Good Life Project - Those Angsty Teen Years (and why they still control you)

Episode Date: October 9, 2014

Ever wonder why everything that happened during your teens has stayed with you for so long? And, for many, continues to control you to this day?In today's episode of Good Life Project, I'm sharing a fascinating conversation with acclaimed professor and adolescence expert, Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D..We're talking about what new brain research is showing us about the "care and feeding" of the adolescent brain, and what parents, schools and society can do about it.We'll also explore why, years after adolescence, it seems to keep such a tight grip on how we interact with the world.Adolescence, also know as “the oy vey years” is not a time most families look forward to. But what if almost everything you thought about those angsty teen years was wrong? What if the rules we laid down as parents, teachers and people who supposedly “knew better” were actually doing more harm than good?Well, it turns out, that just might be the case. New research on the adolescent brain seems be turning everything we thought we knew about the care and handling of young adults on its head. And, it’s also exposing something else. Something that juuuuust might terrify a parent or two.Adolescence is now twice as long as it used to be, starting at around 10, and continuing to almost 25 years old. Which is really important, because until it ends, you’re impulsive hedonistic desires are on overdrive, but the part of your brain that stops you from doing stupid things hasn’t really developed enough to keep you safe.So, how do you handle that? How do you create a world that lets kids take the risks needed to rock adulthood without destroying their futures, and maybe themselves along the way?And how do you take a part of life most families look at as a battle to be survived and turn it into something to be exalted and enjoyed?That’s what we’re talking about on today’s episode with my guest, Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D. He’s one of the world's leading experts on adolescence, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Temple University, the author of more than 350 articles and essays on development during the teenage years, and the author or editor of 17 books including his new one, The Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. In other words, when it comes to angsty adolescents, Larry knows his stuff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If all you care about is whether your kid can get into Stanford, and therefore what you care about is not necessarily what your child learns, but whether your child gets all A's, then you maybe don't want the teacher to be too demanding. You want the teacher to teach your child enough, but not so much that your child doesn't get perfect grades. So I think this whole thing turns into this terrible cycle. Adolescence, also known as the Oy Vey years, isn't really a time that most families look forward to.

But what if almost everything you thought about those angsty teen years was wrong? What if the rules we laid down as parents, as teachers, and people who supposedly knew better were actually doing more harm than good? Well, it turns out that just might be the case. New research on the adolescent brain seems to be turning everything we thought we knew about the care and handling of young adults on its head. And it's also exposing something else, something that just might be a little bit terrifying for a parent or two. Adolescence is now twice as long as it used to be, starting at around 10 and continuing to almost 25 years old, which is really important because until it ends, your impulsive hedonistic desires are on overdrive.

But the part of your brain that stops you from doing stupid things hasn't really developed enough to keep you safe. So how do you handle that? How do you create a world that lets kids take the risks that they need to, you know, to rock adulthood without destroying their futures and maybe even themselves along the way? And how do you take a part of life that most families look at as a battle to be survived and turn it into something to be exalted and even enjoyed? Well, that's what we're talking about on today's episode. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. My guest today is Professor Lauren Steinberg. So he's one of the world's leading experts on adolescence, a distinguished professor of psychology at Temple University. He's the author of more than 350

articles and essays on development during the teenage years and the author and editor of 17 books, including his new one, The Age of Opportunity, Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. Put another way, when it comes to angsty adolescents, Larry knows his stuff. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? So much of who we are as adults is set during adolescence.

A lot of the ways that we think of ourselves, even if our lives have changed, are really grounded in those memories from adolescence. And one phenomenon that I'm really interested in is called the reminiscence bump. And so if you ask people to recall memories of things that have happened to them, people can recall things more from adolescence than any other point in development. It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon. Even though people had thought that maybe it was because of the sorts of things that happened during adolescence,

your first love and your first job and your first beer and maybe the first time you lived away from home, it turns out not to be the explanation. Because even mundane things are recalled better from adolescence than they are from other times. So what's behind that? I think it's the adolescent brain. I think that the recording device in the adolescent brain

is set to a higher level of sensitivity. And it's part of, it's a reflection of the, I think, the fact that the adolescent brain is so sensitive to the environment and that people are not even deliberately paying close attention to what's going on in their world. And I think that it's a hardwired, it's a hardwired evolutionarily adaptive feature of adolescence. Because it also turns out it's not just personal events. People remember what they read. They remember the music that they listened to. They remember the movies that they saw.

They even remember the news stories that they were exposed to during adolescence more than those from other periods of time. At least from the outside looking in, from my memory, there was a pretty deeply emotional time. And from the little research that I've done on this, the memories are imprinted more strongly when they're connected with some sort of deep emotion. But then what you were saying, which is that even the more mundane things,

unless there's sort of this umbrella of just a more highly aroused emotional state that just persists, maybe that's in some way involved. Well, we know that the brain systems that are responsible for our experience of emotions are more easily aroused during adolescence than they are at other points in time. So it's not so much that adolescents are moody compared to adults. It's more that they have higher highs and lower lows. And you're absolutely right. There is some research on the neurochemistry of laying down memory.

And when a memory is accompanied by strong emotions, it tends to be encoded a little more deeply. And because emotions run stronger during adolescence, it may just make everything encoded more permanently. But the sensitivity of the brain to experience during adolescence, I think, should make us pay attention more to what kinds of experiences kids are having because they're going to have some lasting impact on them.

Yeah, so take me into this because this starts to really lay the foundation, get to the heart of your work in the recent book. Right. So this is something that neuroscientists call brain plasticity, which is the capability of the brain to be affected by experience. And the brain is plastic at all ages. Which apparently also some decade or two ago would have been almost heresy to say that past the early part. That's right. It was still malleable. That's right.

But if you think about learning, which we can still do fortunately as adults, if you learn something and you retain what you've learned, there has to have been some change in your brain. Or else you could never get back that information or knowledge. So the brain remains plastic after adolescence, but it's a different kind of plasticity. So during childhood and adolescence, we might think of the brain as being built. New brain circuits get laid down, and unused ones are eliminated or pruned. There's even the development of new neurons. After adolescence, those things don't happen. They don't happen, at least not on the scale that they do beforehand.

So what you find is that brain circuits in adulthood can be tweaked, but they can't really be transformed in the way they are beforehand. To me, that makes adolescence very important because it's the last time in development when the brain is really that malleable. It's also interesting that I guess there's sort of like the pop psychology of neuroscience these days, and neuroplasticity has become this big buzzword. And a lot of people are going around saying, there's no hardwiring anymore. You can completely rewire your brain, but I guess what you're saying is you can do some things, but it's not like this window where there's just a massive opportunity.

That's right. And in the last several years, scientists have actually discovered some of the brain chemicals that change between adolescence and adulthood that create a different kind of neuroclimate in the brain. And so in adolescence, the climate is one that favors change and transformation in response to environmental input. In adulthood, the climate shifts to one that favors stability. It's almost like shifting your portfolio from stocks into bonds as you get older because you want more stability. And I think that it makes perfect evolutionary sense. During adolescence, you're still learning how to be an autonomous, independent person. You need to be paying attention to your world, especially your social world.

But because plasticity is accompanied by some risk, which we'll talk about, at some point it's not worth it. It's not worth the risk. So once you've accumulated the knowledge that you need, you're probably better off closing that window and focusing more on conserving resources rather than expanding them. So plasticity, it cuts both ways. Because the brain doesn't know the difference between a good experience and a bad experience when it's happening. And so when the brain is plastic, it can be susceptible to the influence of positive things in the environment,

but it's equally susceptible to the influence of harmful ones. And that's why adolescence is both an opportunity, but it's also a time of vulnerability. And we see that in lots of ways. So, I mean, deconstruct the word susceptible to me. I mean, what actually happens in the brain if there's a negative experience, you know, like a deep, some sort of trauma or something during this window of time, what is the danger? Like what will this do that creates like more of a downside than at a later point in life? And I guess the same thing on the upside.

Well, on the downside, one of the things that it does is if it's a stressful experience, it causes the release of cortisol. And cortisol in high enough quantities is toxic to the brain. It eats away at myelin, and it interferes with the production of healthy brain circuits that allow for the better transmission of electrical impulses in the brain. And, of course, that means the better transmission of information. The basic principle is that when you use a brain circuit, the more you use it, the more ingrained it becomes. And so if you're learning things and you're repeating them, then you're going to be able to retain that learning more because it's going to

be more deeply ingrained. And so if you were exposed to positive experiences during adolescence that are challenging, not so challenging that they're overwhelming, but that are kind of in the zone, then that will facilitate the development of brain circuits that allow you to cope with those kinds of challenges. But if you're having bad experiences during adolescence, those brain circuits that regulate things like negative emotions are also going to become more ingrained and more easily activated in the future. So which means you have to be careful.

But I mean, I guess there are a lot of implications to this, right? One is for the kid. The other is also for the parents in understanding how this dynamic unfolds and what their role is in it. I mean. Yeah. And I think that, you know, we can talk about this at the level of the brain, but it's just as interesting and helpful to talk about it at the level of psychological functioning. You know, I mean, I think that for a long time, parents thought, or may still think,

that adolescence is something, you know, to just endure, that that's the best you can do. And, you know, I think that sometimes when parents of teenagers get together, they sort of swap war stories about, you know, what they've been through and how they've come out of it maybe, or how lucky they've been that their kid turned out to be such a great kid. But I think what this new view of adolescence holds is the promise, I think, of the fact that you can still affect your child for the better during adolescence. It's not something that you should just look at as a stage to be survived. In fact, I think there's lots of reasons to believe that people can really thrive during adolescence if we stop thinking about it as something just to be endured. I mean, so just imagine how you would behave differently as a parent or as a teacher

if all you thought that the best you could accomplish was to get through it safely. I mean, you wouldn't invest a lot of energy or resources in trying to facilitate the young person's positive development. And I think that if you look at the messages that we've been giving parents and kids for a long time now, I think it's survival. That's the word if you in in preparing for you know this this lecturing that i'm doing now because of the publication of the book um i went and i looked on amazon what's out there for parents and i found you know no fewer than 12 books that have the word survivor survival in in the title uh and then just out of curiosity i looked to see uh what what books for parents of babies were like i couldn't find a single one that i survived because you're supposed

to be all hopeful and loving exactly but i mean anybody that's raised an infant those first i mean i remember as a father those brutal those first three months are really brutal. I mean, and survival was exactly what was on my mind. You know, when our child wasn't sleeping as much as we wished he was sleeping or when his nap schedule was convenient for him but not so convenient for us. But yet, we don't talk about infancy that way. You know, they're all cuddly. And teenagers are difficult and rebellious and challenging and so forth, but that's not really true. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. And I think the language, the context and the frame that we

bring to the experiences as adults, it creates the container, you know, so, and that, and that container is so important. You know, it's not the container that we create and the questions we ask and the, the guidance we, and the lens that we bring to this experience, it's not simply reactive to what's going on with the kid. You know, like it's part of like the whole process, like this can contribute to what it's funny. My last book, at one point in the millions of titles, we were thinking about one of the titles that was thrown out was Surviving Creation. And I showed it to a friend of mine who I respect immensely. He's a tremendous author. And he's like, no way in hell. He said, the moment you label this process that you want

people to experience as wondrous, even though it's difficult and there is struggle, the moment you label it surviving, you've lost. I agree. And there actually is some research that involves parents, and there's other research that involves teachers, that shows that how you approach adolescence, what you think of it, what you expect, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so if you go into adolescence as a parent thinking that it's going to be a difficult time, it's going to be a difficult time because you're going to

interact with your child in ways that probably bring out the worst in your child. And the same thing for teachers too. I remember once doing an in-service training for middle school teachers in a big city. And I went over some of what we were learning about the adolescent brain, adolescent cognition, and a teacher raised her hand and she asked, wasn't it true that the adolescent brain is changing so much that it's impossible for them to learn anything? And I thought, wow. Wow, from a teacher.

This is a teacher. This is what this teacher is thinking when she is up in front of her classroom. So it's like, why bother having her job if that's your assumption? Right, exactly. But, you know, nobody in the room gasped. Nobody laughed. I mean, it was as if this was sort of a normal way to approach it. And for a long time, you know, middle schools were an educational wasteland in the United States. They've gotten a lot better, partly as our understanding of adolescence has shown,

that it is not only a time when people can learn, but it's a time when they do learn and learn an awful lot. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also. I love the conversation because, as I said, I'm in this space immediately as a parent right now. And I'm very blessed to have my kid in a school where she's in eighth grade. She wakes up in the morning. She loves school. It's so good.

Right? Because when I was in eighth grade, that was not me. I don't have that memory. It was I couldn't wait to leave. It wasn't disastrous or bad. And as we've met some of the teachers there, there are ones where it's so clear. They push the kids harder than they've ever been pushed. They make them work really hard, but at the same time, they do it with such a container of love and

compassion that the kids, you would think that a kid who was already going through an angsty emotional time and a lot of change and social change and all this stuff. Somebody comes in and pushes them like that academically at the same time. You think they've just rebelled from that. You're like another grown up trying to push me down. These kids line up to be in the experience of that teacher, which initially is kind of counterintuitive. But then once you actually see it, you get it. Right. Look, it brings to mind so many different things that I want to say.

I mean, the first is that I think for most of us, if we think back to which teachers were our favorite teachers, they weren't the easiest ones. They were the most demanding ones. I mean, they were demanding, but they were also warm and funny and engaging at the same time, which actually are kind of the characteristics of good parents, too. But the other thing I want to say is just to point out how lucky your daughter is, because her experience is unfortunately very unusual in the United States.

We all read about these international achievement comparisons and, you know, where American students are and so on. And those are important, and I do place some faith in their validity. What doesn't get publicized very much is that when those achievement tests are given internationally, they often are accompanied by questionnaires asking students' attitudes about school. So they're not just testing their math skills. They're asking them what they think about school. And one year, they asked kids to rate their school experience on a number of different scales.

These were high school students. And American high school students were almost at the top of the world in rating their school as boring. They were third out of all the countries that were surveyed. Wow. Wow. And then I read this statistic, which just stunned me, from a different source. Again, thinking about your daughter.

Only one out of every six American high school students says that she's ever taken a difficult and challenging class. Ever. Just one. And, you know, and finally, not, you know, not to bombard you with these numbers, but, you know, nearly three quarters of American high school students say that they would learn more if their schools were more demanding. So, yes, I agree with you completely. I mean, people this age want to be challenged. They want to be pushed. They want to see how much they can do and how much they can learn. And if we don't push them, if we don't demand much from them,

we're not taking advantage of this opportunity. So what's happening that we're not? If you look at all those statistics and that great data that you just shared, and that's not the common experience, the question is why? Well, I think there are lots of different reasons. For one, I think we have gotten so obsessed with testing, and that leads to teaching to the test. And when you're teaching to the test,

you're hoping that your students can engage in rote memorization of things so that they can pass the test. And I think this movement to try to evaluate teachers on the basis of their students' performance on these tests isn't helping matters at all. So I think that's one. And then there's funding attached to that as well. That's right. So that think that's one. And then there's funding attached to that as well. That's right. So it deepens the hole there. I think a second is that we have lost the sense of collaboration that needs to exist between parents and schools. And therefore, I don't think that many adolescents are getting at home what they need to be engaged in school.

And someone that I was speaking with this morning joked that they really need to rename the U.S. Department of Education as the U.S. Department of Schools. But education isn't just what takes place in the classroom. It's the whole life of the child, including what takes place in the family. And I think that parents are not always doing what they need to do to send their kids to school in a way that makes them more easily engaged by teachers in these challenging activities. And it becomes a vicious cycle, right? So if all you care about is whether your kid can get into Stanford, and therefore what you care about is not necessarily what your child learns, but whether your child gets all As, then you maybe don't want the teacher to be too demanding.

You want the teacher to teach your child enough, but not so much that your child doesn't get perfect grades. So I think this whole thing turns into this terrible cycle. Yeah. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, your vibe peloton has thousands of classes built to push you we know how life goes new father new routines new locations what matters is that you have something there to adapt with you whether you need a challenge or rest and peloton has everything you need whenever you need it find your push find your your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I mean, it's so interesting. The want that I have for my child is that she develops into a wholehearted, compassionate, interested human being.

It's just so, I don't really care a whole lot about grades because, you know, that's secondary. Like to me, that's, it's just not a metric which can determine success under the way I would define it, which is not, you know, sort of like maybe the traditional way. But then you've got this conundrum, right? Because you've got a population now or a culture where the cost of living is going up and really support the optimal educational experience these days? I think it's hard. You know, I mean, I think that as much as we often talk about quality time, there's kind of no substitute for quantity time. And, you know, one of the best predictors

of kids' mental health is the level of involvement that their parents have in their lives. And, you know, I think that what working parents need to do is to make sure that when they're not working, they're not working. And, you know, I mean, I think that these visions, and who knows, we don't have good data on this, but the stereotypes that we see on television of families having dinner but not talking to each other because they're all on their smartphones, that can't be good for kids. To me, one of the real culprits here is not so much that both parents might be working or in single-parent households that the single parent is working. It's that work infiltrates our whole lives now. Yeah, and we're now so digitally connected that the assumption is that you'll just always be there. Right. something really interesting in the newspaper last week or the week before about some large German companies that were actually forbidding their employees to receive work email in the

evenings and on weekends. And I don't know whether we need to go that far, but it certainly would be a good idea to shut it off when you're home so that you can really interact in a meaningful way with your child. The other lesson I think here is that schools probably should be devoting some of their daily activities to time that's going to help build these non-academic skills. Experts are calling them non-cognitive skills. I'm not crazy about that term, but let's call them non-academic skills for now. So what can schools be doing that help teach compassion, that teach collaboration? Because you and I know out in the world of work now, it's not how well you can work alone. It's how well you can work with other people.

What can schools do to help build grit and perseverance and determination? Yeah. So, which is, I mean, a topic that is actually really fascinating. I had a chance to talk with Angela Duckworth, you know, who's the leading researcher who's exploring grit. And it's clearly a metric which is determinative of success in a number of different areas. But at the same time, when I asked her, well, if you don't have it, can you teach it? Is it acquirable? And she said, don't know. She said, basically, that's the next level of research, but it's not done yet. But then I would turn to the research of Carol Dweck and the growth versus fixed mindset and say, maybe they're using different language.

But fundamentally, you're sort of giving a kid a lens on struggle or challenge that allows them to either process it as, I've hit the end of my capability, so why bother? Or, no, all success is a matter of figuring out how to move through this, and this is just giving me more data. Well, Angela Duckworth is a very good friend of mine, and we actually collaborate and write together as well. And Carol Dweck is a good friend, too. And I think that we probably can build grit.

Angela and I have talked a lot about what it would take to do. And I know she's doing a number of experiments to try to do that. You know, we do know that some of the components of grit, like self-control, are malleable. And we have a pretty good sense of what parents do to instill those capabilities in their kids. There's some really exciting work being done on mindfulness. Yeah, amazing work. On mindfulness and self-regulation.

I've even come across studies showing that things like yoga seem to affect the brain in ways that improve the components of things like grit. But, you know, we don't do that stuff in school. I think one of the really terrible shortcomings of what's happened to our schools is the removal of physical education from the school. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, I don't know a single well-educated adult who doesn't have some sort of regimen for exercise daily or at least aspires to it. So we all know how important physical well-being is for our mental health and our well-being, not just to keep weight off and not just to be strong, but aerobic exercise is really good for your brain.

Yeah, I mean, even if all you care, if you don't care about the emotion, even if all you care, if you don't care about the emotion, even if you're, even if all you care about is performance, you know, we now know that, that, you know, it's like John Rady says, you know, it's like exercise is miracle growth for the brain. And maybe it looks like it's BDNF, which is one of the pathways that helps this. But it is amazing to me how so many schools can be and academic institutions to become so obsessed with grades, yet they strip away one of the activities that is so clearly a contributing factor to excellence.

It is just amazing. I mean, if you were to go to school personnel and say, okay, here's one activity that's really going to improve your students' performance. And it's letting them run around for an hour a day or play basketball or volleyball or whatever. It doesn't really matter. They say, we don't have time for it. How can you not have time for it? That is going to contribute much more to kids' math achievement and verbal achievement than another 45 minutes of math instruction is going to do.

Right, let alone if you want also, how do you make classroom management easier? The effects that it's going to have on kids' moods and just their outlook and their social approach. Right. But if we as educated adults recognize this, why aren't we giving this opportunity to our kids? It really doesn't make any sense at all. One of the things that we could replace, at least in part in school, is classroom-based health education, which doesn't

do very much at all. I think it's important that kids understand, you know, certainly sex and drugs and different kinds of risky behavior and the dangers of that. But we spend an awful lot of time, awful lot of hours teaching those things. And the evaluations of those programs show that they have an effect on what kids know, but they don't have much of an effect on how kids behave. And if we were to spend time focusing instead or combining some of that with activities that are going to help build self-regulation, we're probably going to make more progress

in reducing rates of drug and alcohol use and unsafe sex in kids. So we've kind of danced around also one word, which we haven't kind of laid out there, but let's go there now, which is, I guess, risk or risky behavior in adolescence. You have an interesting lens on this also and how adolescence affects. We talked a little bit about self-regulation, but not a lot, but self-regulation and risky behaviors and how it changes in that window compared to after. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Our guest today is one of the world's leading authorities on the adolescent brain, Professor Lauren Steinberg. We're talking about

how breaking research is changing nearly everything we assume to be true about adolescents, and how to turn it from a period of deep pain into one of grace and connection and maybe even joy. So at puberty, the brain is bathed in sex hormones. And one of the things that we know now is that sex hormones affect the way the brain develops. They don't just affect our sex drive and the way our bodies look or the way our brain develops. They don't just affect our sex drive and the way our bodies look

or the way our reproductive systems function. One of the interesting effects of puberty on the brain is to intensify our experience of pleasure. And puberty does this by increasing brain activity involving the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine serves many functions, but one of its most important ones is in the experience of pleasure, the experience of reward. And there's more dopamine activity in the brain's reward centers during adolescence than in any other point in development. I'm curious, is there any data on whether it's gender specific also?

It is more, it's not gender specific, but it's more linked to testosterone than to estrogen. And so the effect that has been seen in animals, at least, is stronger for males. But remember that both male hormones and female hormones increase at adolescence just in different amounts. So when you have this increase in dopaminergic activity, an activity involving the neurotransmitter dopamine, it intensifies the experience of pleasure to a degree that makes good things feel even better. I came across one really interesting study. I can't remember the methodology, but the conclusion was that sweet things tasted sweeter to adolescents than they do to people of other ages. Now, just imagine that your brain is very sensitive to reward and finds rewarding things

even more rewarding. You're therefore going to be on the lookout for where the different sources of reward and pleasure are. And you may be so focused on that, that you may pay less attention to any attendant risks or dangers that are there associated with pursuing that activity that you think is going to be rewarding. You know, driving fast, having unprotected sex, trying some drug you've never tried before. All these things have upsides and downsides. But if you're focused more on the upside, you're going to be more likely to engage in that behavior. And while this is happening to the brain's reward centers, the backdrop for this is that the parts of the brain that govern self-control are still immature.

They're still developing. In fact, they continue to develop through adolescence and into the 20s. So the metaphor that a lot of us have used for this is starting the engines without a good braking system in place. And that leads kids to take a lot of risks. So if you look at epidemiological data on different kinds of risky behavior, a remarkable array of very varied behaviors follow very similar age curves. So crime is the sort of classic example, which increases steadily from age 10. It peaks at around age 17 or 18, and then it declines. So it's this upside-down you. But if you look at things like self-inflicted injury, cutting, for example, upside down you with a peak around 15 or 16 years old. If you look at accidental drownings

upside down you with a peak around 16 years old. That is striking to me because adolescents typically are pretty strong. They have a lot of stamina. There's no reason to think that they would drown more than people of other ages, other than the fact that they exercise poor judgment about when and where to swim. I could go on. The list is quite long. So because of this combination of an ignited engine and a still developing braking system, you see that adolescence is the time when risky and reckless behavior peaks. Now, that leads us then to wonder, well, is there anything we can do about it? It's like, okay, so we know it. Right.

So before I get to that, let me just point out that mortality rates double or even triple between childhood and adolescence, despite the fact that we've made tremendous advances in preventing and treating disease and illness during adolescence. So the major things that kill kids are not disease and illness, at least in the developed world. You know, they're things that kids do to themselves and to each other. So the way that we typically approach this is through information-based health education. So the premise here is that if we tell you what's risky and we tell you not to do it and we explain why you shouldn't do it,

then you won't do it. Well, it doesn't work. Right, because if your brain is just not wired to... That's right. I mean, so the reason that kids engage in risky behavior isn't that they're uninformed. I mean, studies that ask people about risky behaviors don't find any age differences in the extent to which people know that these

things are risky. It's because of this imbalance between this easily aroused, you know, reward seeking system and this still maturing breaking system, the still maturing self-control system. So what I've advocated is that we, instead of thinking about preventing adolescent risk-taking by trying to change adolescents, and I think change them into something that they're never going to become, as I write, it's an uphill battle against endocrinology and evolution, and we're going to lose it. You're going to lose it, right? There's no way around it.

There's no way around it. But what if we change the context in which kids spend time? So some examples of that. The most successful intervention ever to drive down teen smoking didn't involve anti-tobacco education. It involved raising the price of cigarettes. The provision of good, structured, supervised after-school activities for teenagers does more to reduce experimentation with drugs and alcohol than any drug or alcohol education ever does. The introduction of graduated driver licensing,

which does things like prohibit new adolescent drivers from driving with other adolescent passengers in the car until they've reached a certain age, has done more to reduce teen auto fatalities than any amount of driver education ever did. So that's what I mean by thinking about how can we create a world for our kids to grow up in that's going to allow them to take healthy risks? Because we don't want them to be afraid to do that. But that's going to protect them against taking harmful ones. Yeah. I'm just thinking all these things now. The world that I'm raising a kid in. And it is, you know, it's all,

and again, like it goes back to what's happening in society, you know, like where programs like these existed, increasingly, they're all being shut down. You know, and part of it's a lot of it's a funding issue. But, you know, funding is also a priority issue. It's, you know, like, this is where people want their money to go issue. So, which is why I think this conversation and the information that you're sharing is so important because it's, it gives you the argument to push back and say, you know, this is why this matters. And, and it's, it's really, and there's, that there's data around it now also. You can, it's not like I'm just saying, well, I think. It's like, no, look. They've made some progress in some areas, and we haven't made progress in others. But if you look at international comparisons, let's set aside the achievement issue. American adolescents have the highest rate in the world of obesity. They have the highest rate of STDs, the highest rate of unintended pregnancies,

I believe the highest rate of binge drinking, pretty sure the highest or nearly the highest rate in illicit drug use, easily the highest rate of violence. So, I mean, we must be doing something wrong, right? I mean, it just seems to me that we can do a better job. So when you look at that, right, and then you look at the five countries where they have the best metrics and all those things, you do the cross-analysis and the pattern recognition to say, well, okay, maybe we can't show causation, but what are the correlations where we see they're doing this, this, and this? Are the differences that exist in those countries the ones that we're talking about here?

I think that probably the common thing that exists across those countries is that they tend to have more demanding schools for adolescents. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

One thing that I find interesting and perplexing, and I've not been able to get a good answer about this, I wonder what you think, is in the international competitions, our elementary school kids are typically at the top of the list. And our middle school kids are kind of in the center of the distribution. And our high school kids are at the bottom of the list. So it's not that we have a terrible education system in this country. It's that there's something that matter with the way we educate adolescents you know okay so here's my you asked me yeah yeah um completely no data just completely anecdotal but um when we in there's like a rite of passage in new york city where there are great elementary schools in new york city public elementary schools where my daughter went

there are very few middle schools in New York City that parents tend to feel comfortable sending their kids to. So that very often is the point where a family, if you have the means or whatever it is, you start to go out and you interview at different private schools. So we kind of did it around there. And I remember being at one where it was just middle school. They had no high school. And they said, the reason is because, and we said, well, do you ever plan on building a high school onto it? Because they thought it was just a logical next thing. And their answer was no. And they said, basically, if you look at the landscape of middle schools in New York City,

it's, without using the word, it's kind of a wasteland. It's basically the philosophy underlying is let's just, it's survival. It's not even survival. It's like a notch below survival. Let's just, whatever we have to do, it's going to be awful. You know, for the teachers, we expect all the teachers, you know, like a massive turnover rate every year in our middle school teachers. Teachers come out of school and they're just, they're serving their time in middle school until they can go out and get a decent job. And they said, we see it as this is the most profound opportunity for impact that we can have. So we want to exalt middle school is a place where it seems like the system has kind of given up in this country where elementary school has a lot of expectations.

And, you know, there but there is this it feels to me at least that there is this thing that just says, let's just get them to high school. Let's just get them to 11th grade, whatever it is, because we can't do anything with them. Let's just try and keep them safe and have as few fights as we can have, rather than rising to the challenge of saying, yeah, it's angsty, it's emotional, there's massive change. And all of a sudden, you go to school one day, you don't care what other people think of you. And the next day, that's all you care about. But that doesn't mean at the same time you can't expect a lot from your kid and that they don't yearn for that you know but but look at but as a point of comparison that your daughter's experience now in a really good school um so it's possible totally i mean it's totally possible uh but you, it's not going to happen if we approach it as, let's just get through this.

So we need really to change the way that we think about it. And frankly, high school is even worse. High school is even worse. The reason that we might not think that is that, you know, that's an age when a lot of parents are really taking their kids out and putting them in select schools. And so they think, well, my kid's high school education is fine. But if you look at the vast education system that we have in the United States, our high schools are not good at all.

I mean, they're really not good compared to schools in other countries. But again, I think it's this notion that development's kind of a done deal by the time people are a certain age and there's nothing we can do. And if you give me a kid who's been well-raised and educated and prepared, then yeah, I mean, I can make her have a good high school experience, but the rest, forget it. And we're paying the price on college campuses. More college freshmen in this country need remedial education than took an AP course in high school. And we have a very high college enrollment rate in the United States,

one of the highest in the world, but we're tied for last in college completion with the highest college dropout rate in the world. Wow. Yeah, a third of all people that start college don't get a degree. Is there any research on what's behind that? Yeah.

It's a combination of things. It's financial strain. But the surveys say it is the inability to keep up with the demands of college, whether that's academic or, I think, even psychological demands, of the demands of having a schedule that you have to sort of keep yourself on. And this goes back to our earlier discussion about the absence of school activities that help build things like perseverance and grit and determination. Are there examples that you're aware of, of educational paths or institutions that are really doing it right. And KIPP has made a lot of progress in boosting the academic achievement of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. They're still not where they want

to be. I mean, I've talked to the people who run KIPP. They have a higher college dropout rate than they feel comfortable having. There are pockets of excellence. Very often, I think, the problem is that the excellence derives from the charisma and leadership of an individual. Which is not reproducible. And it's not reproducible. And that's part of the problem. And, you know, because we don't have a national curriculum, we don't have national standards, we give so much room to local districts to do what they want to do. And I think, you know, you have some very creative ones where they're doing great things, but you have a lot where they're not doing what they ought to be doing. You've got teachers who are cheating to make their kids' test scores look better. And these aren't isolated instances happening in lots of cities around the United States.

We don't want our kids in schools where that stuff is going on. One of the things you talk about also is how adolescence is shifting and also how that's leading to a sense of inequality, income inequality. Take me through this. Yeah. So adolescence is being stretched at both ends. It starts earlier because puberty is happening earlier and earlier. The average American girl got her first period

when she was 14 1⁄2 at the beginning of the 20th century, and it's 12 today. So it's really fallen quite substantially. And there have been comparable declines for boys as well. At the same time, the end of adolescence is being delayed as individuals take more time moving into the conventional roles of adulthood. So if you do the math, it looks like adolescence is about a 15-year period in development now. About twice what we actually thought it was.

Exactly. And actually, mathematically, it's twice what it was in the 1950s and three times as long as it was in the 19th century. Now, I'm not one of those persons who believes that it's taking longer to move into adulthood because people are lazier. I don't think it's that at all. I think that it's a changed economy and a changed labor force and people need to stay in school longer, which makes them financially dependent on their parents longer and less able

to earn income that will allow them to establish an independent residence and all that stuff. And people, you know, are postponing getting married and that leads them to postpone becoming parents um but it's not because they're lazy at all uh but in a world in which you need a college degree to get even a decent paying job that means that you've got to be prepared to stay in school until at least the age of 22 and probably more like 24. The average four-year college degree now takes six years. Yeah, I recently heard that. I was going, wow. Right? So who's able to stay in school that long?

Well, it's people that have really strong self-control, really good delay of gratification, really good prefrontal cortical systems, really good supports and resources in their worlds. And those are all things that are in shorter supply among people that come into life in poverty. And what's happening is that kids who grow up in poor families are less likely, for all kinds of reasons, to develop the kinds of psychological strengths that are needed to succeed in a world in which you've got to be able to stick it out in school for so many years. And I think that that is contributing to income inequality. I write about a different kind of capital.

We've heard of human capital and social capital and I talk about neurobiological capital and that's the capital that you have to keep your brain developing in important ways. And I think that a lot of that capital comes along with economic advantage. I mean, it would make sense when it's just sort of like a logical linear argument, really, like that. But I think the point is that in a world where you once could get a good job, if you dropped out of school when you were 16 or 17 or just graduated from high school, it wasn't so terrible to do that. But now, I read recently that the advantage conferred by a couple of years of college in terms of earnings and labor force success has pretty

much disappeared. It used to be the case that people that got a couple of years of college or a community college degree, associate's degree, did better than people that just had a high school diploma. They're almost about equivalent now. So it's not just enough to go to college. You've got to graduate from college. And that's where we're not doing a very good job. Yeah, and you factor in six years and also just the cost of college becoming astonishingly high. Temple, where I teach, just started a program where they will guarantee that you will have the courses available to you that you need to graduate in four years.

And students can sign up for this. And I think in our new entering class, something like 85% of the students signed up for this program. I think it's called Fly in Four or something like that. Interesting. And in a way, I mean, you never like to sort of attribute negative motivation to it. But there is a motivation to keep kids, purely a financial motivation to keep kids longer because it's just more money. But in terms of actually like what you're trying to do and the core mission of growing and getting kids out there and having great opportunities and contributing to society, it does make sense to say, okay, let's move people through and let's

get more people who are actually leaving who are coming. Yeah. I mean, I'm by nature, I can be a cynical person, but I've never heard anybody say that we want kids to not get the courses they need to graduate so we can get more money from them. I don't- Yeah. I would never imagine attributing that. Yeah. Such a fascinating conversation. For purely selfish reasons, I'd like to keep it going for a long time, but I can't because we're sort of rounding on an hour now. Normally, I wrap up every conversation by asking what it means to you to live a good life, and I'm going to ask you that. But also, I think this conversation will be relevant to so many parents. So I want to offer up a precursor to that question, which is for those parents who are listening to this conversation and they want

nothing more than for their child to have a good life. What should they be focusing on? What are the big rocks in that? I think they should be focusing on parenting according to a style that I've described called authoritative parenting, which is parenting that combines warmth and firmness. One without the other doesn't work. And so we don't want tiger moms. That is not a good way to raise kids. That's firm but not warm. And we don't want overly indulgent or permissive parents, warm but not firm. We want that combination.

And that's been shown in, I mean, thousands of studies to help facilitate the psychological traits that you and I have been talking about in our conversation. So that's the first thing. The second is we want to make sure that when our kids are going off to middle school and to high school, that they're going to environments and taking advantage of environments in which they're going to be pushed and going to be challenged. So we want to move parents away from thinking about what kind of grades is my child going to get, and instead thinking about how can I help my child take advantage of this tremendous opportunity to really grow his brain by having him pushed and challenged a little bit beyond what he's capable of doing now.

The third thing that parents can do is they can really help focus a little bit on their child's physical well-being. We have a huge sleep deprivation problem in this country among adolescents. We have a huge obesity epidemic among adolescents. Kids should be getting exercise if it's up your alley as a parent, you know, meditation, yoga. These are really good things for kids to be doing. And I think if you did more of all these things that I've just listed, that it would really help your child develop into a healthier and happier and, you know, more successful person. Sitting across from you for an hour and not knowing you beforehand, it's clear just by your

body language and your presence that you are doing something which you really believe in and is meaningful and you love. So if I offer the question now to you, what does it mean to you to live a good life? I think to be engaged in something that you feel passionate about that has some broader benefit than just benefiting yourself. That's what gives me the most pleasure in my life. I'm really fortunate to have the career that I've had, not in terms of accomplishments, but in terms of opportunities to explore things and I hope in some small way

to make a difference, to improve the lives of families and kids. That's what I set out to do when I decided to do this. And that's what I've been trying to do. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Enjoy the conversation. Thank you. So have I. Thanks so much for listening to Good Life Project. If you liked this episode, we'd be so grateful if you'd share a quick review over on iTunes. It helps us get the word out to more people and make a bigger difference in the world. And while you're there, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Apple Watch Series 10 making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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