NPR)
Quick: who do you think are "on call" all day and all night? If you say emergency room physicians, you’re only half right: nowadays, there are teenagers that stay up all night answering "emergency texts."
Brookline 10th-grader Ashley Olafsson sleeps with her cellphone under her pillow so she doesn’t miss “emergency’’ texts — “like if a friend broke up with her boyfriend.’’ Stephanie Kimball of Waltham, 14, is also available for urgent overnight correspondence, such as, “Hey, seeing if you’re awake.’’ Dedham ninth-grader Courtney Johnson gets as many as 100 texts while in bed. “I just don’t feel like myself if I don’t have my phone near me or I’m not on it,’’ she said.
Sure, all that middle-of-the-night communication leaves them tired, but as Olafsson explained, “It’s impolite not to respond if someone is coming to you with their problems.’’
With teenagers sending and receiving an average of 3,276 texts per month in the last quarter of 2010, according to the most recent statistics from the Nielsen Co., it’s no wonder that Michael Rich, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center on Media and Child Health, is starting to see young patients who come in exhausted by being “on call’’ or semi-alert all night as they wait for their phones to vibrate or ring with a text.
He and his patients’ parents were initially baffled by the children’s increased sleepiness because bedtimes hadn’t changed, he said. “Who would think to ask a kid, ‘Do you sleep with your phone under your pillow?’ To us, it sounds like torture.’’
Yes, that’s right: the average teenagers send and receive 3,276 texts per month! Link
Forget "homeschooling" – that idea is so passé. Here comes "unschooling":
The Biegler children live as though school doesn’t exist.
They’re at home all day, but they’re not being homeschooled. They’re being "unschooled." There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.
What’s more, that hands-off approach extends to other areas of the children’s lives: They make their own decisions, and don’t have chores or rules.
Christine Yablonski and Phil Biegler of Westford, Mass., are self-described "radical unschoolers." They allow their teen daughter and son to decide what they want to learn, and when they want to learn it.
"They key there is that you’ve got to trust your kids to … find their own interests," Yablonski told "Good Morning America."
Yablonski described unschooling as "living your life as if the school system didn’t exist."
Juju Chang of Good Morning America has more on this unusual approach to educamacation: Link
Why are many teenagers night owls? New findings by Mariana G. Figueiro, a sleep researcher (apparently, there is such a job) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, show that it’s the lack of morning light:
Riding in school buses in the early morning, then sitting in poorly lighted classrooms are the main reasons students have trouble getting to sleep at night, according to new research.
Teenagers, like everyone else, need bright lights in the morning, particularly in the blue wavelengths, to synchronize their inner, circadian rhythms with nature’s cycles of day and night.
If they are deprived of blue light during the morning, they go to sleep an average of six minutes later each night, until their bodies are completely out of sync with the school day, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reported Tuesday in the journal Neuroendocrinology Letters.
The finding was made by fitting a group of students with goggles that blocked blue light and discovering that their circadian rhythms were significantly affected.
Before you download the next pop hit from iTunes, check whether it is hazardous to your health. A teen panel working with the Boston Public Health Commission has set up a "nutrition facts label" rating (like that seen on food items) for songs:
“Music, like food, can feed our brains and give us energy,” said Casey Corcoran, director of the Commission’s Start Strong Initiative. “But songs can affect our health and the health of our relationships.”
The tool, patterned after common food nutritional labels, invites consumers to become song lyric nutritionists by helping them identify relationship ingredients that make up a song. Using printed song lyrics as a guide, users can tally the number of healthy relationship themes, such as respect, equality, and trust, which are present in the song. And, like fattening calories, unhealthy relationship themes – possession, disrespect, and manipulation – are also counted. The number of times these themes are mentioned also factor into to the song’s total nutritional value. Corcoran recommends consuming lots of ‘healthy relationship’ ingredients for a balanced media diet.
The model was developed by 14 peer leaders in the Commission’s Start Strong Initiative. The teens, who range in age from 15 to 19 years old, attended a seven-week "Healthy Relationship Institute” where they were trained in teen dating violence prevention and healthy relationship promotion. They also learned to look at media critically, breaking it down to better understand the healthy or unhealthy relationship messages it may contain, such as power, control, equality, and gender roles.
“It’s important to have youth involved in this effort because teenagers are the main audience of the music,” said peer leader Shaquilla Terry, age 15 of Boston. “It’s important to actually listen to and think about the lyrics of a song and not just the beat.”
And which songs are (mentally) bad and good for you? Here are the Top 10 lists:
Top 10 Songs with UNHEALTHY Relationship Ingredients (2009)
| Song | Artist | Score 0-50 |
| 1. Break Up (feat. Gucci Mane and Sean Garrett) | Mario | 45 |
| 2. Blame It (feat. T-Pain) | Jamie Foxx | 32 |
| 3. Paparazzi | Lady Gaga | 27 |
| 4. You're a Jerk | New Boyz | 26 |
| 5. Baby By Me | 50 Cent | 25 |
| 6. Best I Ever | Drake | 24 |
| 7. One More Drink (feat. T-Pain) | Ludacris | 23 |
| 8. Be On You (feat. Ne-Yo) | Flo Rida | 22 |
| 9. Hotel Room Service | Pitbull | 21.5 |
| 10. Bad Romance | Lady Gaga | 20 |
Top 10 Songs with HEALTHY Relationship Ingredients (2009)
| Song | Artist | Score 0-50 |
| 1. One Time | Justin Bieber | 40 |
| 2. Miss Independent | Ne-Yo | 30 |
| 3. Replay | Iyaz | 25.5 |
| 4. Say Hay | Michael Franti | 25 |
| 5. Knock You Down | Keri Hilson feat. Kanye West | 21 |
| 6. Only You Can Love Me This Way | Keith Urban | 20 |
| 7. Her Diamonds | Rob Thomas | 19 |
| 8. I'm Yours | Jason Mraz | 18 |
| 9. Fallin For You | Colbie Caillat | 16 |
| 10. Meet Me Halfway | Black Eyed PEas | 15 |
Official press release at the BPHC: Link
It’s common sense to think that teenage recklessness come from their immaturity – but could the opposite actually be true?
A team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University conducted a study with the paradoxical result – the more mature the teenager’s brain, the more reckless they become:
In a paper just published in PLoS ONE — a journal of the Public Library of Science — a team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta shows that adolescents who engage in more dangerous activities have white-matter pathways that appear more mature than those of risk-averse youths. White matter is essentially the brain’s wiring — the neural strands that connect the various gray-matter regions, where the actual nerve cells reside, that are otherwise independent of one another. Maturation of white matter is important because it increases the brain’s processing speed; nerve impulses travel faster in mature white matter.
Berns and his colleagues recruited 91 kids ages 12 to 18 and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their tendency to engage in behaviors such as driving without a license, having unprotected sex and using drugs. Then they had the kids undergo a relatively new kind of brain scan called diffusion tensor imaging, a type of magnetic resonance imaging that is used to look at dense tissues like white matter. After analyzing the scans, the authors found a strong correlation between how risky the students described their behavior to be and how sophisticated their white matter was. The more mature the look of the brain, the more risk-taking the teenager tended to report.
John Cloud of Time Magazine has the story: Link
