Why Does Growing Up Have To Suck? Part 1

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to know what makes people tick. I like to people watch, and try to figure out what kind of person they are. I often wonder what is going on in people’s heads. Yes I probably should have been a shrink. I did consider biblical counselling at one time, but decided it just wasn’t my nature to try to juggle work and school. So now I research things as the need arises. Last weekend brought about one of those needs.
My thirteen year old son had one of his first traumatic adolescent experiences. Without embarrassing him by publishing his life on the internet, lets just say it revolved around a girl. As I’m sure we can all relate, relationships are among hardest things to figure out. The phrase that comes to mind is “can’t live with them can’t live without them.” Male or female, I’m sure you’ve thought that at some point. I am so thankful my son has music as a way to vent. Song writers are probably the ones we hear about most that tell about their lives. They tell their stories in their music. His mother and I encouraged him to write a song about what happened, and were willing to accept anything he wrote, and any language he used. I don’t believe you should censor someone who is trying to come to terms with their feelings. I mean let’s face it, sometimes “gosh darn it” just doesn’t cut it.
Well, since I haven’t been able to get this out of my head all week, I decided to do a little research on adolescents and why does growing up have to suck so bad. I found a web site called act for youth. Here is the actual article I found. www.actforyouth.net/resources/rf/rf_brain_0502.pdf I don’t know if anyone will ever be able to answer that question, but hopefully we’ll be able to find some answers, and help ease our kids’ pain a little.
We’ll break the article down a little at a time. Understanding that this article was written ten years ago, I haven’t seen anything more current in my search.
When we adopted our children, and thinking that there could be some issues we would have to deal with, it was interesting to learn how a baby’s brain develops. There is so much stimulation it needs during the first few years to get everything wired correctly. Now this article says that the National Institute Of Mental Health has found through MRI’s, the brain of teenagers is still a work in progress. They used to think that the wiring of the brain was finished by three or four years old, and fully mature by ten or twelve. Their new findings(ten years ago)show that the greatest changes to the parts of the brain that are responsible for self control, judgement, emotions and organization, occur between puberty and adulthood. I guess this explains why we see teenagers making some very poor decisions. Their wiring is still trying to connect.
So the next time our teenagers make a wrong decision, or freak out over a friend or relationship in trouble, just remember, it’s not that they have a screw loose, it is probably a loose, or unconnected wire. With a little guidance, hopefully we can get those wires connected properly. That doesn’t mean they still aren’t going to be mad at us, because this wiring process also controls the emotional outburst part of the brain.
That was just the first paragraph of the article. We’ll look at more later, but I think this is a very interesting start.
Thanks for being brave enough to delve in the teenage brain with me.
Paul