Last quarter, I wrote an article “Teens--- as Responsible People” and placed it on our CPS website. It is based on The Good Teen, a book by Professor Richard Lerner, PhD (New York: Crown Publisher, 2007). 

Let’s continue this theme by exploring the National Geographic Magazine (October, 2011, pp. 36-59) which highlights a cover article “The New Science of the Teenage Brain”.  Author David Dobbs opines that teenage “brains… take much longer to develop than we originally thought.” A study at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years.”  We originally thought that the brain was fully developed by the end of elementary school, say by age 12.  What current research shows, however, is that the brain is continually developing throughout the teenage years. 

Dobbs contends: “When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible.  But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily.”