Why do teens do that stuff?
Parents of teenagers are already their kids’ chefs and bank tellers. Now there’s another job to add to the list. “You need to be your kid’s frontal lobe, because they don’t have one,” says Karen Holler, a pediatric neuropsychologist at Butler Hospital, in Providence. OK, she’s exaggerating. All human brains contain a frontal lobe, the part that controls problem solving and judgment, but researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health have found that it’s not fully developed until people reach their late teens or early 20s. That means teenagers are making decisions about drinking, sex, drugs and driving, among other things, with an ill-equipped brain. They’re making these decisions, Holler says, based on emotion instead of reason. “It helps explain so much risk-taking behavior,” says psychiatrist Dr. Charles Staunton, associate medical director for Child and Adolescent Services at Butler Hospital. So, what’s a parent to do? Don’t treat teenagers as if they’re adults, Holler advis
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