What are we doing
to our kids?

So do we understand them? Obviously not!

What we understand as fact about our very own children may be completely wrong and not only confusing our teens, but making them worse. As a teen, you are bombarded by everything and everyone that conveys to you that you are not ready — ready to drink, ready to drive, ready to have sex, ready for responsibility, ready for life. Adults say that even though you feel you are ready, you are not, and that is just fact. So teens are caught in this limbo of life. You feel invincible, ready to take everything on and experience what life has to offer, and then bam! You are faced with extreme opposition from society — “you’re not ready!”, they say.

So, are they, or are they not ready? We have seen brain imaging showing that the adolescent brain processes information differently than adults, and this is proof that the teen brain is not fully developed. People think, “Well, there it is; there is the proof of why teens are so crazy and tumultuous.” But, we may be misled by our interpretations of this “evidence.” And this misinformation could be causing a nation-wide epidemic of teen turmoil.

Before we go down the road of why it’s wrong, let’s look at some common logic. The current well known theory is that teens are distressed because their brains are still forming. In the early 1900’s, a theory was developed that described the teen brain as a stage of development that mimicked the primitive, savage evolutionary period of human existence. So, this was used to conveniently explain why 18 is the most common age for most crimes, yet even younger for arson and vandalism. Robert Epstein, the author of “The Myth of the Teen Brain” in Scientific American Mind, May 2007, raised a great question. If this stage of development is universal, as the long lasting theory declares, then we should see this “teen turmoil” across the globe. So do we?

No, we don’t. Alice Schlegel, an anthropologist from the University of Arizona, and Herbert Barry of the University of Pittsburgh searched for the answer to this very question. What they found out is that 60% of pre-industrial societies had no word for adolescence. The teens of these societies spent nearly all their time with adults and very little time with others their age. 50% of these societies had a complete absence of adolescent antisocial behavior and psychopathology, and the other 50% had extremely mild problems with their teenagers.

What else is interesting is how there is a direct correlation between teen turmoil and industrialization. Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Harvard University have studied this correlation and derived the suggestion that as a nation becomes more “Westernized” with western style schools, TV and movies, teens turn more away from their adult counterparts and build a stronger relationships with kids their own age. Unfortunately, this “Western-style” society is opposing most of recorded human history.

Adolescent rebellious behavior may be a cultural creation.

Historians have noted that the teen years were mostly a peaceful time while humans transition from childhood to adulthood. “Teens were not trying to break away from adults; rather they were learning to become adults.” If indeed the teenage years were as tumultuous as they are now, then we, homo sapiens, probably would not have been as successful as we have been for the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence.

In our distant past, teens bore quite a bit of the social responsibility. Reproduction (since child birth was very dangerous, and sexual arousal is highest in teenage years), simple hunting (because of natural strength, agility, endurance and visual acuteness), assisting in gathering (young teens helped their mothers or grandmothers), and building (putting up of living structures and tearing down in case of moving) were all known to be done by adolescents because that is the age when humans were known to be the most physically and mentally “fit”. Since tribes or primitive societies relied on their young to help continue their survival, I doubt humans would be around to this day if it wasn’t for teens being so valuable.

This should paint a very contrasting portrait of how we perceive our teens today. Did our teens change, or did our treatment of teens change? All this should tell us that we very well could be behind the creation of the adolescent anti-social criminal of today. If you think about it, teens have 10 times as many laws restricting their lives, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons. So, what is this telling our youth? What message are we sending to teens? Are we telling them that they are not to be trusted; they are not to be given freedom; they are a danger to society? Maybe we are inadvertently, predetermining their destiny by shaping and molding how they think about themselves.

Research has been conducted at the California School of Professional Psychology on this very subject, and what they found out is there is a “positive correlation between the extent to which teens are infantilized and the extent to which they display singes of psychopathology.” Bottom line, the “teen turmoil” that we all believe to be inevitable is nothing more than a modern creation from our current society… period!




So what is the truth about our young adults? Robert Epstein and Diane Dumas wanted to find out, so they did some tests on our teens. What they found out is teenagers are just as competent or virtually as competent as their older counterparts in many abilities. Many other studies have shown teenagers have better scores with “incidental memory” — the memory that you acquire with no mnemonic effort — reactiveness and visual acuity. These can be very beneficial while performing tasks that are normally assigned to adults.

Within all teenagers may be some type of biological clock telling them they are ready to take on the world, but as long as we continue to tell them they are not, we could be creating a ticking time bomb within them all. This could be creating the inner conflict that we are so used to seeing within our teens. Then when we take these troubled teens, isolate them from adults, treat them like children and restrict their behaviors, what do we expect? Here is what Scientific American Mind says about this conundrum:

Today, with teens trapped in the frivolous world of peer culture, they 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. Almost without exception, the reckless and irresponsible behavior we see is the teen’s way of declaring his or her adulthood or, through pregnancy or the commission of a serious crime, of instantly becoming an adult under the law.

To correct this modern trap that we place our adolescents in, we need to rid ourselves of the myth of the immature teen brain and replace it with the vision of the mature, capable people that they are. There has been extensive studies proving that teens, when treated like adults, will naturally rise to meet the challenge. Let’s allow our teens to explore their true potential, instead of censoring or sheltering them from adulthood. If done correctly, we might be able to heal our societal ills created by the “teen turmoil”.