Are the cards stacked against our teens?
If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. From researcher Dr. Stan Kutcher: “you have a turbo-charged car with an inexperienced driver.”
He wasn’t talking about graduated licenses, drunk drivers or racecar wannabes. His comment and the codicil – ‘that’s what the adolescent brain is like’ – was part of International Brain Awareness Week in Halifax last week.
Just so you know, Dr. Kutcher is an internationally renowned expert in the area of adolescent mental health and a national and international leader in mental health research, advocacy, training, policy, and health services innovation. He’s also the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health and Director of the WHO Collaborating Center in Mental Health Training and Policy Development at Dalhousie University. It goes without saying he knows his stuff.
I came across his comments in a Daily News article Saturday and haven’t stopped thinking about them since. I’ve often wondered how the brain works, particularly when we’re under stress or involved in significant life changes. We react to such stimuli at a core level and invariably have an emotional response to the events unfolding around us.
Perception, chemistry and genetics each play a role, but what if we’re hard-wired to react in a certain way? What if our brains are working constantly at breakneck speed, pumping out hormones and processing new data and/or impressions at a meteoric pace?
Add to this peer pressure, a sense of self-worth (or not) and everyone clamouring to figure out your life for you and you have nothing short of tumult.
To my mind, there are few experiences to rival what teenagers go through physically, emotionally and mentally during adolescence, and to liken it to an inexperienced driver behind the wheel of a muscle car is pretty dramatic.
As well, I’m a visual guy. Description provokes a mental picture for me and the one that came to mind after reading Kutcher’s line was a cartoon I saw when I was a kid.
I’m sure you’ve seen it or something like it, especially if you’ve read any comic books. There’s a guy jammed into a funny car with huge mufflers pouring smoke and the wheels spinning. His eyes are bloodshot and bulge wildly from an unnaturally large head. Drool slicks his chin and his teeth would rival the Big Bad Wolf’s in “Little Red Riding Hood”.
He’s the epitome of Meat Loaf’s “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” (Bat Out of Hell, 1977).
What it suggests to my imagination is something very nearly if not totally out of control and I wonder if that’s what it feels like for teens. It can’t be easy, especially if the cards are stacked in terms of brain activity. As level and intelligent as any young man or woman can be, each is clearly at the mercy of chemistry and environment, with the two likely ganging up from time to time to really mess you up.
I’m flashbacking on my high school years and realizing that a lot of what I felt then was the product not only of what was going on inside me, but what was happening around me. Teens are bound by the twain and, unfortunately, there’s no escape.
Luckily for me, I found release in the sports world and hockey in particular, which is where I would guess a lot of spleen (among other stuff) was vented.
No one would argue – especially someone living with a teenager at the moment – that parents have their hands full when it comes to raising adolescents.
But if Kutcher’s right, we need to drill a little deeper and recognize that as much as any parent has to deal with, the kids themselves have a plateful, too. And a lot of it involves things they may not understand or prompt questions for which they have no immediate answer.
I think parents and teens are in it together – linked inextricably - and the more one communicates with the other the better chance each has to ride out any turbulence.
It sounds simple, but the reality is it’s damn hard work. And the option of merely taking the keys from that turbo-charged car is ludicrous. Each vehicle has its own locks and every key is completely individual.
