Sex, Brains,
Sex, Brains,
and Video
Games
A Librarian’s Guide
to Teens in the
Twenty-first Century
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Chicago 2008
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information
appearing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accuracy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication.
Composition by ALA Editions in Electra and Sans using InDesign 2 for a PC platform.
Printed on 50-pound white offset, a pH-neutral paper stock, and bound in 10-point cover stock by McNaughton & Gunn.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burek Pierce, Jennifer.
Sex, brains, and video games : a librarian’s guide to teens in the twenty-fi rst century / Jennifer Burek Pierce.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-0951-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8389-0951-5 (alk. paper)
1. Libraries and teenagers —United States. 2. Adolescence—United States. 3. Teenagers—United States. I. Title.
Z718.5.B87 2008
027.62'6--dc22 2007021926
Copyright © 2008 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8389-0951-5 ISBN-10: 0-8389-0951-5
Printed in the United States of America
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
Introduction 1
C H A P T E R O N E
Myths and the American Teen 13
C H A P T E R T W O
Taking On the Teen Brain: Scientific
Perspectives on Adolescence 21
C H A P T E R T H R E E
The Wired Generation: Connections
and Limitations 50
C H A P T E R F O U R
Teen Sex: Facts and Fictions 86
C H A P T E R F I V E
Living in a Multicultural World:
Diversifying Perspectives on
Adolescence 110
C H A P T E R S I X
Concluding Thoughts on Working
with Teens in Libraries 120
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In writing a first book, one learns how much the seemingly individual author depends on the support of others. Considerable thanks are due these friends and colleagues. Among them, Mary K. Chelton, my editor for a previous essay on adolescence, has proved a steadfast and gracious mentor in publish-ing and other scholarly endeavors. Thanks to her and to publisher Ed Kurdyla for permission to revisit the chapter on adolescent sexual and reproductive health information seeking, which Scarecrow Press
published in early 2007. My gratitude to American
Libraries editor and publisher Leonard Kniffel for many years of kind encouragement and advice, as well as his permission to include selected work first published in the magazine, is substantial. The patient and thoughtful encouragement of Laura Pelehach, my editor for this project, is likewise much appreciated, as is the attention of copy editor Cynthia Fostle. Beverly Goldberg and Andrew Ho provided feedback that helped me move forward with confidence, and Bethany Templeton’s untir-ing efforts in obtainuntir-ing articles and corralluntir-ing my errant citations were essential to completing this manuscript. Thanks, too, to Emily Pawley, who at Christmas 2005 told me to stir the mince pie filling and make a wish.
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s a friend and I planned a casual outdoor dinner one summer night, she offered the following head count: “We’ve got six adults, three kids, and possibly two aliens.” It’s not that she anticipated that the Mid-west might become a landing site for extraterrestrials. “Aliens” was her label for the teens of the household, who were as likely to be lured away from home by a spontaneous call from friends or simply to avoid the gathering even without competing invitations as to join us for our traditional Memorial Day barbecue. It was said affectionately and with laughter, yet this characterization of teens reflected a certain amount of bewilderment—and tolerance—for the changes that were taking place in their lives. It implied questions like Who are these young people? It acknowledged the sometimes sudden and seemingly unpredictable changes in teens’ behavior. It suggested the difficulty of knowing what is going on in adolescents’ lives and minds. If this is how parents, present in their lives from the beginning, feel about adolescents, how are those of us who work in libraries, who may see teens only sporadically and for short periods, supposed to work effectively with them?
This book seeks, perhaps ambitiously, to address these and other ques-tions about adolescent development based on contemporary research. It draws on the fact that many individuals are asking questions about adoles-cent development. While having the potential to inform library services to young adults, much of this research is itself relatively young and in
Introduction
formation, meaning that there are limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from it. This book acknowledges those limits and considers previ-ous norms of librarianship as they form a basis for contemporary services to young people. At root, then, this book explains what others who work with adolescents have learned from their professional activities, how that knowledge might revise our thinking about teens, and how to encourage new priorities and partnerships in youth services.
The Purpose of Young Adult
Services, Then and Now
Library services to young adults should aspire to two fundamental objectives: to engage young people through meaningful and ap-pealing responses to their recreational and informational needs, and to simultaneously support good developmental outcomes. This dual pur-pose creates a balancing act for library professionals as they try to figure out what teens want while giving them what they need. These aims may appear straightforward, reflecting a common-sense approach to serving young people, and in fact, advocates of youth services have long espoused these aims. Think of Samuel S. Green’s description of youth services when he wrote, “I would also have in every library a friend of the young, whom they can consult freely when in want of assistance, and who, in ad-dition to the power of gaining their confidence, has knowledge and tact
enough to render them real aid in making selections.”1 Yet what it means
to carry out the work of, on the one hand, making the library a welcom-ing environment for teens, while on the other, helpwelcom-ing to make them into reasonable and healthy adults, has varied considerably over time. A quick glance at the profession’s past offers examples of the ideas librarians have had about youth services that contrast starkly with our own.
In the earliest years of the profession, librarians were concerned that their young patrons read too much and wanted the wrong sorts of books. The 1879 complaints of one Mary A. Bean against young people’s “craze for books” and “indiscriminate reading” were as laudable to her
contemporaries as they are laughable to us.2 Bean’s concerns, now so far
on adolescent psychology would appear. Then, the author of Adolescence
would become a prominent speaker at library and education conferences in the early twentieth century, cautioning librarians and teachers about the damage that could come about as the result of young people’s reading habits. To Bean and her contemporaries, adolescents were sometimes try-ing but not unsympathetic individuals who could be encouraged to like what was good for them by improving their taste from its youthful fixation on romances or adventure stories to an appreciation of the classics that showed real discernment. In other words, teens—who would not have been known by that name and instead were included in references to boys and girls—were unformed but educable, as long as they didn’t linger under the influence of the wrong sorts of books.
Early youth services librarians in this country were not hostile to teens, only very much concerned with their well-being as reflected by their reading habits. There was dialogue about adolescent boys and girls and the ways their needs differed from those of younger children. Librar-ians strove to shape young minds in ways that would support the develop-ment of adult lives and careers, not unlike the way their contemporaries in Progressive Era reform worked to improve society by putting forward new ideas as well as bringing about actual changes in people’s living conditions. Despite these advances, pleasure in light reading remained largely suspect because of its apparent failure to contribute to enlightened thinking. There was the potential that frivolous or racy books would not only damage young people’s futures in this life but also damn them in the next. In 1895, George Cole warned librarians that
nowadays a child who can read will read; and if we do not lead and direct his taste, the enemy, who is ever lying in wait for poor, faltering humanity, will give the child abundant oppor-tunity of the knowledge of evil; and this evil, whose knowledge is death to the soul of every pure boy or girl, is crowding us at every corner of life.3
In the late nineteenth century, librarians working with young people seemed to bear an ominously weighty responsibility for their patrons’ fu-tures. Teens’ judgments were inadequate to the task of identifying their own recreational reading matter, and librarians became their protectors against books that threatened mind, body, and soul alike.
with foolish thoughts. If teens read for pleasure, we’re delighted, whether they choose glossy magazines or a favorite title that we’ve enjoyed. We encourage them and protect their rights to a wide range of materials, as declared in documents as old as the 1953 Freedom to Read statement and
as recent as the 2006 ALA letter opposing the Deleting Online Predators
Act of 2006 (HR 5319, 109th Cong.).4 We’ve turned, over the years, from guarding teens’ tender minds to launching them into a brave new world of information and entertainment resources. This stance is intended to reflect respect for the young person’s growing autonomy as he or she wres-tles to create an independent and newly adult identity.
The professional literature in our journals and magazines extends this theme in other directions. There are expressions of concern about incur-sions against young people’s rights to privacy: Should parents be able to review library records to see what books their child has borrowed? Does this change when fines or replacement fees are incurred? Can parents limit the materials to which their child has access, whether this involves books with content of which parents disapprove or R-rated DVDs? Is it a violation of professional ethics to allow parents, as at least a few librar-ies quietly do, to request special library cards that restrict their children to checking out material from the children’s collection? Should parents or guardians be involved in reference transactions? Many writers in the profession have argued that young people’s rights merit absolute defense; some have even suggested that it may be parents against whom teens need to be protected. The hypothetical situation of an abused young person try-ing to find help at the library is a specter that has been raised more than once. How could one argue with the idea of meeting young people on their own terms when the people most responsible for ensuring their well-being might harm them? These ideas about teens’ needs evoke a compel-ling image of the young person as independent, perhaps even abandoned by their traditional caregivers; lacking safe places and well-intentioned advisors; without resources . . . aside from what might be found at the public library. It’s more than a truism to say we’ve come a long way since the profession started; it is indisputably true, and it is time to evaluate the ways our professional actions serve teens’ needs and interests.
their politics, or the color of their skin. In an effort not to repeat those dark times, we have articulated goals of providing services to all, including young people. We have statements of user rights, with names that echo our most foundational documents of national governance. We promote access to information and freedom to read in a Library Bill of Rights and similar statements supporting individual opportunities for access. There is training in serving the underserved. These and other activities show librarians’ commitment to connecting young people and ideas of many sorts and in many forms, of meeting obligations to young people that oth-ers have neglected.
Yet this enthusiasm for equality of users and unfettered access to infor-mation overshadows other components of the profession’s past—chiefly, an awareness of the relevant expertise of other fields. When psychologist
G. Stanley Hall published his two-volume work Adolescence in 1904, some
have argued, he invented both adolescence and adolescent psychology.5
Librarians were among those who considered the advice of the first ado-lescent psychologist as they grappled with efforts to serve and to guide the young people who entered their facilities. As the twentieth century wore on, efforts to understand teens persisted. A writer for Publishers’ Weekly in 1929 observed, “Of recent years the adolescent girl has been much in the public eye. Her psychology, her behavior problems, her needs, all have
been discussed at great length.”6 Librarians of that era were encouraged
to follow these discussions. Together, the American discovery of adoles-cence and the reform impulses of the Progressive Era engaged librarians’ interests in finding ways to support young people’s development.
Many ideas about youth services put forth by Progressive Era librar-ians, among whom even Bean and Cole could be numbered, would strike few of us as truly progressive. Yet as the Progressive Era unfolded, these librarians did something right in seeking out the ideas and advice of those whose research in the social and behavioral sciences would contribute to their ability to work effectively with young people. They understood that their own professional training could and should be supplemented by those who had other kinds of information about teens. They believed that their work with adolescents would be improved by seeking out ideas beyond the boundaries of their own field. Educators and psychologists were among the experts these professionals consulted, but these librarians also monitored prominent general-readership magazines that from time to time published commentaries about young people and books.
core values and enduring principles. While the profession’s past and present values are far from irrelevant, I argue that professional service to young adults is far more complex than the ideals we espouse as librarians. To work toward the ends of engaging youth and encouraging their well-being, librarians must have an informed understanding of adolescence. More than personal memories of that sometimes strange and awkward time, librarians’ sense of what it means to be an adolescent should derive from contemporary research that offers changing and even challenging perspectives about our young clientele. More than knowledge of cur-rent young adult titles, the latest teen enthusiasms, or even the library and information science research literature should inform a young adult librarian’s professional practice. The work of other disciplines is essential to understanding teens in the twenty-first century, and it can help us as we think about the issues involved in balancing our efforts to connect with teens and to support their transition into adult life.
W H O I S A Y O U N G A D U L T ?
A GLOSSARY
Toward the end of a recent ALA Conference panel for young adult librarians, one practitioner brought up this question: Who is the young adult? The problem, she observed, was that different people seemed to describe entirely different age groups when using the phrase librarians have adopted for patrons between the ages of twelve and eighteen. What was a young adult librar-ian to make of this confusion? she asked. How were young adult librarians to know when someone talking about young adults was actually talking about young adults? This librarian was cor-rect in noticing that the people who are called young adults don’t always belong to the group whom she intends to serve; further, the young clientele of young adult departments may be given different names as well.
dis-ciplines, including public health and psychology, refer to the group we call young adults as adolescents. Adolescence has been divided into three phases—early, middle, and late—to ac-knowledge the developmental differences between a thirteen-year-old and an eighteen-thirteen-year-old. Still, there may indeed be instances when other fields use our preferred term or the co-hort that an individual writer describes includes teens as well as slightly older individuals; however, the surest assumption when someone outside the profession uses young adults to describe a group is that this person refers to individuals who are no lon-ger of middle school or high school age. To these and other re-searchers, young adults are eighteen and older; in other words, they are those who have rather recently gained legal status as adults in the United States. The combined newness of their sta-tus as adults and their age relative to others in the cohort makes them young adults.
Professions Invested
in Adolescence: Information
Sources and Potential Partners
Who are these people with interests in teens and their develop- mental outcomes? What information do they have that can help us to help teens? Researchers in a number of disciplines have sought to learn more about young adults as media consumers, computer users, health-care recipients, and even simply as growing and changing individ-uals. Similarly, educators share some of our concerns about young peo-ple’s literacy. These fields are identified and described briefly in order to offer an overview of information sources that may be useful to librarians. In some cases, practitioners in these fields may be potential partners for librarians who want to draw on content-area expertise to support outreach and other programming for young adults.
Communication researchers are strongly interested in teens’
involve-ment with mass media. Their definition of mass media encompasses
tele-vision and radio, magazines and newspapers, the World Wide Web and video games, and even movies, music, and blogs. These researchers use diverse methods to see what programs and pages attract teen attention, what teens make of the media, and what effects media consumption has on teens. The processes by which media create their effects are also of sig-nificant interest. Consequently, communication researchers know about what media teens turn to and what their brains make of the information available through all sorts of communication channels.
Additionally, some communication researchers focus on interper-sonal communication, or the interactions that occur between two people or sometimes small clusters of individuals. These researchers can deter-mine patterns of expression and barriers to effective communication. As aspects of teens’ distinctive development become recognized, scholars of interpersonal communication have begun to consider the implications of cross-generational conversation and related issues.
focus on the reproductive and risk-taking behaviors that tend to distin-guish teens from younger children. Based on behavioral assessments and other research, these studies identify the kinds of health information that young people need and also consider teens’ information-gathering prac-tices. This results in a rich body of literature that can enhance librarians’ efforts to offer teens meaningful and appropriate materials that address their developmental needs.
Since G. Stanley Hall argued that adolescents were a distinctive population who were undergoing a sort of rebirth that resulted in emo-tional and intellectual turbulence while the processes of change worked themselves out, psychologists have been interested in teenagers. In the twenty-first century, researchers in adolescent psychology have consider-ably more tools at their disposal than did the field’s pioneers at the start of the twentieth century. One specialized research area is neuropsychology, which examines “the relation between brain and human cognitive,
emo-tional, and behavioral function.”9 Some neuropsychologists use magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) and other new technology to capture images of the brain that provide insights into which parts of the brain are active or changing at different times. Other kinds of studies are also contributing to a changed understanding of adolescence. Because much of this research is still new, researchers sometimes find themselves reporting observations that contradict previous thinking, but they are not yet able to provide specific recommendations that might guide our interactions with teens. Nonetheless, the recent and ongoing work in psychology significantly re-vises the theories of Piaget and other developmental psychologists whose models have been used to explain youth development.
Education research, like the research undertaken in psychology, em-ploys a range of methods and comprises numerous special areas. Some work taking place includes scrutiny of newer genres, like graphic novels, as means of encouraging reluctant readers. Some researchers are consid-ering the effects of video games on young people’s cognition. These find-ings regarding literacy and learning are of potential use for librarians.
interdisciplinary field; this turns out to be true of working with young readers as well.
Understanding Adolescence,
Here and Now
There is increasing attention to youth development, and there are many efforts to follow the emerging understandings of young people, not just in academia but in the popular press as well. Magazine covers and news stories call attention to the ways that young people in the twenty-first century differ from previous generations, if not because of what these teens and tweens know and do, then because of what is newly known about them. A glance at newsstand offerings shows publications
like Harper’s and even the New Yorker joining the conversation that
oth-ers, including Newsweek and the Washington Post, have made a
recur-ring feature in recent years. There are discussions of how the brain grows and changes, whether girls’ and boys’ brains harbor sex-linked differences, teens’ sleep patterns and alertness, and the social environments in which adolescents operate, including online activities carried out through
social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. One 2006 New
Yorker cover showed a back-to-school-destined youngster, head filled not with the once-conventional subjects of reading, writing, and mathemat-ics, or even the only-just-finished summer vacation; instead, this young man’s brain was divided among adolescent preoccupations like Scarlett Johansson, AOL Instant Messenger, and manga, with a relatively small allocation for algebra lurking beneath the current, buzzy, electronic sub-jects. Inside, the magazine contained stories on the Mozart effect and in-fants’ acquisition of knowledge, plus cartoons on adolescent ennui. That
same month Harper’s—best known as an intellectually left-leaning
com-mentator on politics and current affairs—presented a print panel on the effects of video games on young minds. Occasionally the library literature provides a glimpse of these issues, too. It seems to be acknowledged every-where that young people form a distinct culture because of what happens in their heads.
young people’s development are crucial to developing services and pro-grams that are in tune not only with teens’ sense of their own needs but also with the findings of experts who are able, through the distance of time and objective research frameworks, to provide perspective on why teens behave in particular ways. The conclusions that can be drawn from skillful research are sure to change as time passes and more is learned through the replication and refinement of studies, but we should not wait for the definitive word before engaging these ideas. It is time for more than a few people in LIS to recognize the importance of such projects; it is time for the community of youth services practitioners to begin evaluat-ing the conclusions that scientists and other scholars are formevaluat-ing so that we can apply the latest knowledge to our own work with young people. In the end, doing so may mean raising our own questions about young adults in addition to considering others’ answers.
This book examines the ways in which the perspectives of other fields that investigate the conditions and the outcomes of U.S. adolescence can speak to our aims of working with young adults in libraries. It strives, where appropriate, to use empirical research to answer questions about the nature of young adulthood. It calls attention to matters that should raise questions about our assumptions about teens and our resulting prac-tices. It points toward change, but identifying all the elements of that change is beyond its scope. Instead, it outlines key areas of interest, gives attention to leading scholars and their work, and recommends resources that librarians might enjoy and find informative. In all this, it suggests further ways of thinking about the beings librarians call young adults.
NOTES
1. Samuel S. Green, “Sensational Fiction in Public Libraries,” Library Journal 4 (1879): 345–355.
2. Mary A. Bean, “Evil of Unlimited Freedom in the Use of Juvenile Fiction,” Library Journal 4 (1879): 343.
3. George Watson Cole, “How Teachers Should Cooperate with Libraries,” Library Journal 20 (1895): 115.
4. American Library Association, Freedom to Read statement, http://www.ala .org/ala/oif/statementspols/ftrstatement/freedomreadstatement.htm; American Library Association letter opposing the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006, http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/techinttele/dopa/DOPA.htm. 5. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
7. Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Avon Books, 1999).
8. Margaret A. Edwards, The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), 16.
umerous ideas about American adolescence prevail in the twenty-first century. The picture created by these images is not always clear, though. Teens are said to be so technologically adept that they are capable of electronic multitasking with ease, astonishingly pro-miscuous yet overprotected, overscheduled yet unprepared for intellectu-ally rigorous testing, and more. Their youthful virtues and vices receive, if not the sort of outcry that has arisen in the past when teens evinced values and behaviors that differed from their parents’ ideals, then certainly a fair amount of media attention. Not all contentions about youth cohere, nor do the portrayals always stand up to scrutiny. Some media outlets turn our attention to the extremes of youth culture, and others offer researchers’ more subtle perspectives on the same activities. Sometimes a phenom-enon will seem to be genuine, based on media depictions of real young people and supported by experts whose advice may speak to parents and teachers but less so to librarians. Yet it is equally important for librarians to understand and apply emerging research on adolescence in their service planning, collection management, and other work with teens. Our abili-ties to welcome young people into our faciliabili-ties and to engage their inter-ests can be enhanced by other professionals’ information about teens.
Most librarians would acknowledge that whether because of media reports or actual interactions, our views of adolescence are changing. We think of young people differently in part because teens think of
Myths and the
American Teen
C H A P T E R
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themselves differently. Market researchers in the late twentieth century were among the first to observe this trend, to which they gave the acronym KGOY: Kids Getting Older Younger. This label reflected the idea that the toys that once sold to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were sitting on store shelves. Preteens spurned Barbie as a baby doll and turned their at-tention and consumer power to things like cell phones and music. Some of our recent questions about what it means to be an adolescent in con-temporary U.S. society emerged from concerns about how to sell things to teens. However, researchers with less commercial interests also sought to understand the implications of a maturing and technologically inflected adolescence; they have been slower to enter the marketplace of ideas, less vociferous in contending for our attention.
This book responds to shifting cultural ideas about adolescence by ex-ploring some of the contemporary research that likewise seeks to change the way adolescence is understood. This chapter highlights a few particu-lar claims that are promoted by the media and that will be examined fur-ther in the chapters to follow. These ideas might seem counterintuitive, yet recent research indicates their sense and their ability to help us make sense of the adolescents whom we try to work with in our libraries.
MYTH 1
Teenagers Are All But Adults
News reports relay complaints about so-called helicopter parents who seem to hover over their adolescent children instead of al-lowing them to be independent. The idea that a young person who drives, works part-time, and is on the cusp of legal adulthood isn’t capable of making certain decisions independently strikes some commentators as incongruous. Yet research in multiple fields indicates (while not denying that parents can be overinvolved in teens’ lives) that every adolescent isn’t exactly an adult-in-waiting. New information about brain development and awareness of changing societal norms are two factors that have influ-enced researchers’ thinking about adolescent development.
ongoing during the adolescent years than much prevailing psychological theory had suggested would be the case. One now often-cited idea is that the brain doesn’t fully mature until a person is in his or her midtwen-ties. There are individual variations, certainly, and these generalizations are not meant to imply that teens are incapable of reasoned behavior or thoughtfulness. Instead, many researchers think teens still benefit from active adult involvement in their lives: young people make increasingly challenging decisions while they are in the process of developing sound skills of reasoning and judgment. Professionals in multiple fields are giv-ing their attention to the implications of these findgiv-ings.
Although the research getting the most attention pertains to teens’ brains, sociological observers see the environment in which young people mature as more demanding, too. It also has been observed that “as young people adapt their lives to a more complex world, it becomes more dif-ficult to say at which point they have reached adulthood. There are more paths to be taken through life and few maps to guide youth on the
in-creasingly complex transition to adulthood.”1 For multiple reasons, then,
concepts of adolescence and maturity are becoming extended.
H E A L T H Y C O M M U N I T I E S ,
H E A L T H Y K I D S
When the Urban Library Council conference met at the Chicago Public Library in early December 2005, keynote speaker Dr. Fel-ton Earls of Harvard University advocated envisioning neighbor-hoods as “small democracies to produce healthy environments for . . . children to grow up in.” Doing so, he argued, was a step toward ensuring that adolescents would experience fewer risks to well-being as they mature.
middle-class neighborhoods that were experiencing problems related to lack of parental supervision of teens.
Healthy neighborhoods possess a quality Earls refers to as “collective efficacy,” meaning that residents work together for their mutual well-being. “Libraries have to help us stabilize this fragile system of how people become active in their communi-ties,” he said. “But young people have to identify themselves as citizens.” Producing healthy and successful adolescents, then, means working with all members of a community.
MYTH 2
Teens Hate Their Parents
When I worked as a young adult librarian, there was a par- enting resource book that routinely provoked laughter in the
department. It was called I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You. Although the book
focuses on mother-daughter conflict, its title seemed emblematic of parent- adolescent conflict. Everyone recognized that irrational yet deeply emo-tional conflicts developed between parents—or authority figures gener-ally—and teens. Despite the sense of recognition that develops around the idea of difficult relationships with teens, most problems are not perva-sive and the vast majority of teens see their parents as supportive. Parents, in fact, typically enhance their teens’ abilities to cope with discomfort during adolescence.
For example, a study about young people’s proneness to worrying found that when teens confided in their parents, they were less likely to report concerns about peer pressure and popularity. Additionally, teens who talked with their parents reported feeling less worried than those
who turned to their peers.2 Elsewhere, surveys have found that teens do
speak with their parents about issues like sexuality and regard them as a preferred source of information about these sensitive matters. Similarly, parents have been found to be very influential in the personal decisions teens make. Overall, statistics indicate that nearly 80 percent of teens be-lieve they have good relationships with their parents.
understanding the lives of the young people we serve. Librarians need to consider how they might protect children at risk without assuming poten-tial malice in all parent-child relationships. Finding ways to encourage dialogue between teens and parents, instead of assuming disconnection, would reflect the types of efforts other professionals invested in young people’s development are making.
MYTH 3
Adolescents Lead Unhealthy Lives
It’s not hard for a reasonable individual to suspect that adoles- cents’ health is jeopardized by multiple sources. With their still-developing abilities to make sound decisions, they may fail to negotiate difficult situations, such as peer pressure to experiment with illegal drugs or to be a passenger in an intoxicated driver’s car. News reporting on the serious problems of bulimia and anorexia abounds. Then there are the less dramatic matters, such as diets that increase young people’s risk of diabetes through poor food choices and weight management.
In many respects, though, teens are in good health. Recently re-leased federal statistics show that teen pregnancy rates have dropped, for
example.3 Additionally, adolescents die at lower rates from car accidents,
suicide, and homicide than do their slightly older, newly adult peers. The same trend is true of drug use, alcohol consumption, and cigarette smok-ing. Current public health data acknowledge variations by sex, race, and ethnicity but show teens also tend to be more likely to have health
insur-ance than those who have achieved status as legal adults.4 This research
holds true for young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen, with sometimes dramatic differences between their health status and that of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.5 While public health professionals continue to strive for gains in all age groups’ health and well-being, they find that at least in comparison to those who are only a few years older, teens seem healthier. Enhancing teens’ health remains an important goal.
MYTH 4
Teens Are More Technologically Savvy Than Adults
information remains. Another way of considering this matter is to ask what the benefits are of being able to manipulate equipment if the information it conveys is less than perfectly understood. Scholarly studies report that teens’ attention is fragmented by their efforts to manipulate multiple elec-tronic devices at the same time, that they have weaknesses when it comes to evaluating the materials they retrieve online, and that basic mistakes— like spelling—can prevent younger users from finding what they want on the Web. While teens may have a facility for text messaging and an incli-nation to multitask, there are real areas of weakness in their technology skills. Librarians’ skills and enthusiasm for understanding young people’s technological aptitudes are well suited to addressing teens’ weaknesses in managing the information they obtain electronically.
MYTH 5
We Can Understand the Interests of Twenty- First-Century Youth by Paying Attention to the Entertainment Media Marketed toward Them
A great deal of writing, past and present, supposes a common youth culture. From Disney and other animated films to MySpace, it is often assumed that young people consume certain media products that result in common understanding and shared cultural references and reflect enthusiasms that aren’t necessarily shared by adults. These assump-tions are true, up to a point. Researchers have come to recognize that the national and international popularity of works like the Harry Potter books or other top-selling media is the exception rather than the rule. There is increasing cause to doubt the extent of tweens’ and teens’ core entertain-ment interests.
Increasingly, the nature of the contemporary media market reflects
a phenomenon called segmented programming—the idea that instead of
putting out television programs, for example, that appeal to as broad an audience as possible, programming proliferates so that more specialized programs attract particular kinds of viewers. This practice has become a defining feature of television. In a survey of thousands of middle school-ers, researchers saw little overlap among demographic groups’ television preferences. In other words, there were significant differences between the programs girls tended to watch and those favored by boys; further, viewing preferences differed by race as well. The survey’s researchers noted, “There is little evidence of a common teen culture across race and
gender among adolescents in this sample.”6 In other words, the
rather than by white youths, and the on-screen presence of female char-acters is the focus, primarily, of female teens, not teens of both sexes. Re-searchers anticipate that the trend toward “bifurcated media worlds” will only grow with the proliferation of new media. While these researchers saw portents for the future of multiculturalism in their findings, librar-ians should note the difficulty of assuming that teen-oriented television reflects broad preferences.
More recently, analysis of teens’ use of social networking sites also revealed some key differences. While 55 percent of all U.S. teens had presences on sites like MySpace and Facebook, site use differed. Older female teens were more likely to have profiles and to maintain connec-tions than were male teens, and they reported that they used online ven-ues to maintain friendships rather than to seek out new ones. Both sexes reported that online flirtation via such sites was relatively rare, and over-all, the majority restricted access to their profiles. Still, researchers saw distinct, gender-related preferences in teens’ site selections, which they attributed to the extent to which sites reflected real identities and con-nected to actual geographic locations.7 The number of teens who use social networking sites, then, is significant, but so is the number who do not use these much reported-on sites. Research results also indicate that use of Facebook or MySpace varies by age and sex, so a young woman’s use of a social networking site may mean something entirely different from a male peer’s use of the same site.
Together, these research findings indicate some of the ways teens differ from one another. Popularity does not equal universality or even sameness. In seeking cues from popular culture, librarians will want to recognize that they are selecting for particular kinds of teens rather than for all young people.
Our interests in engaging teens with books and other media are best served by good information about adolescence. Dispelling myths and misperceptions is a starting point for dialogue, with young people and with one another, about the ways librarians can support tweens and teens. With recent population figures indicating that there are more than 16 mil-lion teenagers in the United States, we can expect that the generalizations about their lives will challenge us to understand them as individuals.
FOR FURTHER READING
This list of myths about teens offers strategies to parents for managing seemingly unruly or unpleasant behaviors but is still relevant to librarians who may find themselves confronting some stereotypical actions from young adult patrons.
Males, Mike. “Debunking the 10 Worst Myths about America’s Teens.” Teacher Librarian 28, no. 4 (April 2001): 40–41.
This list of ten myths about teens focuses on perceptions of violence and other antisocial behaviors. Males counters these ideas with statistical data and argues that adults should work with teens to ensure a good future for all individuals.
Shoemaker, Kellie. “Top Ten Myths and Realities of Working with Teen Volun-teers.” Voice of Youth Advocates 21, no. 1 (April 1998): 24–27.
Compiled by a librarian, this list of myths frames a discussion of considerations for working with teens. Assessing teens’ interest levels and relationships with their parents, as well as coordinating volunteer supervision with other library staff, is advised.
Tkacik, Maureen. “Interns, the Founts of Youth.” New York Times, July 30, 2006, sec. 9.
Marketers seeking sources of authentic perspectives on contemporary teen life are enlisting young people as interns, or in the words of this article, “around-the-clock muses and ambassadors to youth culture.” What do others think about these adult efforts to capture the essence of what it means to be a teen by trying to turn teens into friends? At times, it’s other than cool.
NOTES
1. National Institute for Health Care Management, Young People’s Health Care: A National Imperative (Washington, D.C.: National Institute for Health Care Management, 2006), 3. Also available online at http://www.nihcm.org/pdf/ YoungPeoplesHCFINAL.pdf.
2. S. L. Brown et al., “Gender, Age, and Behavior Differences in Early Adolescent Worry,” Journal of School Health 76, no. 8 (2006): 430–437.
3. Rodger Doyle, “By the Numbers: Teen Sex in America,” Scientific American, January 2007, 30.
4. National Institute for Health Care Management, Young People’s Health Care, 8. 5. M. J. Park et al., “The Health Status of Young Adults in the United States,”
Journal of Adolescent Health 39, no. 3 (2006): 305–317.
6. Jane D. Brown and Carol J. Pardun, “Little in Common: Racial and Gender Differences in Adolescents’ Television Diets,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 48, no. 2 (June 2004): 272.
s
t
C H A P T E R
T W O
Taking On the
Teen Brain: Scientific
Perspectives on
Adolescence
ne thing is readily apparent about the field of brain research: it is growing and changing all the time. Re-cent years have seen the proliferation of studies in this area, in part because of the availability of new means of analyzing the brain that add to and modify what is known about this central, controlling organ. It’s not unheard of for an idea that was tentatively accepted to be rejected—or at least modi-fied—only a few years later. At the same time, because the data are so new, there are areas in which scientists are not yet able to draw conclu-sions that can be applied in a practice-oriented environment. A diverse group of researchers is involved in creating new, more sophisticated un-derstandings of the adolescent mind. Work done by specialists in psychol-ogy, psychiatry and neuroscience, of course, is key to what we know about how the brain develops. Yet, as has been cautioned elsewhere, “even the wide range of recently uncovered changes will not, in the end, prove to
be the full story of the dynamic teenage brain.”1 This means any number
of things for those of us who work with adolescents in library and informa-tion environments, yet there are important caveats about how we might apply new findings.
It has been argued that the brain changes taking place during ad-olescence “provide librarians with an opportunity to turn young adults into lifelong readers and library users.”2 In actuality, there is little direct scientific evidence for this claim. It might be more accurate to say that
patterns of thought and activity during the teen years are lasting, so that an adolescent uninterested in reading during these formative years would be rather unlikely to acquire an interest in novels or nonfiction later in life. A teen who enjoys reading, on the other hand, is likely to continue reading in adult life. Thus, the changes taking place in the teen brain may represent an open door, a time when new paths for information process-ing can more readily be developed.
These ideas, which result from the work of researchers in multiple specialties, challenge us to begin rethinking how we engage young peo- ple’s minds in libraries and other information-rich environments. The science-based findings may encourage us to revisit our policies, our pro-gramming, and even our one-on-one interactions with younger users. This does not mean science will simply tell us what to do. It reflects the idea that new information, relevant to though not produced by our field, can offer us an enriched context for how we think about the needs of younger users. Any number of LIS studies have observed teens’ informa-tion-seeking activities, relying on interviews or journals—often, teens’ own accounts of their intentions—to clarify researchers’ observations. Now the resulting findings can be augmented by new ideas about the un-derlying cognitive changes that play a part in user behaviors. Respecting teens’ voices and their perspectives on library services, while still impor-tant, should be supplemented by emerging scientific understandings of the complex changes taking place inside adolescents’ heads.
We have new research that helps us to reflect on whether the en-vironments we construct in our libraries enhance youth development as well as they might. We can consider if even simple changes in our in-teractions with young people could encourage the maturation of their decision-making and communication skills. In other words, with more information available to us, we are better positioned to ensure that the uses of libraries that we promote are truly in teens’ best interests. Are we
supporting their long-term development and their short-term satisfaction
with our facilities and resources? Such an approach can be construed as polarizing because it suggests that what teens want may not be good for them, and vice versa. Rather than opting for such ready and even re-ductive answers, we should consider how our young constituency might gain from reevaluation of our ideas about their capabilities and needs that takes emerging brain research into account.
researchers endorse this sort of biological determinism. Many prominent brain experts, though, argue that the implications of newly demonstrated changes taking place during puberty and early adulthood should alter the way we think about adolescence. Those ideas are worth librarians’ attention. We are learning that the brain is continually changing, and that knowledge, in turn, directs attention to the nature of the environ-ments that teens experience during this uniquely important phase of de-velopment. Youth advocates have asked that we design library spaces that will appeal to adolescents and that we consult teens during the process of planning services for them. Scientists, by offering insights into factors involved in young people’s perspectives on and responses to the world around them, can help librarians evaluate what teens tell us. Their re-search has the power to challenge and refine our ideas about teens’ use of libraries’ services and resources.
T H E F I E L D O F N E U R O S C I E N C E
Change and the
Teen Brain
What is the single most important finding to emerge from all this research? Chiefly, it is the repudiation of the assumption, which had prevailed for many years, that the teen brain is essentially an adult brain. Researchers agree that while most previous developmental models assumed that the brain changed little once young people arrived at adolescence, a plethora of studies have debunked this once-bedrock notion.
The old view held that major change was a feature of the child’s mind, and teens differed from the very young by their intellectual similar-ity to adults. It’s easy to surmise how research informed by observation of behavior could create this perception. Readily apparent developmental milestones that reflected cognitive change—say, language acquisition, represented first by the utterance of sounds, then the approximation of words, the joining of words into phrases, the construction of sentences, and so on—happened in childhood. The cognitive changes in young adults—such as the development of a larger and more sophisticated vocabulary or the realization that nuances of meaning aid creative ex-pression—seemed less dramatic in comparison to those of the early years. As researchers in this area have remarked, “The cognitive changes in adolescence are not as significant and dramatic as the ones present in early childhood . . . and adolescence marks a refinement, rather than an
emergence, of these abilities.”4 Research conditions reinforced the idea
that because teens looked and seemed more or less capable of acting like adults, their brain development was nearly completed. And so the devel-opmental stages proposed by psychologist Jean Piaget ended in early ado-lescence with the acquisition of abstract reasoning skills or the ability to reason about ideas as well as actualities. Many scientific theories mirrored this thinking about the adolescent brain as a more or less fixed, rather than fluctuating, subject.
These days, courtesy of new tools and techniques of study, accumu-lated research indicates that the changes taking place in adolescent brains are dynamic rather than subtle. Studies have clearly demonstrated periods of significant growth in adolescent brains, notably shortly before the onset of puberty. These changes have been compared to the physical growth spurt seen in adolescents’ bodies, but researchers note that the processes
manifesting themselves in adolescence begin years beforehand.5 This
character-istics—among them impulsive or risky behavior, explosive responses to even mild comments, a night owl’s reluctance to rise early in the morn-ing, and episodes of forgetfulness—are linked to changes in structure and chemical levels in the brain. Additionally, it is believed that this results in changes in motivation. The teen brain is in transition as the proliferation and then the pruning of neural pathways provides teens with new ap-proaches to problem solving. It is not enough, though, for those pathways to be available; teens must learn to use them, and to use them routinely, in order to achieve patterns of thought and action that will mark them as adults. This is often a process of trial and error. In short, teen behavior is linked to ongoing brain development.
Yet researchers are cautious about blaming all troublesome teen be-haviors on ongoing brain development. It has been pointed out that some adults, whose brains presumably have completed these late-occurring phases of development, can still be prone to rash and at times unpleasant conduct, so such behaviors cannot be linked simply to developmental
factors.6 The ways biology responds to environment have also been noted.
That is to say, environmental conditions may either facilitate or discour-age biological inclinations. One example is the contemporary environ-ment, which, through its electric-powered, multimedia entertainment options, allows teens to engage their natural drives for stimulation and late-night activity with relative ease. Still, since the changes taking place in adolescence both facilitate and limit cognitive activities, a great deal of teen behavior may be affected by these conditions. Key to understanding these new findings, though, is seeing them as contributing, rather than controlling, factors.
The brain development that takes place during adolescence increases young people’s abilities to understand the world around them and to re-spond reflectively, yet this development also has limitations. Thinking of development as a transitional process affected by environment and other conditions, rather than as an on-off switch that suddenly and dramatically changes teens’ perceptions or skills, is crucial to understanding teens’ atti-tudes and actions. Adolescent brain development, then, is only one factor contributing to young people’s behavior during a time of life that is often characterized as turbulent or unpredictable.
that class, this didn’t make sense, because they knew that young children could associate facial expressions and feelings. If a child can perform cer-tain cognitive tasks, why would someone approaching adulthood find the same tasks difficult? they asked. The answers to this question are complex, but researchers have identified periods of recurring changes in the brain.
It is common, perhaps even desirable, to think of young people’s development as a trajectory of increasingly sophisticated abilities. The way we talk about early childhood—a baby’s progression from crawling to walking, from social smiles to babbling before uttering first words—re-flects this sort of assumption. Yet young children sometimes continue to depend on earlier habits of locomotion and speech rather than making immediate and exclusive use of their newly developed skills. Adolescents, too, are likely to waiver between moments of maturity and behavior that belies their nearness to adulthood. In other words, just because you see a teen demonstrate good judgment in one situation doesn’t mean that she will do so every time.
Development involves multiple processes that do not begin—or end—at the same time. Also, some aspects of brain development recur; they are not completed in a single execution. And as scientists have cau-tioned, new cognitive skills are only one component of teens’ actions; changes in the brain make an increasing array of activities possible but do not cause a particular outcome.
since Giedd’s first report is a rather brief period to be in possession of revolutionary knowledge, both to know that things are different from what we had supposed and to understand the full meaning of that knowledge, which is still being generated.
Questions necessarily arise from new conclusions. What are librar-ians to do with young adult users, whose brains are more complex and malleable—and more vulnerable—than we had previously thought? What sorts of services and resources are appropriate for a young person when the physical structure of that individual’s brain is still construct-ing itself? Librarians who advocate for teens have argued, essentially, that these young users should be offered full access to all materials, included in discussions about meeting their needs, and respected as adults. The assumption has been that young people’s maturity meant that they were capable of making sound judgments about their information and recre-ational reading needs, even in the potentially controversial and sensitive matters of sexuality and drugs. Do Giedd’s findings, which suggest that brain development doesn’t finish until nearly the midtwenties, indicate that our faith in teens’ decision-making abilities is overstated? In other words, are our post-1967 professional ideals and policies congruent with post-1997 research on adolescents’ cognitive abilities? Giedd has, for in-stance, said that given the state of knowledge on the adolescent brain, it
seems inappropriate to ask teens to make adult decisions.8 What does this
conclusion suggest about librarians’ professional ideals, which recognize teens’ rights to access any sort of material and to have privacy that may exclude even their guardians’ scrutiny?
W H A T ’ S I N A B R A I N ?
In a recent conversation, a colleague who studies learning and the brain told me, “Many areas of the brain are engaged in even the simplest of tasks.” Yet there are still reasons for thinking about the brain in terms of its parts. For instance, recent neuroscience findings indicate that not all areas of the brain undergo develop-ment at the same time. Historically, the brain has been under-stood as comprising different areas, which have been further defined by the specific functions that they are associated with. Those who haven’t been in a science or biology class in some years will see that there are some significant differences in the way scientists now think about the regions of the brain and their functions. Acquaintance with the regions of the brain is useful when considering recent scientific research on the brain since those reference points are still used, even as the thinking about their purpose and scope changes. In almost every instance, the ways in which the brain functions are more complicated than had been thought. In response, many researchers prefer to talk about the brain in terms of distributed functioning and neural pathways. The brief glossary below, then, necessarily simplifies scientific thinking about the brain in the interest of indicating how research has progressed in recent years. While neither com-prehensive nor fully technical, it identifies and describes some areas of the human brain.
The cerebrum is the upper part of the brain, which is divided into left and right hemispheres. The cerebrum plays a role in much conscious thought and is extremely important to processing conscious thoughts.
♦The frontal lobe is one of four lobes whose parts make up the cerebrum. It is responsible for logic or reasoning, including the abilities to consider future events and to think about how to obtain goals, as well as for voluntary movement. Scientists have recently identified the frontal lobe as one area that undergoes critical development in young people.
♦The parietal lobe processes sensory input, including pain signals. The ability to pay attention and to plan actions are associated with this part of the brain, as is language.
♦The occipital lobe is a region associated with processing visual information.
The hypothalamus is a small yet important part of the brain that regulates numerous functions, including sex and sleep.
The thalamus plays roles in motor control, as well as in co-ordinating information among other parts of the brain.
The cerebellum is associated with the control of movement but also with aspects of thinking that involve “precise timing, such as playing a musical instrument.”9 Recent research has indicated the importance of the cerebellum’s role in coordinating thinking, whereas older models understood it as primarily involved in controlling physical activity.10 It also plays a role in the processing of social cues and, some scientists contend, is the last part of the brain to mature.11
The pons serves a relay function, communicating information between the cerebrum and the cerebellum.
The medulla oblongata is also sometimes referred to as the brain stem and is involved with communication functions in the brain.
Scientists also talk about the brain in terms of other func-tional parts at the cellular level. The related terminology pertains to how the brain transmits information to its constituent parts. Below are the few such terms needed by nonspecialists who want to know more about the changes that take place during adolescence.
Neurons are nerve cells involved in conveying information.
Dendrites are branchlike structures that allow the transmission of information among neurons.
Myelin, a fatty substance that covers connecting tissue in the brain, aids the speed of transmission. “An electrical charge travels a hundred times faster on a myelinated axon than an unmyelinated one, reaching speeds of more than 200 miles an hour,” according to a science editor for the New York Times. Levels of myelin change dramatically during adolescence.12
Readers who want to learn more about brain terminology or to check the meaning of additional technical terms may go online to consult the Society for Neuroscience’s “The Short An-swer: Definitions for Common Neuroscience Terms.”13
Insights and Explanations:
What’s Going On in a
Teen’s Brain
We’ve all had moments of witnessing teens choose some seem- ingly inexplicable course of action, of wondering what was go-ing on in their heads. Now, scientists are able to offer some insight into exactly that, in part because MRIs allow researchers to see adolescents’ brains actually at work while posing no risks to the subjects. To make a discussion of such research manageable, we can observe that the brain research of interest to young adult librarians concerns aspects of the teen brain that can be categorized as pertaining to structures and to resulting behaviors. Work has been done to understand what the parts of the brain are doing during the adolescent years of change. Where does growth or other development take place? There are also studies of what capabili-ties or behaviors can be connected to the identified areas of the brain. What happens when changes take place during adolescence? Admittedly, this framework simplifies research paradigms; there is certainly work that crosses even these simple boundaries. This emphasis on structures and behaviors, however, ignores disciplinary lines in an effort to focus on hypotheses and conclusions of interest to librarians. Doing so follows the lead of researchers in this area who seek interdisciplinary connections to
enhance their knowledge by learning from each other.14
that shapes young people’s actions and interacts with environmental fac-tors, like education and culture. Further, other dimensions of psychology, such as emotional states and attachments to caregivers, also affect teen behavior, particularly in the area of risk taking. Stages of brain develop-ment affect or even limit teens’ abilities to reason and to form judgdevelop-ments, but they do not predestine particular choices.
Giedd’s research is often cited as groundbreaking. His work involves taking MRI scans of adolescents’ brains at regular intervals in order to assess changes taking place as young people grow and mature. This re-search project began in 1991, and by 1997, some of the first indications of the profoundly different truth about the nature of brain development were becoming apparent. The findings, created in conjunction and con-sultation with other researchers who relied on the same data, are the ba-sis for revising our understanding of teens’ brains. Giedd demonstrated that adolescents’ brains undergo recurring cycles of development, chiefly through alternating cycles of proliferation and then pruning of connec-tions. Changes were observed largely in the prefrontal cortex, or the part of the brain associated with reasoning and making judgments, with a round of rapid growth beginning shortly before puberty. This has been interpreted as indicating that the executive control center of the brain is still being formed. Key tasks that rely on the frontal cortex include
plan-ning, foreseeing consequences, organizing, and problem solving.15 To see
the part of the brain that is involved in all these activities as in the midst of change, rather than fully operational, offers new perspective on stereo-typical teen behaviors. Other conclusions resulted as well.
One fact determined by Giedd and the other researchers who ex-amined a succession of brain scans of young people was that the brain takes a long time to mature. Researchers now believe that the brain ac-quires adult form when an individual is approximately twenty-five years old. Another researcher, also a parent, has commented, “With teenagers, it’s especially hard to remember that their brains are developing because they look like adults. . . . But even though teenagers have the bodies of
adults, they are not adults.”16 Far from being nearly finished at the start
of adolescence, the brain is still forming connections needed to make controlled and reasoned decisions. Teens, especially younger ones, are still developing brain mechanisms that will allow them to check impul-sive responses and to think rationally when confronted with exciting or compelling situations. As Giedd has said, “This whole concept of adoles-cence being stretched out longer, not just socially, but biologically was an
Young adult librarians who have gotten to know their teen patrons sometimes offer stories about first-year college students who return to the young adult desk when home on vacation, seeking out the library staff members who were so helpful only months ago. To these librarians, recent high school graduates may not seem much different from the teens who have not yet gone through this rite of passage. Experiences with older teens have led some librarians to question cutting off services once adolescents reach the age of eighteen. Instead, it has been argued, young adult services should be intended for any young person who arrives at our service desks rather than limited to those who fall within a designated yet rather arbitrary age range. Recent scientific research on the brain contributes to the notion that high school graduation may not be a defining moment that turns our eighteen-year-old users into adult patrons.
The increasing and then decreasing number of connections in the brain has many implications. Neuroscientists use the term plasticity to refer to the brain’s ability to change or to develop new patterns of convey-ing information. Plasticity has been implicated in some areas of learnconvey-ing, such as language acquisition, but is less clearly understood in others, such as the ability to control emotions. Yet researchers believe that the brain’s capacity to change creates both opportunities and vulnerabilities during
the adolescent years.18 This makes adolescence an extremely important
time of life.19
Given the heightened plasticity of teens’ brains, adolescence is a time when behaviors and aptitudes are malleable; however, that malleability is not indefinite. The phrase “use it or lose it” has been applied to the brain’s development in adolescence. Giedd explains that adolescence is a time when the brain is working out ways to function effectively and
effi-ciently.20 When some activities become a routine part of a young person’s
life, those pathways in the brain are reinforced. The less-used pathways decline and eventually disappear. In one interview, Giedd explained it this way: “If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hard-wired. If they’re lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV, those are the cells and connections that are going [to] survive.”21 Scientists call this pattern of brain development pruning because the earlier proliferation of connections is reduced. They acknowledge that there is more to learn about this aspect of adolescent brain development.
Pruning may be viewed as a process of refining important capabilities, like “inhibition control and working memory, or the ability to hold
