It’s Time For A New Story on Teen Brain Development

Whenever I speak to groups of parents, I hear some version of this story about teen brain development:

• My son can’t think clearly now because there’s a part of his brain that hasn’t developed yet—it’s the part that has to do with rational thought.

• I know that when my daughter becomes a teen, the thinking part of her brain will develop more slowly than the emotional part. I worry that her prefrontal cortex will be impaired and she’ll make dumb decisions.

I hear adolescents compared to an out-of-control car.  They’re all gasoline with the reward system of the brain on full throttle but the brakes, the cognitive control system of the brain, don’t work.

This story is widespread. When asked for one word to describe the teen or adolescent brain in the nationally representative study of the parents of nine through nineteen-year-olds conducted for The Breakthrough Years, the most frequent word was “immature,” used by 11 percent of all parents—a remarkable convergence for an open-ended question.¹

An additional eight percent used immature-like words, all defining the teen brain as what it is NOT, namely the brain of an adult:

• Unformed/primitive

• Undeveloped

• Unfinished

• Incomplete

• Inexperienced

• Not thinking/not smart

• Trapped between being an innocent child and not yet being, hopefully, what we would call a wiser adult

• An unformed mind very vulnerable to peer and outside pressures

• Underdeveloped brain—they’re still growing and don’t have the ability to care or comprehend things

In all, 59 percent of parents used negative words to describe the teen brain compared with 27 percent who used neutral words, and only 14 precent who used positive words.

Many teens have gotten the message and don’t like it. My study included the children of this nationally representative group of parents and one of the questions we asked was, “What should adults should know about people your age?” The largest proportion of young people in the study asked adults not to judge or label them negatively. Another 21 percent asked adults to understand their development. Here’s what a 13-year-old girl wrote:

We’re not as stupid as you think we are. It’s true that we have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, and maybe we’re not amazing at navigating social encounters yet, but some of us have amazing ideas.

It's time for a new story about teen brain development—a story based on the latest science.

Let’s begin with the old story and three reasons—among many—that it isn’t right. First, while it’s true that when researchers look at large groups of young people and compare the average development of the prefrontal cortex (the brain region underlying decision-making, impulse control/cognitive control) with that of the reward region (the part of the brain underlying reward seeking/sensation seeking), they find that it does develop more slowly,² but these averages mask important individual differences.

For instance, a 2011 study by Wim Meeus of Utrecht University in The Netherlands, Eveline Crone of Erasmus University, Rotterdam and their colleagues set out to look at developmental patterns in impulse control and sensation seeking, using a longitudinal dataset of 7,558 youth ages twelve to twenty-five from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth/Children and Young Adults Study in the United States. In this study, self-reported data were collected from the same children in seven different waves of data collection.³  Impulse control was measured with items like “I often get into a jam because I do things without thinking.” Sensation seeking was measured with items like “I enjoy new and exciting experiences, even if they are a little frightening or unusual.”

The researchers’ analyses found that while all young people improved in impulse control as they got older, close to seven in ten young people (68.8 percent) did not fit the pattern of sensation seeking (the gasoline) overriding impulse control (the brakes) as they grew up. In other words, impulse control was as strong or stronger than sensation seeking in almost seven in ten young people over all these years.

This finding relies on adolescents’ self-reports, so what about looking at the brain itself over time?

Kate Mills of the University of Oregon and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge and their colleagues in the U.K. have done so. Working in collaboration with Jay Giedd, then at the National Institute of Mental Health, and using NIMH’s datasets, the researchers identified brain images from thirty-three individuals who had their brains scanned in late childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence and whose scans could clearly reveal the development of different brain regions.⁴ When the researchers looked at averages, they too found that two structures in the reward system appeared to develop earlier than the cognitive control system. But when they looked at individual patterns of change over time, they found that the cognitive control system developed more slowly than both reward system structures in fewer than half of the sample.

Although more research is clearly needed on the patterns of development, it’s safe to say that a number of young people don’t fit the model of the cognitive control systems developing more slowly than the reward systems. At the same time, it’s important to note that the reward system is also changing and developing during the teen years.⁵

It's like sharing the average height for seventh graders. Averages can be useful, but then picture a group of seventh graders standing in a line and the differences in height among individual children are what’s most striking.

A second reason that we need a new story is what adults expect of teens plays a crucial role. Expecting negative behavior can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.⁶

Culture matters too. Summarizing the research on why we need to move away from the pervasive and negative stereotypes of teens, Eva Telzer of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her colleagues note that “risk taking may be more common in cultures that perceive the adolescent period as a time of ‘storm and stress,’ and less common in cultures that believe adolescence is not characterized by excessive risk taking.” They conclude:

Thus, cognitive control and risk taking are not hard-wired into the developing brain but are shaped by the cultural context⁷

A third reason that we need a new story is that decision making depends on the tasks and the context in which they take place, especially whether the situation is high-stakes or low-stakes.⁸ An example is a study assessing cognitive skills by Philip David Zelazo of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues of 102 young people ages eight through fifteen.⁹ Some tasks were low-stakes or “cool,” such as resisting distractions in the Color Word Stroop task where young people are asked to say what color color-words are written when the font color and the word are different (say the word “green” when you see the word red written with green letters, for example—try it’s not so easy). Other tasks were higher stakes or “hot,” like the Iowa Gambling Task, which involves rewards and losses. The researchers found that across these years, children made greater gains on the measures of lower stakes tasks and more gradual gains on the higher stakes tasks.  And that’s the point—adolescence is a time when these self-regulation skills are being learned. Other studies find that when the situation isn’t stressful, when the stakes aren’t high, and emotions aren’t soaring, adolescents are just as capable of using self-control and making good decisions as adults!¹⁰

When I share these reasons about why we need a new story of teen brain development, parents say that they make a lot of sense—that the view of the out-of-control teenager doesn’t necessarily fit their own child, but then they typically describe themselves as “lucky” in having a good kid—that’s how pervasive our negative views are.

In our study, we found there’s a gap between what we think about our own teens and other teens. For example, 39 percent of parents say “impulsive/wild” and 32 percent say “makes risky decisions” are good descriptions of children their child’s age, while 17 percent and 12 percent of parents respectively think these words describe their own child.

Turning to the science behind the new story, let’s look at the heightened reward sensitivity that underlies sensation seeking; that is, the push to seek new, different and exciting experiences. Then let’s think about this in relation to the main task of adolescence, which is to transition from childhood into adulthood. 

When we think about it this way, the meaning of sensation seeking seems self-evident. Why would children ever leave their childhood homes—the safety of homes they have known—if they weren’t drawn to explore. The first part of the new story is that sensation seeking primes young people to leave the nest, to seek new worlds.

We know that emotions are more intense during adolescence—with the highs feeling higher and the lows feeling lower than at other times in development. These heightened feelings are developmentally necessary too. How could teens know if those new worlds are safe or if they fit in/belong, if they didn’t have strong emotional responses. Having a robust emotional detector system helps teens quickly make sense of new places and people.

I am not alone in seeing the teen years in this this way—a large group of adolescent researchers have come to similar conclusions.  I love the story Eveline Crone told me when I visited her lab in The Netherlands. Like many other researchers, she’d studied risky behavior in teens, but when her dream of doing a large longitudinal study came true and she looked at teens’ development over time, she began to see the studies she’d conducted through a different lens, as she explained to me:

We saw reward sensitivity in almost all adolescents in my studies, but the actual risk-taking behavior—the reckless, thrill-seeking, rebellious risk- taking behavior—we only saw that in a small percentage of the adolescents. I thought, “Why do they have this reward sensitivity when only a small percentage engages in excessive risk-taking?”¹¹

This insight led Crone to a breakthrough moment:

I now think that it helps you to be explorative, to look at different options and seek out different alternatives, to find your way in new social worlds.

Other scholars have come to new conclusions about the connection between sensation seeking and risky behavior. Since some adolescents (even though it’s a small percentage) take more negative risks than younger children or older adults, people used to think that teenagers must feel more immune to danger. Why else would they want to watch scary movies or go on terrifying amusement park rides?

That turns out not to be true. Ron Dahl of the University of California, Berkeley, has found that the hormones of puberty, including testosterone, appear to increase the activation of fear circuits in the brain, making them more reactive to threat, not less.¹²

In addition, studies show that adolescents are often aware of the consequences of doing dangerous things.¹³ So, if they know (or are told) better and if they experience fear, why do some of them still take negative risks, even dangerous ones?

This has been a paradox in the research.¹⁴ In a study of hormonal changes and brain development over time, Dahl and his colleagues realized that this paradox makes perfect sense:

As these hormones—testosterone and the other hormones of puberty—go up, the capacity to activate reward and excitement goes up, too.¹⁵

Dahl and his colleagues have been researching “how the two sets of circuits—the fear and the reward excitement circuitry—interact more as puberty occurs.”¹⁶ He has come to view the tendency to seek novel and thrilling experiences as adaptive because it enables young people to learn to face fear. In essence, sensation seeking helps teens learn to be brave. Dahl says:

How do you learn to be brave? Not by being fearless, but by learning to do the right thing even when you’re afraid. How do you do that if you don’t practice?¹⁷

And that leads us to the second part of the new story about the teen brain. Adolescence is the prime time for young people to learn and practice the skills they need now and in the future.

Let’s go back to the brain. As we’ve discussed, the prefrontal regions develop significantly during these years. Additionally, there’s improved connectivity within and between the outer cortical regions (areas linked to cognitive control) and inner cortical regions (areas linked to emotional responses, rewards, and learning).¹⁸  These years are a time of brain plasticity where the possibilities for learning are quite high.

In a review of the research on adolescence, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine writes:

Adolescent brains are not simply “advanced” child brains, nor are they “immature” adult brains—they are specially tailored to meet the needs of this stage of life [emphasis added] . . . Adolescents must explore and take risks to build the cognitive, social, and emotional skills they will need to be productive adults.¹⁹

Over the past twenty years, studies have identified and labeled these skills as executive function skills. They’ve found that these skills develop rapidly during the adolescent years and that they’re core to academic and life success.²⁰ Moreover, executive function skills are the cognitive building blocks for life and learning skills²¹ we highly value like setting and achieving goals, understanding the perspective of others, communicating and collaborating, problem-solving and taking on challenges. Importantly, teens can develop these skills in everyday situations as well as in situations where they take positive risks, like standing up for a friend or trying to learn something that’s challenging.

Whenever I speak about my new book, I’ve been sharing this new story of brain development—that teens are primed to explore and to learn the crucial skills they’ll need now and in the future.  The responses by parents and professionals have been profound.

Last week in Hawaii, a father and his teen son approached me after a speech.

The father began by saying that he so appreciates the new story, feeling that it will help people move from seeing teens as developmentally doomed to make bad decisions toward understanding how their brains develop and how we can help them make good decisions. 

In return, I asked him, what term he might use to describe the teen brain.

“Sense-making,” he said.

“What term would you use?” I asked his son.

“Maybe exploring,” he answered. “but I’m not sure.”

So, I turn to you as readers. What words would you use?

The father, son and I all agreed that there are practical implications of this new story with its new language. The father said that the next time he was tempted to say, “WHAT were you thinking?” to his son in a negative way, he might pause and ask him about sense-making—what was he trying to make sense of?

The son lit up at that idea. Maybe if they both better understood the son’s thought processes and motivation, he could develop even stronger ways of managing emotions and solving problems!!

Now that’s a brain-building story for both teens and adults!

1. Ellen Galinsky, The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens (New York: Flatiron Press, 2024).

2. Laurence Steinberg et al., “Around the World, Adolescence Is a Time of Heightened Sensation Seeking and Immature Self-Regulation,” Developmental Science 21, no. 2 (March 2018): e12532, https://www.doi.org/10.1111/desc.12532.

3. Wim Meeus et al., “On Imbalance of Impulse Control and Sensation Seeking and Adolescent Risk: An Intra-Individual Developmental Test of the Dual Systems and Maturational Imbalance Models,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 50 (2021): 827–840, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-021-01419-x.

4. Kathryn L. Mills et al., “The Developmental Mismatch in Structural Brain Maturation During Adolescence,” Developmental Neuroscience 36, nos. 3–4 (2014): 147–160, https://doi.org/10.1159/000362328.

5. Kathryn L. Mills, interview by Ellen Galinsky, July 8, 2019. Eveline A. Crone and Ronald E. Dahl, “Understanding Adolescence as a Period of Social-Affective Engagement and Goal Flexibility,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, no. 9 (September 2012): 636–650, https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3313; Jennifer H. Pfeifer and Nicholas B. Allen, “Arrested Development? Reconsidering Dual-Systems Models of Brain Function in Adolescence and Disorders,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 6 (May 2012): 322–329, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.04.011.

6. Christy M. Buchanan and Johna L. Hughes, “Construction of Social Reality During Early Adolescence: Can Expecting Storm and Stress Increase Storm and Stress?,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 19, no. 2 (May 2009): 261–285, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2009.00596.x.

7. Eva H. Telzer et al., "Challenging stereotypes of teens: Reframing adolescence as window of opportunity," American Psychologist 77, no. 9 (2022): 1070, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001109.

8. Philip David Zelazo and Stephanie M. Carlson, “Hot and Cool Executive Function in Childhood and Adolescence: Development and Plasticity,” Child Development Perspectives 6, no. 4 (December 2012): 354–360, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2012.00246.x.

9. Angela Prencipe et al., “Development of Hot and Cool Executive Function During the Transition to Adolescence,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 108, no. 3 (March 2011): 621–637, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.09.008.

10. Eva H. Telzer et al., "Challenging stereotypes of teens.”

11. Eveline A. Crone, interview by Ellen Galinsky, September 1, 2017.

12. Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017; Ronald E. Dahl, email message to Ellen Galinsky, January 24, 2023.

13. Valerie F. Reyna and Frank Farley, “Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision- Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00026.x.

14. Jeffrey M. Spielberg et al., “Exciting Fear in Adolescence: Does Pubertal Development Alter Threat Processing?,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 8 (April 2014): 87, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.01.004.

15. Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017.

16. Spielberg et al., “Exciting Fear in Adolescence.”

17. Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017.

18. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.17226/25388.

19. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2019), 43, https://doi.org/10.17226/25388.

20. Adele Diamond and Daphne S. Ling, “Conclusions About Interventions, Programs, and Approaches for Improving Executive Functions That Appear Justified and Those That, Despite Much Hype, Do Not,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (April 2016): 35, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2015.11.005; Adele Diamond and Daphne S. Ling, “Review of the Evidence on, and Fundamental Questions About, Efforts to Improve Executive Functions, Including Working Memory,” in Cognitive and Working Memory Training: Perspectives from Psychology, Neuroscience, and Human Development, eds. Jared M. Novick et al. (Oxford Scholarship online, 2020), 1–572, https: //doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199974467.001.0001.

21. Ellen Galinsky, The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens (New York: Flatiron Press, 2024); Philip David Zelazo, Destany Calma-Birling, and Ellen Galinsky, “Fostering Executive-Function Skills and Promoting Far Transfer to Real-World Outcomes: The Importance of Life Skills and Civic Science,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 33 no. 2 (2024): 121- 127, https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241229664.