"The Latest Assault on Teens: It's Their
Brains"
Despite recent
claims, there's no reason to
think teens think differently than adults
By MIKE MALES
cLos Angeles
Times, Sunday Opinion, February 17, 2002, p M3
SANTA CRUZ—Neurobiologist Richard Restak’s new book,
The Secret Life of the Brain, which was serialized by PBS, is one of
many recent works crediting neuroscience with confirming popular stereotypes of
teenagers as rash and unthinking. PBS’ promo for “The Teenage Brain” segment
read: “As the brain begins teeming with hormones, the prefrontal cortex, the
center of reasoning and impulse control, is still a work in progress. For the
first time, scientists can offer an explanation for what parents already know—adolescence
is a time of roiling emotions, and poor judgment.”
Restak
invites readers to choose their own adjectives—all negative—to describe
adolescents: “difficult,” “unpredictable,” “moody.” Only when they reach
adulthood, “the culmination of human brain development,” do young people become
“mature,” “likable” and “courteous,” he adds. Other experts say teens suffer
“biological tumult,” “impulsiveness” and “disregard for consequences.”
Such claims should be greeted with caution. Theories
founded in “biological determinism”—that the behaviors of certain human
populations result from innate limitations in their intelligence and reasoning
capacities—inevitably win initial praise. Then research dismantles the
theories, often after they have inspired harmful policies.
Today’s authoritative-sounding statements about
adolescents are similar to those eminent scientists once confidently issued
regarding the supposedly flawed cerebrums of women and “inferior races,” as
Harvard University scientist Stephen Jay Gould writes in The Mismeasure of
Man. Researchers a century ago asserted that African Americans’ “less
developed posterior lobe” explained
their supposed impulsivity, irrationality and violent behavior. Women’s
underdeveloped brains, wrote psychologist and sociologist Gustav Le Bon,
produced “fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity
to reason.” America’s preeminent early-1900s psychologist, G. Stanley Hall,
argued that “savage” races, biologically, are “adolescents.” Today’s scientists
reverse the sentence: Adolescents, biologically, are savages.
Modern science is more sophisticated, but skepticism
of its misuse to uphold popular stereotype and official need remains. Youth
have been a favorite target. A 1987 University of Wisconsin analysis of
scientific theories on teen behavior published in decades of journal articles
found strong evidence of “ideological purpose.” When politicians and business
interests need more youths for wars and employment booms, scientists pronounce
adolescents “capable and adult-like” ; during peacetime and economic downturns,
adolescents are “psychologically incapacitated immature and slow to develop.”
The latest discovery of adolescent biological deficiency follows a decade of
blaming youths for every social ill.
To test a theory, compare what it predicts to real
life. Decades of psychological studies have exposed common typecasts of teens
as a “stubborn, fixed set of falsehoods,” concluded University of Michigan
psychologist Joseph B. Adelson. In truth, “adolescents are not in turmoil, not
deeply disturbed, not at the mercy of their impulses, not resistant to parental
values and not rebellious.” UC San Francisco medical-psychologist Nancy Adler’s
testing similarly found that “adolescents are no less rational than adults.” A
Carnegie Mellon University team reviewed 100 scholarly studies and reported the
“perception of relative invulnerability was no more pronounced for adolescents
than for adults.”
Northwestern
University psychiatrist Daniel Offer’s studies of 30,000 youths spanning three
decades found virtually “no support for adolescent turmoil” theories or
hormonal debilities. Repeated surveys show only 10% to 15% of teens report
dissatisfaction with themselves, their lives or their relationship with
parents. “Decision-making for teenagers is no different than decision-making
for adults,” Offer concluded in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
A typical research review in the journal Child Development reported that
“minors aged 14 were found to demonstrate a level of competency equivalent to
that of adults” in standard measures of reasoning.
The similarity of teenage and adult thinking is
further shown by crime and health statistics. If teen brains are inherently
flawed, we would expect teenagers to engage in far riskier behavior than
adults. This is not the case, however. Compared with adults, teenagers have
higher rates of water-sports and traffic accidents but lower rates of other
major mishaps like falls, drug and alcohol overdoses, drunken driving and
suicides. The risks of teens committing a crime, contracting HIV/AIDS or
becoming pregnant out of wedlock vary radically by socioeconomic status and
typically parallel those of adults of their cultures, not teens of other
cultures. “Our youth are no healthier or sicker than we, their parents,” Offer
concluded.
When asked
to speculate on the mental health of average teenagers, physicians and
therapists tend to vastly overestimate adolescents’ pathology. A
multi-university team reported that scientists and adults, in general,
erroneously “believe adolescent problems are more attributable to
‘developmental stage’ than problems of older age groups.” That is, when a 16-year-old drives drunk or
shoots up at school, we blame generic teenage recklessness; when a 40-year-old
drives drunk or shoots up an office, we view him as a disturbed individual.
Despite its
dubious validity, the stigma of biological inferiority allows varied interests
both to abrogate teen rights and impose harsh punishment on them. Liberal
lobbies such as Amnesty International and New York University’s Brennan Center
for Justice defend trying youths in juvenile rather than adult court on the
ground of youths’ supposed developmental incompetence; yet they ignore data
showing that juvenile-court judges sentence teens to longer terms than
similarly offending adults. Conservatives cite adolescent immaturity to justify
zero-tolerance and abstinence-only, far more demanding standards than adults
face.
Deploring
“unsubstantiated claims about the incompetence of adolescents,” Carnegie Mellon
researchers suggest reversing the lens and scrutinizing adults’ “cognitive and
motivational factors that promote this harsh view of adolescents.” Could generic flaws in grown-up thinking
explain the reckless compulsion of authorities who hurl simplistic stereotypes
at powerless groups, the servile conformity of experts who cloak them in
science and the smugness of the rest of us who swallow them?
Mike Males is a Justice Policy Institute senior
researcher and sociologist at UC Santa Cruz.
Mike Males
P.O. Box 7842
Santa Cruz, CA 95061-7842
Tel:
831/426-7099
Fax: same (please
call first)
Email:
mmales@earthlink.net
Homepage:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales