Learning to love the teenage brain

A fascinating article in the National Geographic focuses on the teenage brain. As a school administrator it is easy to focus on the teenage behaviors that annoy and even anger me.

This article recasts the teenage brain as underdeveloped and instead presents a slightly contrasting view of the teenager as highly adaptive. The behaviors that I attribute to an underdeveloped, unfinished brain actually may be seen as the behaviors of a "highly adaptive creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside."

My three (almost) grown sons, would have liked me to have this perspective when they were teenagers. It might have saved them from having to listen to me.