The Brain Development of the College-Bound…
I just posted a new page to my website. The “Scary Statistics” page is a look at college life by the numbers. And yikes….it is scary!
When I speak to parents one-on-one about their college-bound child, they often say, “Well, we raised Johnny the right way. He isn’t like all the other teens out there.” You may have raised him right, but from a neurological development standpoint, he’s probably just like every other college-bound student out there: an adult body matched with a brain that still has a child’s ability to reason and determine consequences. As the scary statistics indicate, that’s a bad combination.
College Drinking, Sexual Activity, and the Science Behind It
Scientists from Harvard Medical School, Yale, UCLA, the National Institute of Mental Health, and others have teamed up to map out adolescent brain development and get a clearer picture of what reasoning tools a teen may have. Here is a quick snapshot of what they have learned. The scientists were surprised by their findings…
- The teen brain undergoes an intense overproduction of gray matter (the brain tissue that does the “thinking”)
- Gray matter “pruning” takes place, white matter develops, and the new brain circuitry allows for more precise operation.
- The frontal lobe (the reasoning center) undergoes more development and change during adolescence than any other stage of life.
- Teen decisions are heavily based on emotions because of a lack of the brain’s ability to determine and evaluate consequences of their actions
- The “understanding consequences” piece of the brain doesn’t fully develop until the early to mid-20s
Many of the scientists who participated in this research were very surprised at two things in particular: the amount of development of the frontal lobe (decision-making, reasoning) part of the brain during the teen years, and how far behind that part of the brain is compared to the other parts of the brain during the teen years. This is the very last part of the brain to develop.
The implication? The teen brain is not well equipped to determine consequences of independent living during the college years.
(For more on this study, click here.)
How to Prepare Your Child for College: Make Life Lessons Shake Teen Emotions
The study mentioned above mapped out the brain well enough to determine that teens (including the college-bound) make their decisions based upon emotion. Stop for a second. Stop. Now, think of all the life lessons you would like to teach your college-bound student. Money, sex, alcohol, responsibility, integrity, spiritual congruency. For each life lesson that needs to be taught, the mechanism for teaching it must reach your teens on an emotional level. If the lesson doesn’t reach their emotions (where their decision-making is made), it won’t help them to make the right decision when the time comes to make the right choice.
Conceptually, this is a big deal. If you are a parent, teacher, or youth leader, I hope this significance of this shakes you to the core. Immersive teaching strategies, full with experiences that hit teens on an emotional level, are necessary in order to impact the decision-making of a teen.
To give you an idea as to how much this has impacted my work with teens and parents, I have completely scrapped the current manuscript of my next book for parents. I have started over. College preparation needs to be immersive. It needs to hit the emotions of teens.
If you spend five minutes with a teen, you will be reminded quickly that they think very differently than adults. VERY differently. Let’s double down on our efforts to meet them on their most important level: their decision-making level.
Bring sex to life at a teen pregnancy center. Money lessons may be best taught at the pawn shop, in the rough part of town, or in a credit counseling center. Wake up emotions regarding talents and careers in a cubicle, on stage, and in extreme corners of the workforce.
Teens need to feel the consequences of teen sex and pregnancy. They need to feel the consequences of credit card debt. Teens need to get hard-wired to the design of their talents and the implications of their skill set on the world.
It is our job to positively impact the brain development of the college-bound. It is our job to help them feel their way through the most challenging part of their development.
Adam Erwin has written two books on the transition from high school to college. He works with teens and their parents who want to better prepare for college. Visit adamerwin.com to learn more about Adam’s books and work.
