What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views
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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
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The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
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The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
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"In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)