Navigating Modern Adolescence

0:07The modern world is a noisy, chaotic place. News about what's happening in the world is available 24-7 on a device you can carry in your pocket. The Internet offers more content than any person could consume in their lifetime or in 10 lifetimes. Politics can feel unstable. Artificial intelligence is upending our ideas about what work will look like in the next few years. And social media, created by technology companies, offers up millions of rabbit holes to go down. Self-improvement hacks, niche interests, impossible beauty standards. and at the same time, communities that offer potential connections with other people.

0:46Taking all of that in can feel like an insurmountable task most days. So try doing it with a brain and a body that are changing dramatically at the same time. How do young people, adolescents going through puberty, experience the world today? How is the adolescent experience changing, and why? And how can adults make their journey easier? We get to those questions and so much more after this short break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Back with more in just a moment. Stay with us.

1:21Joining us from Boulder, Colorado is Matt Richtel. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter from the New York Times. He's also the author of the new book, How We Grow Up, Understanding Adolescence. It's out now. Matt, it's great to have you back on 1A. Hey, Jen. How are you? Doing well. So, Matt, let's just start with the basic definition. When we're talking about adolescence, what are we talking about? Yeah, it's actually a really good question. And it's particularly fundamental because I think we all have ideas about what it means. So it's good to get like a baseline framework. Here's the first thing I'll say when I start writing this book and exploring, I think adolescence is mostly about the bits, you know, the nether regions, for want of a better word, but it turns out that adolescence is really at its core, a neurochemical neurological brain experience.

2:18And there are a lot of ways to define it, but I'll give you two concrete, discrete ways to think about it. One is that you are going from a period in your life where you've been cared for in your home to a period where you've learned to care about yourself or care for yourself and eventually conceivably offspring. There's one more slightly more sophisticated version of that, if I might, and it's this. Adolescence is a pivotal period with a real interesting purpose. It's the integration of the known, that's what your parents tell you works. Use a fork this way, don't run in the road, everybody reads books.

3:10And the unknown, which is what actually works in a fast-changing world. In a sense, Jen, we're talking about a period of profound information processing with a highly sensitized brain. And with that description, it means that adolescence is in a fixed period of time? It could vary from young person to young person? Yes and no. We're already getting into nuance, but let's say this. The definition I use drawn from science is that adolescence roughly starts with puberty, which is a discrete event, but its ending point is different for different young people. And at least the way scientists have begun to define this is it's lasting longer.

4:05Why? Because that in a complex economy and chaotic world, it takes longer to learn the skills needed to go from being cared for to caring for yourself. What about when puberty starts? Do we see any shifts around that in the U.S. right now? Yes, and we see shifts around the Western world, and it's such a pivotal question, Jen. So in the year 1900, puberty hit at the age of about 14 for girls. It now hits at the age of 12. Boys follow roughly the same curve. We don't know exactly with boys because they don't have the singular event of first menstruation. But let's say it's falling for everybody across the board.

4:57Why is that important? The onset of puberty is not just, as I alluded to earlier, about the bits or the nether regions or whatever colloquial phrase you want to use. It sets off this highly sensitized period in the brain. an awareness to the world outside your house, a susceptibility to reward, an interest in exploring. When that hits earlier, it means that the organism, the adolescent, is in a less developed phase when struck by this very sensitized period of the brain. And to be clear, when you're talking about the shift in the brain, it's not just the way you're processing information or the way you feel or think.

5:51It's the brain itself. I mean, explain how those structures are shifting. Amen. Yeah, it's a really, really important point. I think the best way to explain it is by way of a particular study that will really illustrate. In the book, I tried to marry stories of these adolescents with the science that sort of shows why they're experiencing what they're experiencing. And this particular study really stuck out to me. I'm going to mispronounce this word, Jen, forgive me, but I'm doing it because it's a nonsense made-up word. The word is Pwiedischwalt. So these Stanford researchers invent a made-up word, Pwiedischwalt.

6:36And they have young people, both before puberty and after puberty, hear this word spoken by their own mothers and then by strangers. What happens as the young people go through puberty is that the reward centers of their brain begin to light up after puberty when they hear the stranger's voice more so than their own mother's voice. Now, Jen, I would like to ask you, what's your theory on why that would be? Oh, wow. I mean, I was one of those kids who tried really hard to make her parents happy. So, I mean, my best theory is that maybe the stranger—oh, that's good. Maybe the—and this is knowing that I read your book, so I'm trying to think about what did I think before I understood the study.

7:38So what my theory would be is that there is a desire to explore. And so it's sort of like a stretching away from parenting, from parents and what they may think, and a stretching towards perhaps an unknown possibility or an unknown reward that may seem more attractive. It's a great answer, but I want to seize on an interesting word you chose. The word is desire. It suggests that these young people are like, they have a willful, an urge that they can control to do that. But when you look at a brain study like this, that's actually looking in real time at the brain capacity, it's showing us that this is wired, that this exploration outside what is known is deep in the evolutionary biology of the adolescent.

8:42And sometimes I use the word organism to try to pull us out of the way we tend to think, you know, we picture our own adolescent or ourselves. But here's this organism, Jen, and its brain structure is saying, go look out there. So when your kid gives you that look like, I'm not listening to you, they're not necessarily willfully or obnoxiously trying to ignore you. They are programmed to journey beyond what they know so they can learn to survive in a complex world. What does research into adolescence tell us about why some young people make riskier decisions? Like, again, I was one of those kids, risk averse is all get out.

9:35But I had other siblings who would, they were more than willing to roll the dice. What makes the difference? Yeah. What makes the difference is that in every facet of our lives, Jen, there is a spectrum of gene pool. So let's just move it to make the parallel easier to understand. Let's put it into, say, the realm of sports. Some people have a certain hand-eye coordination. Other people say less so. Some people in school are more adept at, say, math or conceptualizing that kind of logic. Others around words. Why do I bring up the spectrum here? Evolution has created a situation where it needs, our survival requires, some spectrum of individuals, some of whom are more conservative.

10:28I guess, is that a fair way to describe you, how you were, Jen? Absolutely. And some of whom are greater risk takers. Interestingly, the important word is reward. They are more susceptible to reward. And therefore, it may seem like they're troublemakers, but in the grand scheme of the survival of the species, they're charting new territory. So I think we have to view them with a different level of compassion than we may have in our prior conceptions of adolescence. Let's head to a quick break. Stay with us.

11:12We're discussing modern adolescence, how young people experience today's world as they go through puberty and become adults. Amit, you use a phrase in the book, Generation Rumination, and that's how you describe the young people going through puberty right now, those at the end of Gen Z and the oldest members of Generation Alpha. What does rumination mean in this context? Yeah, so if you go back some centuries, exploration happened in the physical space. You know, someone would go walk across the river behind the house. And when exploration happens in a physical space, the injury happens or the risk happens in the physical space.

11:55So for many years, the predominant injuries that a pediatrician would face were physical ones, a broken bone, a scrape, a sore, need for antibiotics. Over the last, I would say growing since the 60s, increasing level of exploration internally. What is my identity? Who am I? Where do I fit into this? It stands to reason, Jen, that we would be moving into this space because we've explored a lot of the physical space around us. What's new, what is, as they say, virgin snow, is all these questions about who we are. And as a result, a lot of the risk and injury and exploration comes, or sorry, a lot of the risk from exploration comes internally.

12:42Anxiety, depression overload it doesn't mean i want to be really clear jen i want to it's vital that parents understand that we are in a continuum with adolescence facets that have been around forever but we've moved into a more virtual and self-spaced rumination it's where the exploration happens therefore and i know i'm getting ahead of ourselves but therefore the significant shift we need as a society is to figure out how to help kids in that realm just as we help them in the physical realm. But it seems that helping them navigate that rumination process is more challenging because it's not visible.

13:30It's not necessarily visible, right? It's not like you can, hey, let's go explore the forest together and we're going to walk it together and I'm going to point out the dangers for you. This is a process that largely happens out of sight of the adults in the young person's life. I love that point, Jen. And I would say that it is out of sight because we have largely failed to look. But in point of fact, it's awfully plain. One of the things we're, one of the moments we're at as a reckoning as society is seeing that there has been a shift we have not kept up with. And that is what's so powerful about the science that exists today.

14:11We're on the cusp of helping a generation of young people be healthier and happier than they've ever been. And I might point out to those people saying, this is the roughest it's ever been for adolescents, that in the 1980s and early 90s when I grew up, There was immense amounts of binge drinking, drunk driving injury and death, early experimentation with sex and cigarette use. So before we mourn this particular period, it's vital to see the larger continuum of adolescence that is changing with different challenges, but not singular ones. One of the people you interview for the book is an adolescent named Courtney.

15:01and she had, I think it's fair to say, a mixed experience using the internet. What did she share with you about the role social media played in her mental health during her adolescence? Yeah. First of all, just a quick preface. It's amazing to talk to young people. And when you start to hear their stories, you start to hear the sheer complexity of this. And And Courtney's a great example. At age 10, she feels like her words that she's fat and she has acne and she doesn't have a lot of friends. She gets an iPad and she enters a virtual world where she can be whatever she wants. And she puts a picture of herself into a virtual world that is very carefully taken.

15:45So again, to match her words, she looks like sort of a sexy adult. Well, lo and behold, no surprise. she starts to get letters sent to her from men that are just horrible and disgusting. And she's trying to reconcile this sensation that she is at once experiencing kind of a sense of connection online and being who she idealizes. And that is getting her, excuse my language, dick pics and other things she can't process. She becomes depressed and anxious. She starts to self-harm. And then, Jen, later on as she reflects, she tells me something really interesting. She says, if I had been born 2 ,000 years ago, I might still have been depressive.

16:35But this experience seems to have amplified the possibility of that. The sum of that story, Jen, is this. Scientists talk of a term differential susceptibility. Some people, and Courtney was one of them, are more prone to anxiety and depression. And this environment preyed on her underlying genetics. Other people who go on social media simply do not have that experience. In fact, some adolescents walk away feeling better about themselves. I want to get to this message we got from a member of the tech club who says, the anxiety levels among my nieces and nephews is striking. They create online gardens instead of real gardens outside.

17:27They play online games instead of real games outside. They don't socialize terribly well in real life, but use social media as crutches. I don't believe this is just nostalgia on my part. In talking to the young people you interviewed for this book, I'm sure this is something they hear quite a lot about, how they experience their lives virtually as opposed to in the real world. I mean, how much of it is not just a nostalgic view of our childhoods growing up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but I mean, what is the reality of how technology is reshaping adolescence in really fundamental ways? Yeah, let's get to the 64, well, I guess with inflation, $72 ,000 question?

18:15I don't know. It depends which index you use. Thank you for the listener writing in because it's a really important point. It is not just nostalgia. It's a question of what the actual mechanism is that is affecting young people. Going on social media, say, for a period of time does not necessarily harm someone. What I think we can say more definitively is that if you're on a screen all the time, you are displacing important functions and activities we know are vital for your health. And here I would cite more than anything else, sleep. I would also cite physical activity, use of your body. I would cite in-person interaction, which goes to how we measure socially the world around us so that we can ultimately survive and compete and thrive, I would call this, Jen, a displacement effect.

19:15If I'm a parent listening here, an educator, a policymaker, the question isn't whether social media destroys a kid by itself. The question is, can we get young people to do the healthy stuff first and then foray into a virtual world that to some extent will be their future. As I said, you follow several young people in the book, and one is a young man named Henry, and he struggled intensely as he started adolescence. What did he face? Yeah, Henry is a young man I've carried with me as much as anyone I've ever written about. Henry grew up in around Charlotte, North Carolina, in what some people would idealize as a perfect family.

20:08His older brother was Luke. His younger brother was Jonah. His parents are deeply loving. And sometime in the middle of, and Jonah's, and sorry, and Henry's this kid who he underlines and takes notes in the margins of his Bible. He gets straight A's. And even though in a class where he's destined to get a straight A. He wants to get the highest A he can get. He's kind of a perfectionist. And in the middle of COVID, Jen, he seems to lose contact with himself and to an extent to reality. And he begins to count his calories. And Henry develops an eating disorder such that in the summer of 2020, his heart rate is down to 30 beats per minute.

20:56And his parents bring in the cavalry and they do everything that they can conceivably do to try to help and support and love this young man. And, Jen, it is worth noting, going back to your upbringing, that Luke, Henry's over brother, seems like he's living the perfect, non-rebellious adolescence. In fact, Jen, his big rebellion is going to a different church than his parents. So hardly heresy from the way they look at it. Jan, in the end, should I give away what happens with Henry? I think it's important, too. And I just want to quickly remind people that if you're struggling and you need emotional support, help is available.

21:41You can call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or by going to the website. Go ahead, Matt. Yeah, it's hard to talk about.

21:53Henry, without going to the method, kills himself in his parents' bathroom and Luke finds him. And there's a couple things I guess I want to impart to listeners about this story. One is everybody, most kids make it. I and Henry's parents hesitated about how to put this story in the book because it is not the typical outcome. And there is tremendous reason for hope. And I would really like to underscore for people who say, I'm so terrified of this. This still is an outlier. The second thing I'd like to point out is that the eating disorder that Henry suffered is a really interesting example of the kind of thing we're talking about in Generation Rumination.

22:45And may I just reflect on it for a moment, Jen? Certainly. Certainly. So Henry was trying to process a lot of information in a very chaotic and unstable period. His school had been upended. The things he thought he knew didn't exactly work. He was a perfectionist. He was trying to develop rules for the road in a chaotic society. And where his brain went was to something it could control. And that was how many calories he took in. that is a kind of rumination and i think later on we're going to hear in the show from another expert who i see nodding right now um but when a young person gets in that kind of ruminative state it ceases to be a place of logic and it it's a place where we have to learn how to reach young people because it's no, it's not, it wasn't, it didn't work for Henry's parents so loving to say, Henry, you're not 300 pounds.

23:53Look in the mirror. You're 98 pounds all wet. You're dying. But Henry, in his moment of rumination, in his state of information processing overload, was unable to hear them. Today, Jen, his parents have put out a T-shirt, Henry Barnes, that has his H on the front and on the back it says, my darling, please live to see another day, something to that effect. I've worn it all over the world. I believe that while he is not the common tale, he's the kind of thing we can stop going forward. Back with more in just a moment. Stay with us.

24:42Now back to our discussion about what it's like to go through adolescence today. And now let's bring in Amara Khalid. She's a licensed clinical psychologist who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. She's also the founder of RIA Psychological Services in Chicago, where she joins us now. Amara, welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me, Jen. A quick note that we'll talk about general tips for parents and guardians, but our discussion is not a substitute for mental health support for a child. Be sure to seek out a mental health professional if you feel a young person needs extra support.

25:13You can always call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or by going to the website 988lifeline.org. It's free and confidential. Let's start with this question from Mimi who says, How can parents prepare tweens or preteens for the upcoming brain shift or psychological changes during puberty? And Matt, I'll come to you first. Was this something you investigated for your book? I did, but I would say, yes, there's a couple big picture ideas I would carry with me as a parent. I use the phrase, love, lead, and let go. It's a bit glib, but I would say that you start with unconditional love because you need a safe space for your kids.

25:57I think lead means in this context that you've got to prepare your kid that the world can be hard. You've got to send them clear messages that they are not entitled and that they're going to run into challenges as they go forward. Let go means you are not them. So when your kid succeeds on the sports field, that ain't you. And when they struggle in school, that's not you either. Why do I say these specific things? Because we're creating an environment where they can grow into their own person with less baggage from us. Dr. Khalid, have I gone against any of your wisdom? No, I think you're spot on.

26:44I think a lot of parents project their desires, their wishes, their aspirations onto their children. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I just want to caution parents about projecting too much because then it becomes, you know, their children are constantly seeking approval. And what we want to provide is unconditional love, not conditional. What about some of the, I suppose, some of the questions you can start to ask in those pre-adolescent years, Amara, to normalize having the discussions that move the rumination Matt talked about from a purely internal exercise to one that perhaps is more shared?

27:31Yeah, I think a lot of parents can share their own experiences of adolescence and talk about what a confusing time that was. And that can really normalize the experience. You can ask questions about what they already know, because some tweens will already have some information about what's changing in their body, what to expect hormonally. And some kids have no clue. Some kids have misinformation based on what they hear from their friends or other folks. So it's really important to come from a place of curiosity and not hold any judgment and just say, let's talk about it. There are books we can read together.

28:10We can talk about any questions that you have. Some things may be answered in school, you know, if you have a sex ed class, but maybe not. So just having that open, curious space to hold for your tween is really important. When someone's going through adolescence, and I'm thinking back to those years myself, it's this period of huge change and these moments of intense stress, they're just bound to happen. Matt, in the book, you describe a set of techniques for emotional stress that you refer to as cold water for the brain. What are some of those techniques? Yeah, I will connect this exactly to what Dr.

28:52Khalid just said. One of the things I've tried to impart to my kids, leading up to the cold water approach, is that it's helpful to give them a framework that some of the experiences they're having are raw emotion. What do I mean? Let's say your kid comes home and says, everyone in ninth grade hates me. This is highly unlikely to be true, but it is almost like a form of what Henry went through, where an over-information and emotional overload has hijacked the brain in the form of a really dark thought. To prepare them for the cold water therapy, which I'll describe in a second, I think a framework we can tell our tweens and pre-tweens and pre-teens and pre-adolescences, you're going to experience a lot of really intense emotions.

29:47And some of those periods are just emotions. And what the literature suggests and the science suggests and the experts suggest is when that happens, there are very specific techniques a young person can do to move their brain out of this torrent. They talk about taking a cold shower, putting your face in the snow, getting some exercise. If you can afford it, there are people like Dr. Khalid or people, I don't know what you charge, Dr. Khalid, so I didn't mean it like that. But there's DBT and CBT. But what they're aimed at is helping get through these emotional storms so that later on you can have a rational conversation that probably starts like this.

30:35Oh, mom, actually Doug in ninth grade really likes me. I take it back. So what I hear Matt describing there, Amara, is laying down a foundation for a practice that they can carry into adolescence with them. Right. But it also requires the adults in the life, in that person's life, to have that practice in place as well. So you can both teach and model. Absolutely. Modeling is so essential. And I think, you know, there's a couple principles that I talk to parents about when they're working with adolescents during this stage. First is connection before correction. Right? This is a time where your teenager's prefrontal cortex, which manages regulation and reasoning, is just going haywire.

31:33So help them label the emotion to engage the thinking brain, calm the emotional brain, but staying calm yourself. Model regulation so that they can mirror you. And you want to make them feel understood and not judged. So something you might say is, hey, I can see this is really overwhelming. Do you want to tell me more about what you're feeling? The other piece is not trying to fix the stress too quickly. So be present and non-controlling because their stress is not about you. So don't make it a reflection of your success or failure as a parent. You have to create emotional safety where your child can express pain without needing you to rescue them or correct them.