You see those beautiful eyes and that heart-melting smile. What you don't see (and probably rarely think about) is what's going on in your child's brain, which is steadily growing, preparing itself for the challenges of adult life, and will continue to do so until...
Doctors routinely warn women to avoid smoking and using alcohol or drugs during pregnancy. Why? Because the unborn child’s body and brain are slowly developing, and the mother’s blood provides materials to the placenta, which nurtures the growing fetus. If the mother...
For readers who are unfamiliar with Dr. Jay Giedd's work, he entered the Residency Program at the Menninger School of Psychiatry, transferred to the Barrow Neurological Institute and completed his residency in psychiatry in 1989. He was a postgraduate fellow in the...
I have a 15-year-old nephew. The last time I saw him he was doing what most kids his age are doing: sitting on a couch browsing his smartphone. At the time I was thinking that a lot of unused brain cell connections were in the process of being "pruned" from his...
I've written extensively about the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during adolescence. At puberty, a child's PFC undergoes a "second blooming," which begins a roughly 12-year period of development. During this period (adolescence) unused brain connections...
Most of the 50 million parents of school-aged children in the U.S. are all too aware of the gauntlet of dangers that threaten when a child becomes an adolescent: under-age smoking and drinking; drug abuse and addiction; low self-esteem and peer pressure; self-harm and...
One crucial step in helping your adolescent child build a superior mind is to protect the prefrontal cortex (PFC) from damage during adolescence - the developmental period for wiring the foundation for critical thinking. To this end, I've written a number of posts...
Often when I write about adolescence, I make reference to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. To help you appreciate where that part of the brain is and what it does, I'll give you a quick guided tour of your brain. I'll do my best here, even though the...
Every time a teenager tries to figure out why something happened, tries to understand the relationship between thing A and thing B, tries to see the connection between cause and effect, foresees possible consequences, evaluates options, solves problems and consciously...
I'm just guessing, but it may be true that no teenager in the long history of planet Earth has ever been given "the brain talk," even though it's probably some of the most important information a teen can have. Nevertheless, imagine a young teenage girl having lunch...