{"id":93293,"date":"2015-09-03T04:47:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T04:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=93293"},"modified":"2015-09-04T04:29:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T04:29:23","slug":"what-are-they-thinking-aaron-white-scott-swartzwelder-w-w-norton-2013","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=93293","title":{"rendered":"What Are They Thinking?! Aaron White, Scott Swartzwelder, W.W. Norton, 2013."},"content":{"rendered":"

What Are They Thinking?! <\/a><\/em> Aaron White, Scott Swartzwelder, W.W. Norton, 2013.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Teenage Brain<\/a><\/em>. Frances E. Jensen, Amy Ellis Nutt, HarperCollins, 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most books on the \u201cteen brain\u201d and \u201cparenting teens\u201d disturb me a lot. I can see why they\u2019re popular. They soothe and flatter adults, positively stereotyping parents as aggrieved, innocent, and healthy, whose \u201cmature\u201d brains are exasperated and often frightened by the troubles inflicted on them by their teens. Teenagers are\u00a0negatively stereotyped as scary, risky, obnoxious (with a few redeeming qualities), characterized by \u201crecklessness, rudeness, and cluelessness<\/a>,\u201d and subjecting parents and teachers to \u201coutburst(s) of anger, tears, poutiness, withdrawal, irritability, even hostility<\/a>\u201d every day<\/em>!<\/p>\n

I worked with adolescents for 10 years on a daily basis and researched youth and adult behaviors for 25 years. My shocking conclusion from both experiences: Teens are individuals, not cutouts<\/strong>. Generalizations and quips teen-brain authors dispense\u00a0reveal their own simplistic thinking and bigotry, not\u00a0what teenagers are “really like.”<\/p>\n

These books feature standard reviews of selected studies (omitting more unsettling research), rampant miscitation of statistics, and vastly premature claims about brain science they admit is \u201cpoorly understood<\/a>.\u201d I picked these two books as\u00a0more recent, popular, and\u00a0representative of the genre.<\/p>\n

Blunt question for PhD-, MD-, and psychologist-authors unburdening on the \u201cteenage brain:\u201d Why is it okay to lie about adolescents?<\/em><\/strong> I don\u2019t mean small lies; I mean huge, wholesale fabrications that would destroy the entire basis of these teen-brain-risk books if acknowledged.<\/p>\n

The fact is: teenagers are NOT \u201chigh-risk.\u201d Teens are SAFER from suicide, homicide, accidents, drug and alcohol deaths, gun deaths, and other measures of immature risk-taking these authors use than EVERY age of older adults, and have been for decades.<\/p>\n

To understand how youthful troubles are generated not by their brain deficiencies, but by difficult conditions imposed on them, consider violent death rates <\/a>tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control<\/a> in the most recent year for teens at the highest-risk ages (15-19) versus adults of ages to be their parents (say, 40-59).<\/p>\n

For non-Hispanic Whites (who generally are middle-class or more affluent), middle-aged parents are 2.1 times more likely to be murdered, 2.4 times more likely to commit suicide, 2.5 times more likely than their teen to die in an accident, 2.7 times more likely to die from guns, 6.9 times more likely to die from illicit-drug abuse, 9.2 times more likely to die from an alcohol overdose, and equally likely to die in a car crash. Overall, White middle-agers are 2.5 times more likely than White teens even at their riskiest adolescent ages to die from risky behaviors. (Sound incredible? Check our tabulation <\/a>or to the CDC\u2019s WISQARS page<\/a> and check yourself.)<\/p>\n

In contrast, African Americans teenagers, our poorest demographic, are twice as likely to be murdered and to die by guns than their parents \u2013 but overall, their parents are still 1.4 times more likely to die from violent causes than teens, including 17 times more likely to die by illicit drugs. Hispanics are in between those of Whites and African Americans.<\/p>\n

The problem is, someone 50 or 100 years ago invented the notion<\/a> that teens are a dangerous age compared to adults, and authorities have been parroting that myth ever since. The fact is, teenagers are not \u201crisky,\u201d but the stresses of poverty create risks, which are then selectively blamed on teens.<\/p>\n

Strangely, the much higher parent-age risk appears to derive not from poverty, but from risky behavior choices with drugs, guns, alcohol, etc., of exactly the types we blame on adolescents. The real risk patterns are a shock, give, how many places \u2013 practically every page \u2013 these authors praise adult-brain superiority, including \u201cdeveloped frontal lobes<\/a>\u201d that enable learning from mistakes, a larger perspective that deters suicide, and \u201creasoned\u201d and \u201dsensible<\/a>\u201d planning to avoid danger.<\/p>\n

High-risk youth also are often abused; 250,000 youths under age 18 are substantiated victims of violent, sexual, and\/or severe psychological abuses<\/a> in their homes every year, nearly all inflicted by parents. So, how much attention do the \u201cteen brain\u201d books allocate to the most important issues: poverty, abuse, and risk-taking parents? Just about none; a few offhand phrases to a couple of pages. However, authors are eager to blame media, the internet, and video games, and especially the \u201cundeveloped frontal lobes\u201d and \u201cdopamine excess<\/a>\u201d that supposedly drive teens to trouble. And while they publicly detail their kids\u2019 problems in negative terms for readers, these authors are curiously unwilling to critically examine their own troubles (i.e., Jensen\u2019s divorce<\/a>).<\/p>\n

These authors\u2019 faulty theory that the \u201cteenage brain\u201d promotes risk rests in the false assumption that teenagers act in singularly risky ways. This compounded illogic leads to another myth: that the adult brain is \u201cdeveloped.\u201d Brain development occurs throughout life. The middle-aged brain<\/a>, for example, experiences loss of memory and learning genes and cognitive capacity. These changes may contribute to middle-agers\u2019 vulnerability to blanket stereotyping, nostalgic fantasies, irrational fear of anything new, and inexplicably high-risk behaviors at a time when they enjoy life\u2019s highest economic and social advantages<\/a>. And to conflicts with teens.<\/p>\n

In short, these books indulge dangerous, feel-good escapism packed with images of teens not as individuals, but as \u201cirrational, impulsive, and wrongheaded<\/a>\u201d metaphors: selective statistics (often wrong) and studies claiming adolescents are \u201cdifferent\u201d from adults; and failure to include the huge body of literature showing youths and adults in similar locales and circumstances behave very much alike.<\/p>\n

I think we have two choices. We can continue, as these authors do, to indulge the \u201cfun\u201d course smugly praising our grownup brains as mature and parents and professionals as near-perfect in every way, and teens as merely victims of their immature, dopamine-driven adolescent brains, danger-hyping peers, and corrupting popular culture. Or, we can switch to the humbler, realistic, \u201cno fun\u201d course incorporating the real world teenagers actually experience, including grownups and parents acting in inexplicably troubling ways and poverty and family abuses as the main drivers of risky youth behaviors. Do we grownups value having fun with self-flattery more than the well-being of our society\u2019s young people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Are They Thinking?! Aaron White, Scott Swartzwelder, W.W. Norton, 2013. The Teenage Brain. Frances E. Jensen, Amy Ellis Nutt, HarperCollins, 2015 Most books on the \u201cteen brain\u201d and \u201cparenting teens\u201d disturb me a lot. I can see why they\u2019re popular. They soothe and flatter adults, positively stereotyping parents as aggrieved, innocent, and healthy, whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-93293","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93293"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93768,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93293\/revisions\/93768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}