Your teenager: an owner's manual

The brain behind the behaviour
While your teen may appear quite
grown-up on the outside, her brain isn't there yet. This may explain why she seems capable and responsible one day and totally goofy the next. Here are some findings that will help you better understand your teen.

• There is a dramatic spurt of growth in the brain's prefrontal cortex just before puberty followed by a pruning back in adolescence. What teens do during this time affects which neurons stay and which ones get ditched. The effects are pretty well permanent. For example, a teen involved in music, sports or academics will make and keep more neural connections than a teen who has spent day after day watching TV.

• The thinning process starts later in brighter children. This may explain your brilliant but awkward "late bloomer."

• The corpus callosum (the bridge between the two halves of the brain) grows rapidly before and during puberty, but falls off shortly thereafter. The corpus callosum has been shown to influence language learning and associative thinking.

• The cerebellum, which coordinates all mental and motor activity, continues to grow throughout adolescence.

• Perhaps due to their evolving brains, adolescents show higher physiological responsiveness to stress than adults.

Give your teen great life skills
Build resiliency in your teen by giving him or her many avenues for mastering challenges. Ron Clavier, a psychologist and author of Teen Brain, Teen Mind, suggests the following:

1. Enrol your teen in social organizations such as Scouts, where he will learn to meet simple challenges under the guidance of mentors and older kids.

2. Encourage participation in organized sports; teens learn teamwork and develop a sense of belonging to a group.

3. Acting in a school play, writing for the school newspaper, organizing the debating team or participating in a chess club also encourage risk-taking in a relatively safe environment.

4. Help your teen find more than one peer group. For example, enrol him in programs with students from other schools. He will be less susceptible to peer pressure from one group if he has other pals to fall back on.

5. A religious or traditional rite of passage ceremony for tweens or teens can help your child through the difficult years. For example, Jews celebrate coming of age with a bar or bat mitzvah at age 12 or 13. The child has to engage in several months of study and prepare a lesson to deliver to the congregation. The benefit -- other than a party afterward -- is that your child masters a difficult challenge at an age when he or she might not feel up to it.

Learn the facts about teen depression.

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