New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Rituals That Will Make You An Awesome Parent

The teen years. This is the age where one’s room can simultaneously resemble a FEMA disaster site and a meticulously curated museum of personal angst, each discarded clothing item a testament to a fleeting mood or an identity crisis.

What causes all the problems? The teenage brain. It’s a marvel of nature, a biological enigma wrapped in a riddle, encased in a skull that’s often adorned with questionable hairstyle choices. But say a word about it and you’ll invoke an eye roll so powerful it could shift the Earth’s axis.

But we need to have some sympathy for teens. We’ve all been there. Your body’s betraying you on a daily basis, your emotions are on a perpetual roller coaster, and the world expects you to make life-altering decisions about your future when you can barely decide what to have for breakfast. The billionaires are a lot younger these days and social media constantly reminds you you’re not one of them. A thousand things competing for the title of “Most Likely to Be Discussed in Therapy Years from Now.”

As a parent you’re primarily concerned with how to get them to do better in school. “I study better at night,” they claim, as if their brain only activates under the cover of darkness, ignoring the fact that “night” is code for “when you’ve gone to bed and can’t see me not studying.”

What are parents to do? Time to get some insight on how the teenage brain works and tips that might help you deal better with its often perplexing and infuriating behavior. Who has answers?

John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. And he specializes in gray matter issues. His book is “Attack of the Teenage Brain.”

Let’s get to it…

 

It’s All About “Executive Function”

The beauty of teenage logic is that it’s not encumbered by things like “forethought” or “consequences.” It operates on a higher plane, one where actions are driven by a complex algorithm of peer approval, immediate gratification, and the ever-potent “I dunno, it just sounds cool.”

Why are teen brains like this? Yeah, they’re not fully developed yet. But the key issue isn’t a lack of development; it’s uneven development. The limbic system, where emotions, impulses and passion are bubbling up from, is online by 15. The prefrontal cortex, the center of “Whoa, Nelly, maybe this isn’t a good idea” doesn’t fully mature until 25. Plain and simple, you’ve got about a decade where the gas works just fine but the brakes are iffy at best. Which is why you say, “Think of your future,” and they hear, “Blah blah blah, I’m older than YouTube.”

Actually, it’s even more extreme than that. Their nucleus accumbens, a region associated with pleasure and addiction, is about 7 percent bigger on average than it is in adults. Part of the maturation process is this area getting smaller and having fewer votes in the neural equivalent of Congress. So the brakes are flawed, the gas is working just fine – and the car has a turbocharger. Parents are nodding right now.

Obviously, it varies from kid to kid. And psychologists measure this level of insanity by what’s called “executive function.” It’s a collection of processes related to managing yourself and your resources in order to achieve a goal. Fancy pants terminology aside: it’s basically self-control.

Slice the data however you like, high scores on executive function predict success for both teens and adults. And that’s doubly impressive because, sadly, few other things do. As Roy Baumeister and Jon Tierney wrote: “When researchers compared students’ grades with nearly three dozen personality traits, self-control turned out to be the only trait that predicted a college student’s grade-point average better than chance. Self-control also proved to be a better predictor of college grades than the student’s IQ or SAT score.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Those with high executive function are more empathetic, had more friends, had fewer mental health problems, were less prone to anger and divorce. And they earned higher salaries.

What about low EF? Yeesh. Lousy grades and they had a higher likelihood of doing pretty much everything parents don’t want kids to do. More unprotected sex, more drugs, and a higher rate of being arrested. (They were even more likely to get kicked out of preschool. Yes, preschool.)

Bad news is that executive function is largely genetic and very heritable. Good news is, we do have a few levers we can pull…

 

Parenting Style

How you parent affects children’s stress levels and as stress goes up, EF goes down. Might sound obvious but this is no small thing — a teen’s home environment is actually a better predictor of their grades than their school environment is.

Diana Baumrind is one of the leading researchers on parenting styles and she says it all comes down to two factors: demandingness and responsiveness. Levels of these two produce the four methods by which moms and dads wrangle kids:

Authoritarian

This is when demandingness is high and responsiveness is low. These are the drill sergeants of the domestic domain. Their house runs on a tight schedule, discipline is non-negotiable, and the word “because” is a complete sentence. Many orders, little warmth, lots of punishment.

Indifferent

Here demandingness and responsiveness are both low. This is parenting via absentee ballot. These moms and dads are disengaged from their kids. The philosophy is, “If it’s not bleeding or on fire, it’s fine.” Kids aren’t very supervised and have few expectations placed on them. On the bright side, these kids could become remarkably self-sufficient… but mainly out of necessity.

Indulgent

This is when demandingness is low and responsiveness is high. They’re breeding spoiled kids. They want the approval of their chldren and rarely discipline them. These are the parents who think bedtime is a suggestion rather than a rule and that candy is a food group. The resulting teens look like “Lord of the Flies” but with Wi-Fi.

Authoritative

The right mix is when demandingness is high and responsiveness is high. With that, shining like a beacon of hope, reason, and balanced breakfasts, we have the Authoritative Parents. They’re firm but warm, like a benevolent dictator or a good Hogwarts headmaster. They have clear rules but still seek to increase teen autonomy and self-direction. Instead of resorting to “because I said so”, they talk things out with their adolescent charges and listen to input.

The result? These kids are the best students across the board. They have high academic expectations for themselves, solid school attendance rates, and they’re confident and inquisitive. If you want your child to be a better student, authoritative parenting is the way to go. (The worst performers come from authoritarian or indifferent households.)

Best part? No gene editing is required to see some benefits here. Even if being authoritative isn’t your natural setting, studies show when parents alter their behavior to act that way, kids saw the same benefits, especially in the areas of emotional stability and good grades.

But that’s not the only thing you can change around the house. This next thing can help your kids but has nothing (directly) to do with them at all…

 

Work On Your Marriage

Marriage: an institution that, at its best, is like a warm, comforting sitcom from the ’90s, and at its worst, is like that same sitcom but with the laugh track removed so all you’re left with is the eerie sound of people making terrible decisions in silence. Yes, how you deal with your spouse or co-parent ends up affecting your teens. Relationship stability, believe it or not, ends up affecting academic performance.

Persistent unresolved conflict between parents has been shown to nosedive EF scores in adolescents. It also affects how well they sleep and even their immune systems. And so, of course, we turn to the work of marriage expert John Gottman.

Over decades of study he’s learned more than a few things about good marriages. Conflict was common but positive interactions overwhelmed it, usually by 5 to 1. It’s okay to have tough times but you need to have a lot more good times. And happy couples engage in repair; they fight and then they make things right.

As I wrote about in my book, Gottman refers to the four uber-bad things that destroy marriages as The Four Horsemen:

• Criticism: Raising issues with your spouse is fine, but making it personal is toxic. Women are much more guilty of this. It’s the difference between “please take out the trash” and “you never take out the trash because you are a subhuman pig-man.”
• Stonewalling: And this is what men are more likely to do. Just shutting down and ignoring the other person’s concerns and feelings. The message conveyed is “I don’t care.”
• Defensiveness: They raise an issue and instead of addressing it, you fire back with another issue. And this makes them counterattack and then you counterattack and it just escalates until the number and intensity of problems collapses the space-time continuum and you end up in a quantum entanglement of endless screaming.
• Contempt: This is the worst of them all. It’s when you treat your spouse like they are beneath you. Sarcasm, eye rolls, dismissiveness. It’s the thing Gottman found to be the best predictor of divorce. Don’t do it.

The good news is two-fold. Reducing these behaviors is do-able and has big effects. Gottman found it reduced the likelihood of splitsville by 50%. Second, repair can work wonders. Many couples have plenty of horsemen running around but if they consistently apologized and made deliberate efforts to ameliorate the situation, they could have happy marriages, too. And happier marriages mean better kids.

Now getting your teen to be better at social interaction can be a challenge. So let’s hit them from another angle. The physiological one…

 

Exercise

Exercise has huge effects on your teen’s brain. It not only increases gray matter volume by 8%, it also boosts activity in the areas responsible for executive function. Final result? Working out for an hour a day had the potential to increase academic performance by a full letter grade. Not to mention exercise has profound effects in countering depression and anxiety — with some research showing it’s as powerful as medication.

Now here’s the twist: some studies show zero brain-boosting benefits from exercise. Huh? But the issue was more about brain than brawn…

“Mindless exercise” that had no intellectual or emotional aspects to it (like running or weight lifting) often produced no changes in EF. What does make a difference? Sports. They require concentration, planning, and problem solving. Students involved in team activities like soccer and basketball more commonly got the full benefits from their workouts and boosted executive function. (For tips on the best ways to exercise, click here.)

And what about the emotional side of things?

 

Mindfulness

Teenage emotions are like a rollercoaster that’s been designed by a sadist. One minute they’re up, the next they’re down, and sometimes they’re just screaming for no apparent reason.

Mindfulness teaches teens the revolutionary concept of actually stopping for a moment to breathe and notice their own thoughts, rather than being swept away in a tsunami of angst and drama. It’s like giving them a mental surfboard to ride the waves of their own mood swings.

Mindfulness practice gives teens four benefits, all of which they are very much in need of:

• Enhanced focus and attention: Do I need to explain why teens need more focus and attention? No? Good.
• Enhanced emotion regulation: This not only made teens more tolerable to people over 30 but also improved grades.
• Enhanced self-awareness and reduced narcissism: It helped them focus on something other than themselves which, frankly, you never thought was possible.
• Enhanced Functional Connectivity: Parts of their brains literally grow or shrink and interact in new and positive ways. Amygdalas got smaller, prefrontal cortexes got thicker, and behavior improved.

How do you provide them with these benefits? Here’s how to teach them to meditate.

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up and cover the much-debated issue of “screen time”…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to be an awesome parent:

• Executive Function: Teenagers embody a blend of fearlessness and what-the-hellery that adults can’t help but admire from the safe distance of hindsight and homeowner’s insurance. Their brains aren’t fully developed yet. The key to better behavior in school and elsewhere is in helping them increase executive function.
• Parenting Style: The right parenting reduces stress levels and boosts grades. Go for the authoritative style: high demandingness and high responsiveness.
• Work On Your Marriage: Avoid criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness and contempt. Good homes have a bigger effect on grades than good schools. If nothing else, it guarantees that your family dinners are more “Modern Family” than “Game of Thrones.”
• Exercise: It increases executive function, improves academic performance, reduces anxiety and, if nothing else, will render them too tired to cause you as much grief.
• Mindfulness: Boosts focus, emotion regulation, and self-awareness. And it’s perfect for lazy kids – all they have to do is breathe.

Screen time: the war waged in every 21st century household. Research is mounting that social media is the real problem here, with increasingly clear connections to teen mental health issues.

It makes sense when you think about it. On social media, status is constantly, ubiquitously quantified at every turn. Every post is a high stakes bet in the casino of public opinion. Social media is like being in a beauty pageant and a spelling bee at the same time. You’ve got to look perfect and sound smart (but not too smart, or you’re trying too hard). Teenagers have always dealt with pressure but previous generations didn’t have an omnipresent fear of doing something stupid and becoming a global meme with a dedicated subreddit.

I’m not going to say take the phone away or only allow one hour or three hours or whatever. The most important thing? Just make sure they get a regular break from it. It doesn’t just elevate anxiety and depression; it also reduces social skills. When kids spent five days without any screen-based media, their ability to recognize nonverbal emotional cues shot up. If you want calm, more empathetic kids, make sure they spend some time away from the screens.

Yes, you’ll hear sighs so deep, they could start their own weather systems but your prize will be the absence of that sinking feeling in your stomach when you see the school’s number on your caller ID.

Give these tips a shot and with time, you’ll see positive changes that both you and your adolescents will appreciate. When your teenagers are calm, happy, and doing well in school, it’s like you’ve suddenly found yourself in a Disney movie. And not one of those old-school Disney movies where the parents are either dead or missing. No, I’m talking about the kind where animals clean your house and everyone breaks into song over breakfast. It’ll be wonderful.

But as things improve, do try to maintain a veneer of nonchalance because, you know, appearing too excited and happy is just so very very uncool.