If you are the parent of an adolescent, you need to be familiar with one fact about the teenage brain. Jay N. Giedd, of the National Institute of Mental Health says, in an article, Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Adolescent Brain

The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early 20s.

Here’s my version: The CEO of the brain, the part that controls impulses, plans and holds to a course of action, helps us anticipate consequences, and in general helps us “act like adults” isn’t fully developed until well after the teen years.

Here’s Jay Giedd again:

The frontal lobe is often called the CEO, or the executive of the brain. It’s involved in things like planning and strategizing and organizing, initiating attention and stopping and starting and shifting attention. It’s a part of the brain that most separates man from beast, if you will. That is the part of the brain that has changed most in our human evolution, and a part of the brain that allows us to conduct philosophy and to think about thinking and to think about our place in the universe. …
I think that [in the teen years, this] part of the brain that is helping organization, planning and strategizing is not done being built yet … [It’s] not that the teens are stupid or incapable of [things]. It’s sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision making before their brain is finished being built. …

Although I want to focus the frontal lobe aspects of Dr. Giedd’s work, his conclusions are far reaching and sometimes enormously optimistic. Here’s an article that embeds the frontal-lobe thread in his more general work with the non-adult features of the adolescent brain. And here’s the always-excellent Sharon Begley, also in the larger context: Getting Inside a Teen Brain

This research gives us the most important new knowledge about the teen brain since I was a teen myself, just before the last mastodon kicked off. In my next post, I want to talk about how I use this new knowledge in my own practice. Then, I want to comment on an article about “helicopter parents” that appeared last week.