NurtureShock (20 page)

For the seventh-graders who started out most bored, “it didn’t seem to make a difference,” said Caldwell. It turns out that
teaching kids not to be bored is really hard—even for the best program in the country.

Why didn’t TimeWise have a stronger effect?

Is it possible that teens are just neurologically prone to boredom?

According to the work of neuroscientist Dr. Adriana Galvan at UCLA, there’s good reason to think so. Inside our brains is
a reward center, involving the nucleus accumbens, which lights up with dopamine whenever we find something exciting or interesting
or pleasurable. In a study comparing the brains of teens to the brains of adults and young kids, Galvan found that teen brains
can’t get pleasure out of doing things that are only mildly or moderately rewarding.

Galvan’s experiment was quite ingenuous. She had kids, teens, and adults play a pirate video game while
inside
an fMRI scanner, with their heads restrained. Their arms were free to push buttons. With each successful turn of the game,
they won some gold—on the screen flashed either a single gold coin, a small stack of coins, or a jackpot pile of gold.

Young kids find any sort of reward thrilling, so their brains lit up the same amount, no matter how much gold they won. Adult
brains lit up according to the size of the reward: single coin, small pleasure response, big pile, big pleasure response.
The teen brains did not light up in response to winning the small or medium reward—in fact, the nucleus accumbens activity
dipped
below
baseline, as if they were crestfallen. Only to the big pile of gold did their reward center light up—and then it
really
lit up, signaling more activity than kids or adults ever showed.

Galvan noted that the response pattern of teen brains is essentially the same response curve of a seasoned drug addict. Their
reward center cannot be stimulated by low doses—they need the big jolt to get pleasure.

But that wasn’t all that Galvan saw happening in teen brains. Their prefrontal cortex seemed to be showing a diminished response
whenever their reward center was experiencing intense excitement. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for weighing risk and
consequences. Explaining this, Galvan said it was as if the pleasure response was “hijacking” the prefrontal cortex. At the
very moment when experiencing an emotionally-charged excitement, the teens’ brain is handicapped in its ability to gauge risk
and foresee consequences.

In abstract situations, teens can evaluate risks just like adults. Given a scenario, they can list the pros and cons, and
they can foresee consequences. But in exciting real life circumstances, this rational part of the brain gets overridden by
the reward center.

All this fits the pattern we see in the real world, where adolescents seem sluggish in literature class, drink like fish on
Saturday nights, and don’t seem to realize it’s a bad idea to put five friends on a golf cart while driving it down a steep
hill with a sharp turn at the bottom.

Not all adolescents are primed like this. Galvan had her subjects fill out questionnaires that assessed how often they participated
in certain risky behaviors in their own lives. She also asked them whether certain risk behaviors sounded like fun—getting
drunk, shooting fireworks, and vandalizing property—or sounded merely dangerous. How they answered the questionnaires matched
their neurological results: those who said risky behavior sounded like fun also had higher spikes in their brain’s reward
center when they won the pile of gold in the pirate video game.

The neuroscience of risk-taking is a very advanced field, but it doesn’t offer many solutions; some teens are wired to take
big risks, done deal. The mechanics of this brain wiring include a reduction in the density of dopamine receptors, which makes
teens unable to enjoy mild rewards, and a simultaneous spurt in oxytocin receptors, which makes them highly attuned to the
opinions of their peers. Surrounded by friends, they’ll take stupid chances, just for the thrill.

If there’s hope in this science, it comes from the few scholars who recognize that teens are only
sometimes
huge risk takers. In fact, there are all sorts of risks that terrify teens
far more
than adults. The risk of asking a girl to a dance, and getting turned down, has frozen millions of boys every year from taking
that chance. Teens are so self-conscious of appearances that they wait until Christmas break to get haircuts. They feel all
eyes are upon them when they raise their hand in class. They think it’s risky to show up at school wearing a new shirt nobody’s
seen before. In many cases, the fear of embarrassment turns teens into weenies.

A series of experiments by Dr. Abigail Baird at Vassar captured this dichotomy perfectly. She put teens in an MRI scanner,
then asked them to decide if certain concepts were a good idea or a bad idea. The good ideas were pleasantly mundane, such
as “eating a salad,” or “walking the dog.” The bad ideas were grisly:

Bite down on a lightbulb

Swallow a cockroach

Light your hair on fire

Jump off a roof

Swim with sharks

When adults took this test, they answered virtually instantaneously. Their brain scans revealed that adults visualized the
concept of biting a lightbulb, and then had an instinctive, physical aversion to that mental image. Areas of the brain that
signal distress and danger lit up, automatically.

When teens took the test, they didn’t answer differently (they didn’t think swallowing a cockroach was a good idea), but it
took them longer to answer. Their brain scans revealed no automatic response, nor any distress; instead, they were weighing
the decision in the cognitive parts of the brain, with deliberation, as if they were momentarily agonizing over what college
to attend. “They were actually
thinking
about it,” Baird laughed. “They weren’t
feeling
it.” They didn’t have painful past experiences to draw upon. Swimming with sharks simply didn’t scare them.

How many times have parents said to their teens, “Why did you have to try it? Didn’t you know it was a bad idea?!” Actually,
the teen brain can think abstractly, but not
feel
abstractly—at least not until it’s had more life experience to draw on. And
feeling
like it’s a bad idea is what it would take to stop oneself from doing it.

But then Baird put some teens through another experiment. The video screen inside the MRI scanner showed a web site that was
polling local teens on their opinions and tastes. The subjects created a pseudonymous user name and password to log in. They
were told that they were online with other teens in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. The poll questions were unremarkable—what
style of music they liked, whether they thought Paris Hilton was cool, what local stores they shopped at. After each question,
one teen’s answer (and user name) would randomly display to all.

As they worked through the poll, the teens in Baird’s lab did not have their answers displayed to others. In fact, there were
no other teens taking the poll—that was just the pretense to scare them. And scare them it did. Just the mere
possibility
of having their preferences displayed to this imaginary audience vibrantly lit up the regions of the brain that signal distress
and danger.

That’s the teen brain at fifteen in a nutshell—fearless to jumping off roofs, but terrified of having its love of Nickelback
exposed. Might there be a way to harness the latter to minimize the former?

In the dictionary, the antonym of honesty is lying, and the opposite of arguing is agreement. But in the minds of teenagers,
that’s not how it works. Really, to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying.

That’s cryptic, so let me unpack what I mean.

When Nancy Darling’s researchers interviewed the teenagers from State College Area High School, they also asked the teens
when and why they told the truth to their parents about things they knew their parents disapproved of. Occasionally teens
told the truth because they knew a lie wouldn’t fly—they’d be caught. Sometimes they told the truth because they just felt
obligated, saying, “They’re my parents, I’m supposed to tell them.” But the main motivation that emerged was that teens told
their parents the truth in hopes their parents might give in, and say it was okay. Usually, this meant an argument ensued,
but it was worth it if their parents might budge.

For the average Pennsylvania teen, they told the truth only about four areas of conflict. Meaning (since they lied about twelve
areas), they were three times more likely to lie than to attempt a protest.

In the families where there was less deception, there was a much higher ratio of arguing/complaining. Arguing was good—arguing
was honesty. The parents didn’t necessarily realize this. The arguing stressed them out.

Darling found this same pattern when she compared her results in the United States against companion studies replicated in
the Philippines. She fully expected to see less arguing in the average Filipino home than in an American home. In the Philippines,
family members are supposed to preserve harmony, not foment conflict; also, young people are not supposed to challenge their
parents—because they are taught to believe that they owe parents a debt that can never be repaid. “A good child in the Philippines
is supposed to be obedient, so because of that, we didn’t think they would argue. We thought they would avoid discussion.
But they had the highest rates of conflict. It was completely antithetical to our predictions.”

It took further analysis for Darling to understand this counterintuitive result. The Filipino teens were fighting their parents
over the rules, but not over the authority of the parents to set rules. While they might have felt the rules were too restrictive,
they were far more likely to abide the rules. In American families, the teens didn’t bother to argue. Instead, they just pretended
to go along with their parents’ wishes, but then they did what they wanted to do anyway.

Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, are ultimately a sign of respect—not of disrespect.

University of Rochester’s Dr. Judith Smetana, a leader in the study of teen disclosure, confirms that, over the long term,
“moderate conflict with parents [during adolescence] is associated with better adjustment than either no-conflict or frequent
conflict.”

Most parents don’t make this distinction in how they perceive their arguments with their children. Dr. Tabitha Holmes studied
over fifty sets of mothers and their teen daughters. Her sample was drawn from families in a program called Upward Bound,
funded by the U.S. Department of Education to give high-schoolers from low income families a chance at attending college.
The mothers had aspirations for their daughters and were quite protective of them—often by demanding obedience. Holmes did
extensive interviews asking both mother and daughter, separately, to describe their arguments and how they felt about them.
And there was a big difference.

Holmes found that 46% of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to the relationship. Being challenged was
stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights
were, the more the mom rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23% of the daughters felt that their arguments were destructive.
Far more believed that fighting
strengthened
their relationship with their mother. “Their perception of the fighting was really sophisticated, far more than we anticipated
for teenagers,” noted Holmes. “They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their
mother’s point of view be articulated.”

What most surprised Holmes was learning that for the teen daughters, fighting more often, or having bigger fights, did not
cause the teens to rate the fighting as harmful and destructive. Statistically, it made no difference at all. “Certainly,
there is a point in families where there is too much conflict. But we didn’t have anybody in our study with an extreme amount
of conflict.” Instead, the variable that seemed to matter most was how the arguments were resolved. Essentially, the daughter
needed to feel heard, and when reasonable, their mother needed to budge. The daughter had to win some arguments, and get small
concessions as a result of others.

Daughters who rated arguing as destructive had parents who stonewalled, rather than collaborated. The daughters heard “Don’t
argue with me!” before even uttering a word. “Even the tiniest of concessions made them feel it was resolved okay,” Holmes
said. “One daughter told of wanting a tattoo. Her mom forbade it, but allowed the girl to buy a pair of crazy shoes that the
mom had previously denied her.”

“Parents who negotiate ultimately appear to be more informed,” according to Dr. Robert Laird, a professor at the University
of New Orleans. “Parents with unbending, strict guidelines make it a tactical issue for kids to find a way around them.”