Braaaaaiiiinnnsss!!

There’s an article that identifies young children with puppies; plastic and willing to please the parents. While teenagers are more like cats; temperamental and only willing to be with you if you play hard to get. They're moody, fidgety, and usually don't like to be held for long periods of time. I myself get antsy whenever my mom hugs me for longer than 3 seconds. I don't know; that might just be a personal thing, and not so much a generalized one.

Teens are difficult to deal with. I help lead a small group of high school freshman from my church, and my patience is always worn thin by the end of each session. I've never heard so many dirty jokes in one sitting. Nor have i heard so much talk about Justin Beiber. So kudos to any parent willing to take on that venture for the rest of their life. My hat's off to you. I can handle kids, especially ones who can't talk back (or ask me questions non-stop; "why does this do that?", "what are you doing?", "who's that?"). But i can only handle teens for an hour at a time, once a week. This is partly because they bring so much unnecessary drama to the table, and i have to spend most of the session clearing it off so we can focus on the task at hand. I'm hoping when i get older and decide to have kids of my own i'll be prepared to deal with this.

I was REALLY fascinated by the new information they're coming out with now about teen brains and how their growth and emotionality aren't due to hormones, but to the stage of development their frontal lobe is at. I had no idea we weren't finished growing/pruning our brain cells at 18 years. We could be pruning on our deathbed. In high school i was under the impression that we were done growing at 18. In reference to week 5's topic, the hurried child, i don't think children are hurried to grow up, so much as teenagers are, at least for my generation (the college years, around 18-23). In an interview with Jay Giedd, he says, "I think that [in the teen years, this] part of the brain that is helping organization, planning and strategizing is not done being built yet ... [It's] not that the teens are stupid or incapable of [things]. It's sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision making before their brain is finished being built". It's like expecting a house to stand up without framework. And what's worse is that adolescents subject themselves to this, and even do it to themselves; jumping ahead without laying out a foundation. We push ourselves to do things like get tattoos, smoke, drink, etc, just so we can pretend we're grown-ups. It's foolish, but unfortunately widely accepted.