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? Argue about everything? Do stupid risky things? Seem completely unmotivated?

Well, I hate to tell ya’, but you have a normal teenager. And in today’s episode I’ll explain what’s going on in your teen’s brain that causes them to seem like they don’t have a lick of sense (as we say down South).

Today I’m kicking off a 7-part series to help you understand the natural changes your teen is going through and the parenting skills you need to learn to manage this developmental stage without losing your mind or causing their behavior to spiral out of control. Actually, you can learn to become even closer and more connected and improve their behavior. Welcome to the fundamentals of parenting teens.

If you’re like I was and you don’t understand the natural changes our kids go through beginning with puberty, you’ll respond to those changes inappropriately, which leads to worse behavior and even more confusion and anxiety for you, which then causes you to crack down even harder, and things quickly 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, be sure to watch all the episodes in this series so you can hopefully avoid this spiral (or get out of it if you’re already there).

So, let’s talk about your kid’s behavior. People talk about “raging hormones” causing teens to go off the rails beginning in puberty but although hormones play a role, the bigger issue is what’s going on in their brain.

Scientists just discovered about 25 years ago that rather than the brain being all finished and fully developed by around age 6 like they’d previously thought…it actually starts sort of reprogramming at puberty and doesn’t finish until somewhere in the mid-20s. THIS is why adolescents think, feel and behave so differently than kids or adults.

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 this go-around, you have about 15 years of it. I know – cruel joke, right? Especially for moms who may be also in perimenopause.

But this is no picknick for them either. They’re at the mercy of their changing brain and they really don’t understand what’s happening. And if you don’t understand what’s happening, you can easily make things worse.

Having more empathy and learning to respond to the changes in their thoughts, feelings, and behavior, is what will help you get through these years with less conflict and more cooperation.

The biggest thing to remember here is 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.

Let me explain, in very basic terms. Just before puberty the brain’s frontal lobe sprouts billions of additional neural connections – connections between brain cells that communicate chemically and electrically between areas of the brain and between the brain and body. These connections are called synapses.

And then when puberty hits, these synapses start going through a process of strengthening the connections that are used most often and pruning away the connections that aren’t used. The process starts at the back of the frontal lobe and gradually moves towards the very front of the frontal lobe, called the prefrontal cortex, until it’s all done sometime around the mid to late 20s.

This strengthening and pruning process means that the brain is very pliable or “plastic” – the term is neuroplasticity…the brain is literally rewiring and shaping itself. You could say it’s very impressionable and much more open during this stage to learning new things. They can learn faster and better than they could in childhood or will be able to do in adulthood.

This means whatever your kid experiences, practices, studies or 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, or drinking alcohol. The brain makes no distinction between good and bad learning – 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 anything from learning a foreign language to drinking alcohol.

This is why you want to help your kid put off all of these negative behaviors as long as possible because for every year their frontal lobe advances in this process without them drinking or vaping or using drugs, the less likely it will become a habit or a problem for them later in life. This is a scientific fact…not a guess. It’s been shown that most adults who have a substance issue disorder began using that substance in early adolescence.

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, also avoiding the negative. And frankly, the more positive activities they’re involved in, the less time they have to spend on the negative.

Overscheduling is not a good thing, but supervised afterschool activities have been shown to keep kids out of situations where they have more opportunities to try substances or get involved in negative experiences.

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 – that last part of the frontal lobe that will go through this process. It’s too busy rewiring to do it’s job very well.

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, focusing attention, delaying gratification, behaving appropriately under specific circumstances, and most significantly, managing intense emotions, making good decisions, and using self-control.

Is this making sense for you now?

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

Think about it…if you have deficits in managing emotions, using self-control, and making good decisions, it’s going to be hard to stay OUT of trouble at school and at home. And guess what? If your kid has ADHD, anxiety, depression, or uses substances, they will have an even harder time with these skills.

Now as this pruning and strengthening continues in the frontal lobe and things start solidifying in the prefrontal cortex, (as they get closer and closer to their twenties), they will gradually get better at these executive functions. So, gradually they’ll get better and better at thinking, feeling and acting more like a rational adult-like human. But it’s very gradual.

And unfortunately, every person is different, depending on their genetic makeup, their environment, temperament, personality, developmental delays, mood disorders, trauma issues – so many factors.

This means some kids are capable of acting more like an adult at 15 while others still can’t manage it at 29.

And most kids will be able to do really 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 brain growth is not a linear process and people are not machines.

For instance, my son could spend hours reading and learning about political issues, but be completely unable to complete a simple homework assignment. You might see your kid be able to help a friend work through a difficult relationship issue with their parents but be totally unable to talk to you about their feelings. Or they may be able to make great grades in all AP classes, but they can’t seem to stop themselves from having a complete meltdown over their pants not fitting right. Again, this is because this brain stuff is not a steady progression towards the finish line.

And think about how many things in you teen’s life that are affected by an inability to regulate their emotions, a lack of self-control, or an inability 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 executive functions impact every aspect of their daily lives.

Here’s why I want you to understand this – because you have to put yourself in their shoes when they make a mistake or do something wrong. You have to see it from a developmental aspect…you have to evaluate each situation knowing how their brain works right now.

If you look at these situations from an adult vantage point and with the expectation that they think, feel, or can behave like you, then you’re doomed to make things worse. If you assume they have the same abilities that you do, then you’re going to see their behavior as dramatic, narcissistic, selfish, disrespectful, irrational, manipulative, irresponsible, lazy, ridiculous.

And when you think that way, with your fully-grown brain, from high upon your adult perch, you become incensed, frustrated, angry, fed-up, or afraid, anxious…and you lose it with your kid. You remind, question, snoop, lecture, argue, punish, 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, they would do better. They don’t want to be like this any more than you want them to be.

Their behavior is a combination of a) this neuroplasticity, which weakens their ability to use these executive functions, b) several other areas of their brain that are also going through big changes which make it even harder to use their prefrontal cortex, and c) your response to their 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 that are making it harder for their prefrontal cortex to do its job – it’s simple neurobiology, it’s fact, right?

But you can change your response – your behavior in response to their behavior. That’s all you can control – that’s it. You can’t control their thoughts, or emotions…and you can’t control their behavior…and if you’ve tried, you already know how that turned out…or maybe you haven’t 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. They have to want to cooperate with you.

I’ll talk more about your response and how to improve their behavior a little later in this series. But for now, I just want you to start accepting that pretty much any unpleasant, illogical, unacceptable behavior you see in your teen…is all about the changes going on in their brain and how you respond to them. I want you to tell yourself that they’re not doing this on purpose, that you haven’t failed somehow, and that things can and will get better when you change how YOU think, feel, and act towards them. To learn more about these brain changes, you can download my free guide, The Challenging Adolescent Brain – the link is in the description below.

Now, in part 2 of this series I’ll talk to you about a part of the brain that is super sensitive during adolescence and causes all sorts of negative emotions and behavior in your teens.