In my posts, "Video Game Addiction and Brain Damage" and "Teen Smartphones and Social Networking - Buyer Beware" I described potential threats to normal teen brain development. If you read these articles, you know there are serious downsides to potentially beneficial...
About the teen brain, I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news. Nearly every adult I talk to these days has heard about the teen brain. Fifteen years ago, this was not the case. At the turn of the century, the fact that the prefrontal cortex (PFC)...
If you've read about the teen brain, you know it's mostly about a child's final stage of brain development, during which the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is wired for foundation critical thinking skills. In one respect, wiring the PFC is like every other aspect of brain...
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...
I recently spoke with a mother of three boys, ages 11, 13 and 15. She told me she and her husband plan to give all three sons video game consoles for Christmas. Of course, they'll win a lot of “best mom and dad” points with these gifts. She and the father believe that...
Since the 1990’s, when Dr. Jay Giedd and his colleagues at the National Institute for Mental Health published their pioneering research about adolescent brain development, more than a dozen authors with different backgrounds have written about “the teen brain.” For...
It was the summer of 1960, and I was 15. Elvis’ active duty service in the Army was behind him, and John Kennedy was running for President. My father, a chief warrant officer in the Army, had been reassigned to Germany and our family would follow six months later when...
In a separate post, I quoted Dr. Jay Giedd, the pioneering brain researcher who discovered that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is still under development during a child's adolescence, that this is the "smart" area of the brain, and that wiring the PFC will vary greatly...
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...