Decoding the Teenage Brain

From wearing shorts in winter to procrastinating beyond reason, teenage behavior is puzzling and often infuriating. In this personal essay, one mom tries to crack the mystery of her teen daughter's behavior and offers advice to other parents of adolescents.

The lights in the room are dim, an illustrated cross-section of the brain floats on screen. "Parents of teenagers often act as surrogate frontal lobes," says the speaker, a bald man with wire-rimmed spectacles, pointing to the lateral portion behind the forehead and eye.

He explains that while the amygdala, or primitive brain, is entirely grown, the frontal lobe, which governs higher processing skills such as rational thought, impulse control, and goal setting, is still growing and won't fully gestate until about age 25.

I'd never considered being a frontal lobe part of my job description. Nor, apparently, had the other parents in the packed room at our local library, eager students all, on a quest to learn more about the teenage brain, the topic of today's seminar.

I count on my fingers. In addition to Sophia, my oldest, I have four other children, two preadolescent daughters and two preadolescent sons who will one after the other hit puberty: I'll be acting as an outsourced frontal lobe on the fly, times five, for the next decade.

I came to the lecture because of my growing anxiety over Sophia, now 13. It had become clear to me in recent weeks that parenting a teenager requires a different skill set than parenting a small child. The lecture at the least, I hoped, would help me understand why Sophia had become, in a word, difficult - or in a phrase, a completely different child than the little tutu-wearing girl I used to tuck into pink sheets.

That Was Then

Not long ago, I knew every single one of Sophia's friends; had the same six kids over for tea parties and trick-or-treating. Now, according to her Facebook page, she has 372 friends, only two of whom I recognize among the hundreds of photos Sophia displays on the site. I could spend hours tracking her online activity, but I don't. I have a husband, five children, a career, and a desire to sleep more than three hours a night. Plus, I trust her. Does this make me a bad mother or a crazy one?

The speaker is on slide nine, which shows brain scan results. He explains that if you watch the brains of teenagers while asking them a question such as Would you try to ski down Mount Rushmore?, the switches in their minds would not flick and flash as much as those of an adult being asked the same question. This is because a teenager is thinking, Yeah, I might give it a try, not weighing potential risks, while adults take all the data in and conclude it's not a good idea. 

I boiled this down in my notebook. Did this mean the same teenage boy on skis is the one who will soon be behind the wheel of a car?

This Is Now

The morning after my trip to the library, Sophia came downstairs for school wearing a tank top, short shorts, and Ugg boots. In March. "You can't wear that to school," I said. "Why mom? Why?" she cried. "Because you can't," I said, and she blasted past me, right back upstairs.

Left breathless at the breakfast table, I thought, "What the heck?" I followed her into the girls' bathroom, a room I avoid at all costs; nothing has a cap in there, toothpaste smears the sink, dirty clothes on the floor come so close to the hamper - mere millimeters, really.