Does your tween or teen act like they’d rather be swallowing razor blades than be near you? Do they treat you like a low-level employee who can’t do much of anything right? Do they rebuff your advice? Seem angry all the time? Bite your head off for nothing? Argue about everything? Have a horrible attitude? Talk back, take too many chances, aren’t motivated to study, just want to play video games, scroll TikTok or hang out in their bedroom?

Well, I really hate to have to tell you this, but you have a quite normal kid. I literally just named some of the most common answers I get when I ask parents coming into the Facebook group, what they’re struggling with regarding their teens.

But when we don’t understand the natural changes our kids go through beginning with puberty, we end up responding to those changes inappropriately, which leads to worse behavior in our teens and tweens and even more confusion and anxiety for us, which then leads us to respond even more inappropriately, and things just spiral out of control.

It’s a cycle so many families fall into really early during a kid’s adolescence and then never seem to find their way out of.

So, I’ve decided to record a series over the next several episodes, on the “basics” that you need to understand so you can parent your teens in a way that keeps this spiral from occurring (or gets you out of it, if you’re already circling the drain.)

In today’s episode I want to explain why, between the ages of 10 or 12 and on up until their mid-20s, our kids just seem to not have a lick a sense (as we say down South). Stay with me – we’re going to talk about what’s going on in that noggin of theirs.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that that teaches you the science of parenting adolescents so you can be less stressed and more excited about having a teenager. I’m Ann Coleman, I’m an attorney turned parent educator and I’ve spent years studying the science of teen behavior and I want to help you learn how to parent your teens for the best possible outcome.

Scientists didn’t even realize until about 25 years ago that it’s not just “raging hormones” that cause adolescents to think, feel and behave so differently beginning with puberty.

What they discovered was that rather than the brain being all finished and fully developed by around age 6 like they’d previously thought, the brain starts sort of reprogramming at puberty and keeps that up until somewhere in the mid-20s.

And this process is a whole lot like the process that took place in the brain from birth to about age three. You remember toddlerhood, right? Yeah – pretty much the same thing here. Except that this go around, you have about 15 years of it. I know – cruel joke, right?

But not only for you – for them too. They are at the mercy of this changing brain and more often than not, it doesn’t feel great to be them. They don’t understand what’s happening and because you don’t understand what’s happening, you can easily make things worse for them.

Having more empathy and learning to respond to these changes, is what will help you get through these years with less conflict and more joy.

I want you to understand first and foremost that they cannot help neurobiology. You can’t stop thousands of years of evolution – it is the way it is in there because it serves a purpose – which admittedly worked better back in the caveman days, but it still serves a purpose today.

What happens at the beginning of puberty is that the neural connections (the connections between their brain cells) in the frontal lobe of their brain – they start this process that will continue until they’re around 25 or so. And during this process, their brain is much more open to learning new things. They can learn faster and better than they could in childhood or that they will be able to in adulthood.

This means whatever your kid experiences, practices, does over and over, during adolescence, it gets hard wired into their brain. Now that’s great as long as they’re studying algebra or practicing the violin or learning how to play tennis. But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword because, the same is true for less than desirable activities such as vaping, smoking weed, drinking alcohol. The brain makes no distinction between good and bad experiences – it’s an equal opportunity learner.

And once their brain is hard-wired for these experiences, this “knowledge” is more likely to last until adulthood.

But the opposite is also true, if they don’t learn something in adolescence, they are less likely to be able to learn it in adulthood – again, that’s algebra or drinking alcohol.

This is why you want to help your kid put off all of these negative behaviors as long as possible because every year their brain is growing without trying these things, it’s less likely they will have a problem with it in adulthood.

That’s why it’s so important for our teens to be involved in as many positive activities, and exposed to as many positive influences, and environments as possible…while at the same time, avoiding the negative. And frankly, the more positive activities they’re involved in, the less time they have to spend on the negative

Now, the other thing to understand about this process the brain goes through during adolescence is that it causes a general weakness of the prefrontal cortex.

And this is really significant: the prefrontal cortex is what some refer to as the “thinking brain” – it’s the part of the brain that manages executive functions like organizing thoughts, reasoning, solving problems, planning ahead, changing plans on the fly, focusing attention, ignoring distractions, multi-tasking, watching out for errors, making quick decisions, delaying gratification, managing intense emotions, behaving appropriately under specific circumstances, and most significantly, making good decisions, and using self-control.

Is this coming together for you now?

These executive function skills are the very skills they need for school, maintaining relationships, staying out of trouble, and doing almost everything required of them every day.

And those last two - self-control and making good decisions  - are the two skills that teens need the most to stay out of trouble and keep moving forward in life and they just can’t manage either one, a lot of the time.

Now as this process in the brain continues and they get closer and closer to their mid-twenties, these connections are getting more solid and many of the executive functions increase – they get better. So, gradually they’ll get better and better at thinking, feeling and acting more like an actual rational person!

But unfortunately, every kid is different, depending on their genetic makeup, environment, temperament, personality, developmental delays, mood disorders – so many factors.

Some kids are capable of making very rational and adult-like decisions at 15 while others still can’t manage it at 29.

AND most kids will be able to do well in some circumstances and not so well in others – and they might even do well with something one day and not so well at the same thing, tomorrow. It can be a bit of a roller coaster – this is not a linear process.

There are so many things in you teen’s life that are impacted by a lack of self-control and the ability to make good decisions. Managing their emotions, avoiding conflict, not talking in class, stopping themselves from driving too fast, choosing to study for a test rather than playing video games – these skills impact everything.

Here’s why I want you to understand this – because you’re not putting yourself in their shoes when they make a mistake or do something wrong – and you should be.

You’re looking at the situation from your vantage point – your point of view. And from where you’re standing, you see their behavior as irrational, manipulative, silly, irresponsible, lazy, ridiculous.

And when you think that way, with your fully-grown brain, from high upon your perch, you become incensed, frustrated, angry, fed-up and you lose it with your kid. You lecture, argue, fight, and you build an antagonistic relationship with them. And once this starts, it only gets worse – their behavior, your behavior, and your connection with them.

It’s really easy to think, as an adult, “why can’t they just do this?”, “they should know better”, “they’re being hard-headed”, “what’s wrong with them?” “why would they even try that?” “they’re never going to make it in the real world”, “they’ll be living with us forever”.

And these thoughts might be valid and justified if your teen’s brain was fully functional like yours. But it isn’t. It’s nothing like yours.

It’s not their choice to be irrational, to be able to do some things better than others, to make a good decision one day and not be able to the next, to fall apart when you tell them no, to be disrespectful, to be demanding, rude or mean. If they could do better, the would do better.

Their behavior is a combination of a) this process going on in their brain, which weakens their ability to use the executive functions, b) several other areas of their changing brain that give their prefrontal cortex a real run for its money, and c) your response to their emotions and behavior.

And guess which one of those 3 things you can do anything at all about?

You can’t change the process going on in their brain, or the other parts of the brain and how they make it even harder for the prefrontal cortex to do its job – it’s simple neurobiology, right?

But you can change your response to their emotions and behavior. That’s all you can control – that’s it. You can’t control their emotions, you can’t control their behavior (and if you’ve tried, you already know how that turned out…or maybe you   yet accepted that you can’t control them. In that case, I’ll go ahead and tell you a secret; by the time your kid reaches puberty, all your influence in their life is through the connection you have with them – there is no more absolute control – not without more problems than you can possibly handle for both your teen and you.

I’ll talk more about your response to their behavior a little later in this series.

But for now, just understand that pretty much any unpleasant, illogical, unacceptable behavior you see in your teen…is all about the changes going on in their brain. There are ways to deal with it, but we’re not there yet.

In the next episode I’ll talk you about a part of the brain that is super sensitive during adolescence and causes all sorts of issues for your teens (and for you, of course).

Thanks for listening, stay tuned for the rest of the series – the next episode drops on Tuesday. If you got something out of the show today, please share it and let your friends know about this series.

And if you would like to learn more about how to successfully parent your teen, meet with me and other folks in the thick of parenting adolescents and have an opportunity to ask questions of other experts and challenge yourself to be the best parent you can be…join me in Parent Camp.