Science Vs - How the Teenage Brain Works, with Lisa Damour

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Our brains go completely WILD when we go through our teenage years. It’s a time where it feels like every disagreement with our parents turns into World War III, and every idea that could get us killed sounds like the most fun we could ever have. In this episode, we get into the science of what the brain is doing during the teenage years with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. Lisa co-wrote the college textbook “Abnormal Psychology” and was a consultant on Disney's “Inside Out 2.” She takes us deep into the developing brain to explain what makes teens tick. Plus, we talk about mental health, how boys and girls are struggling in different ways, and tips for anyone who has big feelings.   Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsTeens Check out Lisa Damour’s podcast, Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Raising Tweens & Teens, here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2GIh790via4L7oGAJ2mz1b  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Lisa Damour (05:33) The teenage brain (11:20) Big feelings, what they mean, and how to respond  (19:56) The teenage brain and abstract thinking (22:34) Teenagers and risk-taking (29:18) How long does adolescence really last??  (33:47) The different kinds of popularity (41:58) Should we be worried about kids these days? (46:57) How boys are struggling and how can we help (51:49) Oddball questions Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. You can join us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I have such a vivid memory of being 14 and looking in a mirror and thinking, how do I know I'm not an alien who has been left here by my planet? Would I know if I were? And I remember freaking myself out. Like, I remember really like finding that pretty destabilizing. And then, you know, then you kind of move on. Okay. You turn 15 and you don't think that way anymore. But I have such a clear memory of that.

Do-do, science chats with our favorite nerds. Yeah. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. Today on the show, The Teenage Brain. Being a teenager is such a weird and poignant time of our lives. Everything feels so heightened and important. what is happening in our brains during that time? And then why, as we get older and become full-blown adults

with jobs and podcasts and self-esteem? Why can what happened in high school still imprint on us? Why, if we bump into our high school bully while we're out in a park with our kids, why does that still matter? What about bumping into your high school crush while you're out at the supermarket, buying pickles. Why do we still care?

To decode the mysteries of the teenage brain. Today we are sharing my chat with the fabulous Dr. Lisa DeMore. Lisa has been a clinical psychologist for more than 30 years and she specialises in teenagers. She co-wrote the college textbook of normal psychology and she has written not one, not two, not three. No, actually, three. She's written three best-selling books on the teenage brain. Her most recent one, right here, is the emotional lives of teenagers. And I learned so much about my own emotional life from it, even though I'm a big kid.

If all of that doesn't impress you, Lisa was also a consultant on Disney's Inside Out too. So after the break, my chat with Lisa D'Amour, we are going to talk about the mysteries of the teenage brain and also mental health more generally, how we can all live happier lives, whether we have to deal with Jordan in calculus or our boss. My chat with Lisa is coming up just after the break. Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

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I saw my friend on the other side of the street. I was heading to school with the kids. I let go of Mom's hand to wave. I had already forgotten their lunches. I ran over to hug her. She came out of nowhere. And then... It stopped.

Sometimes the moments that never happen matter most. Volvo's automatic emergency braking helps ensure a safe ending for everyone. Learn more at volvocars.cairs.caps.cair slash safety. Welcome back today on the show, The Teenage Brain. And to tell us all about it is the fabulous and oh so wise Dr. Lisa D'Amour. Hi, Lisa. Welcome to the show. Wendy, thank you for having me. It is great to be here.

I'm so excited to chat with. you. I've been gobbling up all of your books. You can see from the dog-eared nature of them. Oh, I appreciate that. So let's get to know you a little. I heard that you wanted to become a psychologist when you were little six or seven. I didn't even know what a psychologist was at six or seven. What sparked this for you? So what happened was the early part of my life had, a lot of disruption. My parents divorced when I was three. My mom remarried when I was six, and we moved overseas, all in that time. By the time I was six, divorced remarriage, move overseas. So a lot had happened. Yeah. And in the midst of all of this, we became family friends

with someone who moved from Denver where we were living to London, where we moved overseas. By coincidence, happened to be making the same move in the same week. And she was a training psychologist. Her name is Carla. We remained very close. She was, you know, in graduate school, she was actually training with Anna Freud's daughter, who really worked out child and adolescent psychology. That is wild. She was training with Anna Freud. She was right in that developmental line. Your babysitter? Well, basically, actually, because my mom and my stepfather were, you know, sort of starting a new marriage, so they traveled a fair bit on their own. So whenever they would travel, I would stay with Carla. in her grad school apartment.

And I became incredibly fascinated with what she was doing. And I would just drill her with questions. You know, who are your patients? Why are they there? Why does therapy work? How does therapy work? And she, as someone who loved kids and smart and generous person, took me very seriously, gave me very meaningful answers.

And somewhere in that age six or seven, and I returned back to our flat in London one weekend, and I was like, I'm going to do Carla's job. That's going to be my job. And then you focus on teenagers in your practice. I do. I do. What do you love about teenagers? They're the best.

So I have always liked teenagers. I've always thought they were the most interesting human beings on the planet. I think they are so vibrant. There's so much going on. There's so much change happening really right. rapidly. So then I want to jump into the science of what is happening in our brains when we're teenagers, because it is this super profound time in our lives. And I think it's so fascinating that science's understanding of the teenage brain has changed so wildly very recently. So tell me

what is happening in the human brain as we become teenagers. A lot. Okay, but it's all fantastic. It's a little hard on the kid, and it's a little hard on the people. around the kid, but it's all normal development. So the way that I'm not, I'm going to oversimplify this. So, you know, if neurologists take issue, they're right. But the general outlines of what I'm saying are accurate. Yeah. So in the first part of life, zero to nine, roughly, there's a great flourishing of neurons.

A lot of neuronal activity is generated, new neurons are created. The brain is sort of growing like a bush, right? like, you know, tons and tons of branches and all sorts of leaves on those branches, and like there's a lot going up. In adolescence, there's a pruning. There's a starting to get rid of dead weight, neurological dead weight. And so what happens is, actually, it makes the brain more efficient and more powerful. And there's also an increase in myelination, which is the coding on neurons that actually speeds the communication between neurons. So the adult and brain, and this is part of why I love them, is getting faster, more powerful.

It's also developing the capacity to see things in all new ways in the sort of most kind of old school but still holds up view of this. Kids go from being concrete thinkers. They're like, I think what I think. And that's what I think to abstract thinkers. It's just like, well, I think this. But I can imagine that you might think that, right? That they can see things have abstract reasoning, imagine things from different perspectives. all of that starts to happen around 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, whenever a kid is really sort of underway with puberty.

And the pubertal changes in the brain happen before the body really starts changing. So like, you know, 10 and 11-year-olds often have a lot of this going up. Now, what's critical for everyone to be empathic about is that the upgrading, the renovation in the brain, this speeding, this strengthening that happens, proceeds in the order in which the brain initially developed, which is from the lower order regions which are basically above our neck, the back of our neck. The lizard brain.

To the higher, yeah, the ancient brain down here, to the higher order regions which are behind our forehead. So the tricky spot is that teenagers go through a phase of having what we kind of sometimes call a wonky brain, right, or a gawky brain, a gawky brain. in that the lower order regions have been upgrade, that they are actually more powerful, more efficient, more responsive to the world around them. But the higher order regions haven't gotten their upgrade yet.

And the problem being, our emotions are back here. Our emotions are in this more ancient part of the brain. So what it means is that emotionality is tremendously heightened for young people. If we almost think of that as like the psychological gas, but the brakes are still the old breaks. They're not as developed as sort of renovated and upgraded as the emotional centers. So what it means is they disregulate really, really easily when they're in this gawky brain phase. And when we look at this on paper, dysregulation, you know, sort of falling apart emotionally is at its absolute height on average.

around age 13. And then kids actually become more regulated as they move deeper into adolescents. Because they're getting 15, 16s. More of those regular. Because the front of the brain is catching up. And so, you know, it's got this phenomenally interesting effect on family life because one thing that happens is a lot of parents think, okay, well, adolescence doesn't even begin until 13 because teen, teenager, when in fact kids start acting like teenagers around 10 or

11. And we've always marked the onset of adolescence as psychologists around 11 because that's when the puberal changes in the brain usually are starting. So the first thing that's happening in families is everybody, you know, the teenager starts there, the kid starts acting like a teenager around 10 or 11. And the family's thinking, what's happening? We thought we had two more years. Yeah. Which they didn't. And then they hit 13 and they are held together with scotch tape, often coming apart, right, getting really, really dysregulated very fast, having meltdowns because they can't find their pants that, you know, they have 14 other pairs of pants they could wear, but it's the one pair of pants. And the family's thinking, holy moly, this is how we

start the teenage years, is like we're coming out of the gate like this. And then they usually are thinking, oh my gosh, and we're only going to go up from here. And the good news is, no, no, no, you go down from there. It gets better. It gets better. But the other thing that we need actually never lose sight of is it's weird for the kid too. The 13-year-old who is in a fetal position on the floor because they can't find the pants they were looking for is also thinking, what is going on? Like two years ago, I would just wear other pants. Like, why am I like this now? And so it's a time where there's a great deal of tenderness called for because it's scary for the kid and scary for the parents.

Now, you wrote in your book that adults shouldn't mistake the extreme emotional intensity that is natural to adolescence for psychological fragility. Tell me about this. So we do make this equation, right, that if you're emotional, it means you're fragile. And that's not really true, right? I at this point, you know, I'll be weepy about anything. Like, the older I get, the more readily I move to tears by, like, you know, an engagement. engagement on a television show. I'm like, oh, they're getting married, right? I'm pretty sturdy, right? I have very easy access to my emotions, and I am pretty tough emotionally I can put up with quite a bit. So it's not a fair, it's not a fair equation to say that someone's emotional means that they're necessarily psychologically fragile, psychologically fragile. I think for kids, especially when it comes out of the gate so fast, especially when it's a very distinct departure from who they were six months ago, a year ago. And especially,

when families are in an environment where there's a lot of scary headlines about teenagers. You know, there's, especially in the wake of the pandemic, there's been so much concern about adolescent mental health, so much concern about adolescent suicide. You know, all of this is warranted. All of this is really important. But I have such a, such empathy for a family who maybe has a 10 or 11 or 12 or 13 year old who's starting to have that ramping up emotionality and is becoming distressed about things they weren't distressed about before. And the folks are looking at headlines that are saying really scary things about teenagers. I think in those moments, it's really easy to worry that something's really wrong.

And the way I would have parents reassure themselves is to ask a few questions. So first is the child coping, the teenager coping, in a way that brings relief and does no harm, right? So distress is happening as part of life, even sort of out of the blue, bigger than one would expect to distress. So long as teenagers are doing things that come at no cost and actually bring relief, like crying. Crying is great. It brings relief does no harm. Cuddling the family pet, putting on their favorite playlist. Sometimes a sad playlist when they're sad.

Going outside, wanting to talk about their feelings, wanting to go back to bed. Sometimes they'll just get under their covers. Wanting to do a facial. You know, like, these are the things teenagers do when they're upset. And if it comforts them and brings relief and they feel better, that's health. Like, that's health. It's not the presence of distress that is a sign of mental, you know, concerns about mental health. It's the presence of poor coping.

This is very interesting because, I think we have this idea, even beyond teenager, as a grown-up, every time I'm having a bad day, to be honest, or just feeling crappy, I do worry about my mental health. I might use words like, oh, I was a bit anxious today. I had anxiety today. But is this true for all of us? If we are coping, that's actually life and mental health.

Is that right? That was mental health. So the way I wrote about it in this most recent book is, you know, mental health is not about feeling good. I mean, it's nice to feel good, but that's not how we define mental health as psychologists. It's about having feelings that fit what's happening and then managing them well. So if you're having a crappy day, it's usually because something went wrong, right? So maybe, you know, you got stuck in traffic or maybe you weren't feeling well physically, or maybe somebody was a jerk at work, you know, or something like that. those are, you know, the various miseries of life.

This is natural to life. If somebody's unpleasant to you and you're like, that's cool, I don't mind. It's fine. I feel great. Like, that's actually more concerning than if you're like, ow, that hurt. Like, what's going on? Right. And I try to help families see this, right?

If a kid messes up a test, right, an important test and is upset about it, that's what we want to see. What we don't want to see is the kid who messes up an important test is like, whatever, I don't care. So not only is distress natural, most of the time, it's proof that people work exactly like they're supposed to. And then so how do we know that, whether it's teenagers or big kids like you and me, how do we know that we're coping well?

Because there is this sort of story you hear that every bad emotion you have, not only should you not really have it and try and whisk it away as quickly as possible, but you should talk about it with your therapist, with your friends. You've got to talk about it to death. And I'm not a talk, Lisa. It's okay. Is it okay? So how do we know if it's okay to just slam on the music, have a cry?

What's a good coping mechanism and what's not so good? So the not so good basically are defined very similarly to the good ones. So the good ones are they bring relief. and do no harm, the not so good ones bring relief but come at a cost, right, that there's a price tag attached. So say you've had a really bad day and you're like, you know what I could go for is a glass of wine. And one glass of wine does the job, relaxes you, lets you, let it go, and you leave it at

that. And no harm is done. That's fine. Right? That's fine. Now, if that always becomes the strategy, if there's no reflection on what went wrong, no effort to choose, you know, to try to fix it, then it could start to be a strategy does harm. If it's seven glasses of wine, now we have a problem, right?

So even, and the kid equivalent is something like video games. Like a lot of kids will have a really rough day at school, feel very frustrated, and they'll come home and they'll want to get on their video game. Because if they get on their video game, they don't have to think about what happened, and they want to stop thinking about it for a little bit. Yeah. Now, if it's something the kid cannot fix, and they actually do need to change their mental channel, so they can just sit down and get their homework done after playing video games for a little while, video games are a perfectly reasonable strategy in that moment. If, however, every time the kid's upset, they're like, I want to be on my video game,

or every time the kid's upset they're like, I'm going to be on my video game for four hours and not get my homework done, now you have a problem. Is there a cost? This is a really helpful way to look at it. Is there a cost, right? Okay, so substances, you know, can be very costly. taking it out on other people, right? You have a bad day at work and you come home and you kick the dog

or you come home and you're, you know, unpleasant to your partner. This comes at a very high cost. Taking it out on yourself, right? What is wrong with me? I'm the worst. I hate myself. I never get anything right. You know, that gives a sense of control, which is why people do it,

but it doesn't feel good and it's not going to help them. And then the last one is people who use avoidance to manage anxiety, right? Like I'm nervous about this thing so I just won't do it. If we do that repeatedly, our lives get narrower and narrower. So the goal, my whole goal of my whole career, I can't make distress go away. I can't prevent the people will feel distress. And I don't want to. There's so much value, even if it's uncomfortable, in having the full range of emotions,

being sad when there are losses, being angry when we're hurt, being disappointed when things don't go our way. I mean, that's exactly how we're built. We're built to do that. I've heard you say that you do PR for distress these days. I'm all for it. I'm all for, I mean, like, not unnecessary distress, but like I'm certainly trying to counterbalance, frankly, a wellness industry that I think has sent the message that distress is inherently bad. In your book, you talk about kids who are coming to you and talking to you about this specifically, and I find it very relatable. What are they telling you about kind of the wellness industry, the messages they're getting.

That they're like failing at self-care, right? Like, if only my self-care were better, I would be in this state of ongoing emotional Zen. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You're like 16. Like, there's no ongoing emotional Zen at any point in life and definitely not at 16. And so, but it's amazing how much better kids feel instantly when we say your feelings make sense. They're super uncomfortable.

Also, they're only feelings. You can handle them. We're here to help you handle them. Now, going back to the teenage brain, our gorky brains as we're teenagers, you mentioned that we start to really develop abstract thinking as when we're teenagers. This sort of gets ramped up. Do you remember as a teenager having that sort of come online for you? I do. And it's funny, I have very vivid memories in my adolescence, I think more than most adults, which I don't know why I do. But I don't know why I do. but I don't think that's an accident that I've ended up in my job. But I have such a clear memory, because what I know now through my training is it's very jarring when basically this new dimension is added to your mind, right?

It's very jarring. I'll give you an example clinically. Like I remember caring for a 14-year-old who became suddenly like absolutely flipped out about human mortality. Like, you know, she, of course, before 14, she knew people would die. Like, she knew that. But at 14, like the sort of existential meaning of this descended on her and that her parents were eventually going to die and the dog was eventually going to die. And she was just beside herself. So that kind of like seeing the depth and complexity of things can be very, very, like, complicated.

Yes, I remember that now that you mention it. Absolutely. And what's it all for if we're all going to die? Yeah. Still a question that comes up, but as a teenager, it's very pronounced. It's very profound and very destabilizing. It's very destabilizing. And I've had other kids say, like, how do I know this isn't all like a big joke and everyone's in on it than me?

Right. Like the ability to kind of have those thoughts is new. So, mine, I have such a vivid memory of being 14 and looking in a mirror, mine's weird, but like I think a lot of people have weird ones, but mine's pretty weird. I'm thinking, how do I know I'm not an alien who has been left here by my planet? How do I know? Would I know? Would I know if I were? And I remember freaking myself out.

Like I remember really like finding that pretty destabilizing. And then, you know, then you kind of move on. Okay. You turn 15 and you don't think that way anymore. But I have such a clear memory of that. Wow. Wow. Wow.

And so another thing that teenagers do quite famously is risk-taking. And I was sort of delighted to read while I was researching for this interview that rats and mice when they're teenagers also risk take more and they go and visit places that might be a little bit dangerous, more so than when they're adults or when they're kids. And a sort of a study that I think we can all relate to found that even teenage mice drink more alcohol when they're with their friends, something that both teenagers do tend to be more risky when we're with our friends. And adult mice don't do that. And sort of in the context of risk taking and also So your childhood, tell me about skitching, Lisa.

Oh, my gosh. I cannot believe I did this. Okay. So the risk-taking in teenagers, the best way to think about it is novelty-seeking, right? That's what it is. The teenage brain is driven towards novelty, right? Like, if you think about, like, who invented fire, I'm sure it was teenage K people, right? They're like, what does this do, right?

I mean, like, they want to sort of try new things, see what happens. So they make risky choices. Okay. I have to tell you, when I was writing about this in my book, I actually had to call friends from Denver. And I was like, do we actually do this? Because it's like so bananas what we were doing. So I grew up in Denver, Colorado, which at the time was a very small town. It has since become a very populated city.

But it was this tiny town and not a lot of folks and not a lot of traffic. And, you know, it's in the mountains of Colorado. and we would get a big snow and sometimes so much that it became packed on the street you know sort of like there was a two or three inch pack of snow that you could drive on we would we were able to drive we were 16 and older go out at night

and one of us would drive and two or three of us would hold on to the back bumper of the car in this crouched position in snow boots and while our friend drove and we would just sort of like hold on and like you know like

Back to the future were you inspired by Back to the Future? Doesn't you want Bonnie McLeod? Do something like that I think of his skateboard right? Right, right. But then the other thing we would do is like tour

like usually a couple of kids would sit in the trunk of the car and talk to the kids on the bumper. Like it was like it was like it was like and then eventually like your hands get tired and you fall off and you sort of tumble in the snow. And the job of the driver is to watch in the rear of your mirror until they can see that everybody's off the car.

And then you bag it up and you go get everybody again. And it's like we would do this in like the middle of the night. And I mean like it sounds really dangerous. I'm sure it wasn't smart. Because you're like, how did you not like end up under a tire? Right. You're not really, you're kind of behind the car. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Yeah. So it's funny, like, the other thing, I can't believe that we did. So I had a great adolescence because we mostly were skiing. Like that was our weekend activity. And it was actually perfect. But Wendy, the thing I think about now, and I go out to Colorado, my folks are still there, we were 16-year-old drivers driving up to overbirthed pass, which is the continental divide of the United States. It is a sheer drop on lousy roads.

We were new drivers. I had a 1979 diesel Volkswagen rabbit that I bought myself for $900 when I was a teenager. I like won't do this now. Like as an adult, I'm like white-knack. You know, this is so wild because the studies in teenage rats, what they do is they put them on an elevated maze with sometimes a bit of a drop. And they love it. And they don't care.

Little mice snooping around. Look at you go. What are you doing? And I do this now, and I'm like, what? Who let me drive on this at 16? Do we know why the teenage brain loves novelty? Probably for evolutionary reasons. Yeah.

Right? That, you know, if we think about it in an evolutionary frame, for the species to survive, teenagers need to be out and about finding other teenagers and, you know, engaging with them. You know, if they stay, if all the teenagers stay home in their cave, the culture does not survive. Right. Right.

...is just not survive. But you also mentioned something else about adolescent mice drinking more in the company of their adolescent mice peers. We have other studies showing the same. There's actually a really brilliant series of studies done by Lawrence Steinberg, who's a researcher who's done beautiful work on teenagers, where you put teenagers in driving simulators and ask them to drive. And then you put 30-year-olds in driving simulators and ask them to drive. So you get a baseline of them driving alone in the simulator. Then you bring in a whole bunch of teenage friends.

And you bring in the mice? Yeah, them to drive. No, no mice. This is all humans. So then the second round of the study is, then you bring in a bunch of 17-year-olds to watch a 17-year-old drive and a 30-year-olds to watch the 30-year-old drive. The 30-year-old drives the same with a whole bunch of 30-year-olds watching as they did alone. The 17-year-old gets significantly riskier with peers in the car.

And there's two really important things that come from this. One is this understanding of an idea of hot and cold reasoning, that cold reasoning is this very logical, cautious, smart, mature reasoning that happens when teenagers are not with their peers. Hot reasoning is they get with their friends and social and emotional pressures change their judgment. And that's what this study really does. So, like, you might have a kid, you know, at 5 o'clock on Friday.

They're like, I'm going to Billy's house tonight. And the parents say, don't drink. And he's like, I will not. It is nuts at Billy's. And then he gets to Billy's, and someone's like, have a beer. He's like, okay, right? He wasn't lying at 5. It's that the conditions change.

Yeah. So that's important. We've all been at Billis at 5 p.m. 100%. I have such a clear memory of the first time someone offered me a cigarette. I'm being like, that is the dumbest thing I could. possibly do, thank you? And then it was in my head.

Exactly. I don't know how to puff to this day. I don't know how to inhale. I was coughing. I didn't inhale. It was in the bin, you know. So, so interestingly, just to sort of cap off this discussion of the teenage brain in development, there was a super interesting study that came out last year that looked at

4,000 people from basically zero straight out. to 90, and they analyzed their brains looking for patterns and found that basically our brain is in, it changes throughout the course of our life. But for the purpose of this discussion, the chunk of change that they, the sort of phase that hits adolescents, they found probably started around when we're nine years old, all the way up to when we're 32 in this study, which very interesting. What did you make of that? Yeah.

What I made of it is I don't think they should have called it adolescence. Okay. Yeah, because what the study really said was for that entire window from 9 to 32, the brain is actually becoming more and more integrated, more and more sophisticated, more and more capable. Yeah, having that process. You were talking about the pruning, the pruning of synapse. and the power and the, you know, the areas of the brain connecting very quickly to each other, you know,

like that that is just improving and improving and improving through that window of 9 to 32. And then at 32, actually, it starts to decline. That that's really what the study found is that then where, you know, thinking becomes more localized to certain areas, like that really sophisticated integration that has been, you know, really, accelerated by the adolescent process and then moved into young adulthood, like the brain kind of peaks in a way at 32 is what that paper really showed. And so, you know, not that you can't do good work after that, because, and a lot of some as we say, like, yeah, the brain may lose some of its, you know, just incredible nimbleness, right, that may happen. But it's offset by experience,

right? Like other things come in to help us still do good cognitive work and be very capable thinkers well into, you know, later adulthood. Yes. But I was sort of fascinated that they decided to call that whole thing adolescence because I think, Wendy, and this is something I really struggle with, it then sort of gives it a negative tinge because we have a negative tinge about adolescents, right? Like this is, this is like a fascinating thing to me that we tend to sort of advance negative stereotypes about teenagers.

And the one that I hear all the time about brains is like, oh, their brains don't even work, You know, until there used to be 25, their brains don't really work. And I'm like, no, no, wait a minute. Like, until 25, and 25's often the number that we've talked about where, you know, adolescence ends is increasingly what people are saying. What happens at 25 is the upgrade is complete, and there's good balance between the front and the back of the brain. And strong emotions don't knock the brain off line, the front of the brain off line so readily. But, you know, when a 15-year-old is calm, when they're not contending with big feelings, they reason beautifully, right?

Or I look at a piece of art made by an 18-year-old, and I'm like, tell me that kid doesn't have a working frontal lobe. Or like, Lord, right, the singer? Yeah. When she broke out with those unbelievable songs, she was 17. Mm-hmm. Their brains don't work. I'm like, are you kidding me? Yeah.

Are you kidding me? Their brains are more vulnerable to being derailed by strong emotion until 25. But I always feel a little prickly when people are dismissive of teenagers' neurological capacities. After the break, more of my chat with Dr. Lisa Dumor. There's a lot of worries about kids these days. A lot of reasons to be worried. The mental health crisis, social media, gambling. But how worried do we need to be?

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Welcome back. Today we're talking all about teenagers with clinical psychologist, Dr. Lisa DeMaw. Let's jump back in. And now I kind of want to zoom into the more social side of being a teenager. And I was fascinated to read that scientists have these fancy words for the different kinds of kids in the school yard. So there is something called sociometric popularity, the popularity if you just ask kids anonymously who's genuinely liked. They have sociometric popularity, but then there's perceived popularity, which refers to,

I'll quote from a study here, prestige, visibility and dominance, aka Regina George. It's the mean girls. Which is kind of astonishes me that there is this sort of universality, so much. so that we have fancy science words for these concepts. And I'm sure our listeners will immediately know from their high school who had the perceived popularity and who had the sociometric popularity. Is this something you see, you talk to a lot of kids, you talk at a lot of schools, do you see these dynamics playing out?

Yeah. Much as I absolutely adore Tina Fey, I always like, the phrase mean girls a little bit. Like, because, first of all, there's no equivalent for boys, even though, and this is not a good thing for anybody. Like, boys are actually statistically quite a bit more aggressive than girls, both socially and physically. That's right. In your book, you point out that when you look at this sort of almost manipulative meanness, we kind of associate girls as having, yeah, that more manipulative and whereas boys will just punch each other, and that's how they're mean. But you write that actually that's not true, that both boys and girls.

do not have the market cornered on that. And what boys do? And this pains me terribly for them. And, you know, families with sons will talk about this. They do tremendous teasing, like tremendous. And, you know, like giving each other a hard time, really needling each other quite a bit. And, you know, if a kid reacts to it and gets hurt, then, oh, I was just joking. I was just joking.

Like, why, you know, like, so this is not nice. Oh, my God. That, when you said that, I'm just joking, I'm just joking. I literally just this prousty in response of the main voice in my high school that absolutely used to teeth me for wearing pants. Yeah. But it's the same, it's the same phenomenon. And a lot of kids outgrow really fast. And I don't love labels for kids that they can't shake.

Yes. So then tell me, as we grow up. and we become full-blown adults with our own self-esteem and our own jobs and our own podcasts, why does the crap that happens in teenagehood seem to uniquely affect us? Why did when you just said, why did this have this visceral reaction in me? What's going on there? I think it is the heightened emotionality of adolescence, right? that things leave a mark in a different kind of way.

And what's interesting is the highs are higher and the lows are lower. So, you know, it's very funny. And I don't know what was going on. I don't think it involved a boy, but there's this old like Boys of Summer song by like Don Henley maybe or something. And I know it came on when I was upset once when I was an adolescent. I don't know what I was upset about. I hate the song.

I still hate the song. And same thing, like, it just takes me back to this very vivid experience of being distressed. And I think it's just the vividness of that distress. Yes. That is so unique. The flip of it is, you know, Colorado's beautiful. Like, where I grew up was so beautiful. And I did have this $900 Volkswagen Diesel that I bought from working as a bus girl.

And, like, my favorite thing in adolescence was to put the windows down, to be driving in the beauty of Colorado and, like, playing music and, you know, like, listening to a song. And, like, I, like, that was, like, a transporting experience for me. And, like, that I cannot recapture that, you know, in middle age. I was reading about this study the other day where they asked a bunch of 70-year-olds, they gave them some wood. and said, just tell me any memory that this word inspires in you. And then later said, what years of your life did these memories come from? And the more recent times, they got a lot of memories. But then there was this bump in teenagehood and early in our early 20s. That makes sense. This reminiscent bump. Okay. So Lisa, on this point of the power of teenagers, I got

bullied by some teenagers the other day. I want to tell you the story. And then I want you to psychoanalyze me, please. So, so I was at a lake and there was some teenagers there and one of the teenagers was throwing rocks at the ducks, aiming for the ducks. And the other teenagers

around him said, don't throw rocks at the ducks. So I was like, great. I don't need to do anything here. But then the kid hits a duck. and I said, tried to be, hey, right? I said, come on, don't throw rocks at the ducks. And he went, I wasn't. I said, yeah, you were. And then he sort of had a smile.

We had an arrangement, no more throwing rocks of ducks. But then, Lisa, the other kids, they turned on me. And they started going, don't throw rocks at the ducks, don't throw rocks at the ducks, don't throw rocks. And then I was there so aware of my body at what I was. saying that I kept talking to my friend, as if I didn't care what the teenagers thought of me, and then everything that came out of my mouth, they'd be like, uh-uh, uh-huh, they were bullying me, and I didn't like it, and if they were grown-ups, I would have told them where to stick it, but because they were teenagers, something inside me still wanted them to like me, and I'm

embarrassed. Why did they, why did any of that happen? Why was I scared of the teenagers? I'm sorry, it happened. You did the right thing. They knew you. were doing the right thing. I promise you that they knew full well, that you were on the right side of this. What was happening, I swear, in that moment, I am sure, is they were protecting their friend, that their friend was appropriately, maybe feeling a bit of shame and humiliation about being called out for doing something that was out of line. and in I really mean this

I'm not trying to sugar go to this and I think what was an effort at a loving and protective gesture towards their friend they sided with him and made you the bad guy and it's

you know they don't care you're not you were a bystander to this like it wasn't really about you it was about you're calling him out appropriately. Which is, I mean, I like that for them. I like that tribalness for them.

And then, you know, there is a lot of concern these days that, about teenagers, about kids, you know, with social media and the mental health crisis, body image issues. Yet on some level, and I've heard you talk about this, kids are healthier than ever before. You know, they're having less sex, which, you know, I guess you could think about in many ways, but their teenage birth rates are falling. Plummitting. They're smoking less, vaping more, but still, are you worried about the kids these days?

I mean, yeah, because it's my job to worry about them. What do you? I think one of the worries I have is this sort of presiding stereotype right now we have, that they are fragile, that they are damaged, right? I mean, I think there's certainly kids who suffer. and we're seeing numbers that are higher than they have been in the past, on the whole, teenagers are great, and they're doing great, and they're thriving, and they're

forward-looking. I mean, I think that that story doesn't get told. I had the best opportunity a couple years ago. I was given a Gallup poll. Gallup is a big polling company here in the U.S. that I could use for anything I wanted. So I asked teenagers a whole bunch of questions about their feelings. And one of the questions I asked was, what did you feel a lot of yesterday?

And I don't know the numbers in front of me yet, but these are very close to proximate. But, like, you know, like 43% said I felt anxious and 32% said I felt stressed. And like 23% said they felt sad. And 23% said they felt angry. 94% said they felt happy also. So, you know, if you add those numbers up, it's way more than 100, right? So that, yes, they are anxious and side by side with that. The overwhelming majority of kids said, I also felt.

felt happy yesterday. So I think we tend to report the elevated numbers in terms of distress. Yeah. And we tend to focus on kids who are having very significant problems, which we should, right? If we're going to focus on anybody, we want to focus on the kids who are really struggling. Those are the stories that we should tell and pay attention to. But that can come at the cost of looking at a bigger picture, which is this is the best-behaved generation of kids we've ever had. Also, lower drug use. They use way fewer drugs than their parents' generation did. Some of that may be that they don't go out as much. Some of the sexual findings may be because kids can have a pretty steamy relationship

without leaving their house, just using their phone, right? I mean, so, you know, it's not all upside, but especially like the drug numbers and the pregnancy numbers, I'm like having cared for young people who have. had bad, bad drug outcomes or dealt with early pregnancies, like having those numbers drop is great, right? And like, we can poke holes in it a little bit, but like on whole, like, I'm pretty psyched about that. So what does worry you about this generation coming up, the teens? So I do worry that we're kind of behind the, like, we sort of are, walking back technology now.

Like, it got out ahead of us. You know, we, there's been a wonderful, and I fully, you know, fully supported movement to get phones out of the school day. I think it's a great idea. There's no reason for kids to have phones during their school day. But, like, we didn't get our hands around that early, right?

That's something that we're sort of trying to put that horse back in the barn. Yeah, I feel like your kids were actually the generation that was caught in the middle, right? You've got teenage kids now. I have a 22-year-old and a 15-year-old, right? So, like, you know, my 15-year-old does not have phones in the school, but my 22-year-old did, right, when she was coming up through middle and high school. So that was unfortunate, and I worry about that.

I think there's other norms that we should establish that should have been established early. Like, I don't really think kids need tech in their bedrooms, right? Maybe to do their homework, but there's no upside to it, and there's a lot of downsides for kids having tech in their bedrooms kind of ever, but definitely overnight, right? So we're working to sort of establish norms about where these things go and where they belong and how big a part of kids' lives they should be. But we're walking stuff back, right? And we didn't do that right for a whole bunch of kids. I worry about that. I also think kids are asking questions adults really are having a hard time answering these days.

Questions about the climate. Questions about what AI means for their futures as workers, as thinkers. the value of their education. I don't know that there's ever been a time generationally where the kids' experience of growing up was so different from the parents' experience of growing up. I don't think there's ever been a time generationally where the child's future looks so different

from what the parent remembered their own future looking forward to. So I think it's a tough time in that kids have really fair questions about what's ahead for them that adults are actually struggling to find. When we, I think, about sort of charting the concerns we've had for the teens, for the teens, first it was a lot of worry about girls. Now it's switched, I think, to boys and concerns around toxic masculinity. What is your one tip you would say to parents raising young boys right now? I think we want to not assume that boys are doing just fine.

When boys suffer, they tend to display their suffering through acting out or being irritable or getting themselves in trouble. And we don't ask questions about that or if we ask about it, we see it as a disciplinary issue as opposed to an emotional issue. So I still worry about girls, but I think there's a lot of evidence that boys are struggling with, you know, questions about what it means to be a male. how to think about what's ahead for themselves. A lot more body image questions are coming up for boys. There's a lot of content online around luscularity, low body fat. These kids are being offered and, you know, like advertise all of these supplements, all of this stuff from all over, right?

So there's no reason to think, unfortunately, that anyone's getting off easy here. And we don't want to assume that just because a boy's out. in a way that may be off-putting to adults that he's just being naughty, right? We should take that as evidence that he's struggling in one way or another. I loved in your book, you pointed out that one really important thing to do is to have male adults in their life talk about their emotions. Why is that important? We know that by about age eight or nine, if not earlier, boys start to, you know, many boys, not all boys, but start to sort of consolidate this. sense of being a boy and masculine and wanting to be masculine. And at that around that time,

they tend to associate it with like not being like a girl. Right. That's sort of their definition. The strongest definition of being a man is not a girl. Not being like a girl. Exactly, right? That that sort of becomes the organizing force. Yeah. And they start to associate talking about feelings as a gruel thing, right? That they'll sort of be like, girls do that. Girls talk about feelings like guys don't, real guys don't. And one of the things, so there's that piece of information, so there's that data point. Another data point is in two parent heterosexual homes, the person most likely to talk about feelings is the mother, right, because of socialization.

Like women are socialized to talk more fluidly about their feelings. And so, you know, if you put these two data points together, a boy who's decided, like, the most important thing, you know, in the world is to not be like a girl, and then it goes home, and the only person who's really doing a whole lot of feelings talk is their mother, it confirms their assumption that, like, oh, talking about feelings is for girls, and now we're off to the races of masculinity does not necessarily include talking freely about one's feelings. So the one solution, I'm sure there's others, is, uh-uh, uh, the men in boys' lives, be it their fathers or their coaches or their teachers or their uncles or their priests or whoever

need to talk about their own emotions, need to be curious about the boy's emotion. So this idea that feelings are for girls doesn't actually get reinforced at home. So you have a podcast called Ask Lisa. I do. It's called Ask Lisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens. And every week we just go through a letter from a family, a real letter, about one of the challenges that teenagers face or their family's face and just unpack it. What's been your most memorable or surprising question recently? You know, we're getting a lot about gambling.

There's a lot in the U.S., online gambling has been made legal, and unsurprisingly, because they like novelty. A lot of teenagers are gambling. And so this has become a big issue, and one again, it's gotten out ahead of us, and we need to find a way to reel it back in. What's your tips? My tips are you need to talk to kids about it, and need to help them understand the science of why gambling is addictive, you know, that it's really

designed to plug into our reward systems. It's designed to make us feel not like we lost, but like we almost won and you want to keep going. But it needs to be a conversation. Gosh, it never ends, doesn't it? We're worried about social media and then sports betting pops up. Yep, yep. No, I have a great job. There's always something new. All right, to cap us off, Lisa, thank you so much. your time and your wisdom, we're going to have a lightning round of oddball questions. What was your favorite title to a scientific paper that you read while researching this book? It's such a funny paper. It's an old psychoanalytic paper from the 70s, and the title is

nagging, spreading excitement, and arguing. And it's about the, I mean, it's like the language of it is very old school psychoanilatel. theory, but the resonant ongoing value of the paper is this idea that, like, sometimes when kids are stirred up on the inside, they just stir stuff up on the outside. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right, finish this sentence. Now that I know blank, I'll never look at blank the same way again.

Now that I know the neurological basis of why breathing calms anxiety, I will never look at my accelerated heart rate and my breathing the same way again. again. Oh my, tell me more. Yeah, no, I, whenever, like, whenever somebody be like, oh, you know, a really good solution for anxiety is breathing, I would be like, like, I'd roll my eyes. I'd be like that is like some woo-woo, you know, like not scientific stuff. But then when I was researching the book before the emotional lives of teenagers, it was

a book called Under Pressure, I came across this research paper about how our lungs have stretch receptors on the surface of our lungs that are there to make sure that we're breathing and they alert our brain if we're suffocating or not breathing well. So if we have a strong anxiety response, our amygdala, the ancient part of our brain, accelerates our breathing and picks up our heart rate to get more oxygenated blood out to our muscles. When we engage in deep breathing, we override that and we basically hack into the nervous system on the lungs and send it the message, okay, now we're breathing deeply and slow. slowly, those nerves recognize that as evidence of safety, and they send a message up to the brain saying,

you can turn off the anxiety alarm because we're breathing deeply and slowly. That means we're safe again. Wow. All right. Last question. What is the funnest object sitting in your house right now? So it's not an object, but it is my 15-year-old daughter. I have a very fun 22-year-old daughter, but she's a college. My 15-year-old is the funniest person I have ever met. she I'll give you this like all day it's like living with a comedian here's this was her yesterday she was at school and for some reason I think they had a substitute teacher so they were all in class taking like written driving tests like they were just trying them out and she's almost 15 and half so she will soon be able to get a driver's permit and she's like yeah I took a written driver's test today I was like

how to go she's like it is clear that I'm probably not safe to even be a passenger in somebody's car She was like, my understanding of driving seems to be that of a Dickensian urchin who has never seen a car. This is my kid all day. She is so funny. She is an absolute riot. She was talking about that she and her friends were looking for a gift for a teacher who she's been complaining about. And I was like, oh, I thought you weren't so keen on that teacher. She goes, yeah, no, no, it's sort of a mix of pity in Stockholm syndrome.

We're going to look for a gift for this guy. I mean like, no, she is like, I'm like trying to convince her not to go to college because I'm enjoying her so much. That is so lovely. And what a wonderful way to. She's very funny. Do what a wonderful way to finish off our chat about the teenage brain. Thank you so much, Lisa. I really, really appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me. This has been great. That was the fabulous Dr. Lisa DeMoor. Her latest book is The Emotional Lives of Teenage. and her podcast is called Ask Lisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens. Go check it out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time. My reg league goalie says he plays for the love of the game. You gave up six goals last week, Steve. Maybe play to win, huh? Like with Bet365. I get paid the second my team goes out big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. Steve, Bet365, the home of winning early.

Must be 19 and older. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsuntario.ca or call 18665 through 1,2,600. Terms and conditions apply.