The Think Now/Act Later Brain & Dealing With Fear in Parenting Teens
During the election and post-election season, I’ve thought a lot about fear, especially as it relates to adults and adolescents.
Honestly, there was no way I could ignore fear; it surrounded us. No matter which political party I was hearing from or what I thought and stood for, candidates and their surrogates up and down the ballot were pushing fears—our fears for what our lives would be like if this or that candidate won.
Fear Can Loom Larger Than Hope
Candidates were using the fear-factor to get us to vote for them because it tends to work well! Fear breaks through our attentional barriers. We are primed to be on the lookout for fear because we are driven to protect ourselves and those we love.
Over the past decade that I’ve been studying adolescence, I’ve become more and more on the lookout for those who use fear as a way to sell—not just political candidates—but all kinds of products and services, especially those who are selling to parents.
I remember when I began conducting the research that led to my book on teens, The Breakthrough Years, I was struck by how many of the best-selling titles and news articles were framed in fear-provoking ways. In fact, the FrameWorks Institute did a media analysis in 2018 and found that media stories on teens were twice as likely to stoke our fears about the bad things that could happen during adolescence as not.1
Fear Can Disable
I’m on the lookout for a fear-based approach toward teenagers because I know what fear does to us—it mobilizes us to respond to danger in reactive ways. “Act now/think later,” is the memorable phrase that Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota uses to explains this biology.2 Fear promotes a flight-or-fight response and a we/they stance. We don’t generally make good decisions as parents, as consumers, or as citizens when we are responding from fear because it can disable a more intentional approach, a think now/act later brain.
My alert button to fear tactics in talking about adolescence rose even higher after conducting a nationally representative study of nine through nineteen-year-olds because leading with fear runs counter to what young people say they most want and need from us. When I asked what adults should know about people their age, the largest proportion (38%) asked us not to see them negatively, to label them, to generalize about them, to stereotype them. Those are fear-based responses from adults.
Last week, I was speaking to a group of student leaders in a DC school and I asked the same question—what should adults know about people your age?
One high school student responded in a way that summarizes the complexity of this issue for me. She said she feels emotions strongly but she hates it when adults call her “dramatic.” It’s normal to feel emotions strongly during adolescence, she told the group, so why is what’s normal used as a judgment against her?
The Paradox
But is feeling emotions as strongly as she does really normal? she later asked me and the group. I can only imagine that her parents might be wondering the same thing, especially when there’s such public attention to a mental health crisis among teens. When is feeling very emotional normal and when is it a symptom of a mental health problem?
And that’s the paradox—the truly sad paradox. What teens most want—not to be seen in exaggerated or negative ways—can clash with parents’ also normal fears for them and the desire to protect them.
A Bite-and-Run Incident
I don’t just study this—I know from my own experience how hard it is to dampen fear.
One recent Friday afternoon, my 11-year-old grandson heard only part of what his mother—my daughter—said to him about his afternoon plans so he took the school bus home rather than the bus to soccer, like he was supposed to do. When he got to his neighborhood bus stop and no one was there, he called my daughter from his watch phone.
Rather than go home alone, he decided to go with a neighbor who was picking up her daughter and invited him over.
His dad decided to leave work early to pick him up. As my grandson was crossing the busy city street to get to his dad, he was bitten by a dog.
My grandson dialed me by mistake during the commotion. When I reached them at home a few minutes later, I heard the story from him and his dad.
My grandson told me the bite was like scratches on his leg and they really hurt. He said the dog was bigger than our two dogs—it was white, curly and on a leash. He only noticed the dog when it bit him.
His dad told me that his first clue that something was wrong was that my grandson was limping as he neared him. When he heard about the bite, the lady and her dog were gone; they seemed to have almost melted into the city crowds. He put antiseptic on the wound and photographed it so my daughter could show it to the doctor.
An hour or so later, my daughter called me from work, asking if I’d heard. She was upset, at everyone…
Why hadn’t her son listened to her that morning? She was so clear in her message to him.
Why had the school let him get on the wrong bus? She hadn’t notified the school that the regular Friday afternoon bus plans had changed. Didn’t they follow directions? Was anybody in charge at this dismissal time?
What if the dog had a disease? She’d never know because its owner had run away.
Why hadn’t his dad chased after them. If she’d been there, they’d never have gotten away.
And what does this say about her soon-to-be-teen? What else might he forget? What other dangers are out there? Even though this was not as terrible as a terrible experience might be, it loomed large.
I Didn’t Listen Either
My first instinct was to protect my grandson. Rather than see him as a person who doesn’t listen, I said to her, why not see him as a person who needs to learn to listen? Why not create better ways of making sure he knows the bus plan every morning?
“I can’t talk to you,” my daughter said before she clicked off the phone.
Right under her anger and my worries were fear.
It’s scary being the mother of a soon-to-be teen in such a randomly dangerous world. It’s scary being the grandmother, especially when you aren’t in charge anymore.
Just like my grandson wasn’t listening to my daughter, I wasn’t listening to her normal feelings either. I jumped in with advice without acknowledging how frightening this was.
Studying Is One Thing, Doing Is Another
In the qualitative study for The Breakthrough Years, I asked parents to walk me through a time when they lost it with their teen or tween—when they hadn’t been the parent they had wanted to be. I asked them to describe this situation in detail—what happened?—what had they felt and thought?—what had they done?—what happened next?—and so on.
From their stories, I could hear two different mindsets at play. One was what I call an Adversity Mindset. As the parents described what was going through their minds, they’d felt: 1) things can’t change (or what Carol Dweck of the University of California, Berkeley terms a fixed mindset),3 2) fearful and threatened, and 3) doubts that they could figure out how to handle the situation.
The other mindset was what I call a Possibilities Mindset: 1) things can change or what Dweck calls a growth mindset, 2) this situation felt like a challenge, not a threat, and 3) they thought they could figure out how to handle it (a belief in their own efficacy, as the late Albert Bandura would say).4
I created measures of these mindsets and in our next quantitative study, we tested them, finding that when parents have more of a Possibilities Mindset, their teens are more likely to thrive. You can read more about the research here.
It’s how those parents handle the normal fears of parenting that matters in parenting teens. The parents who feel the fear but who can shift from seeing it as a threat to a challenge are better equipped to support their kids.
In my research for the book, I also uncovered a number of cognitive tools that we can use to shift from a threat to a challenge view. For example, there is LEANING INTO stress and understanding its impact on our bodies and minds. This is what Jeremy Jamieson of the University of Rochester calls a stress-can-be enhancing mindset and his studies show how effective this is.5 Another cognitive tool is LEANING OUT, taking a fly on the wall perspective. The studies of Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan show how effective this type of psychological distancing is too.6
I hadn’t used either technique, but my daughter did.
The Magic Pause
She was at work when it happened but she knew to pause before talking to her son. When she got home and they talked about the bus and the bite incidents as a family, she was seeing them as challenges. Her family had a brief but productive conversation about how they each felt and what they might do next time.
In parenting and grandparenting teens (perhaps especially in this post-election season), this pause—even for seconds—is truly magic. It helps us shift from an act now/think later brain to a think now/act later brain so that our feelings of fear can help us and our kids.
Daniel Busso et al., “One Half of the Story: Media Framing of Adolescent Development" (Research Report, FrameWorks Institute, December 2018), https://wwwframeworksinstitute.org/publication/one-half-of-the-story/.
Megan R. Gunnar, interview by Ellen Galinsky, July 27, 2017.
Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol Sorish Dweck, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” Child Development 78, no. 1 (2007): 246–263; “An Analysis of Learned Helplessness: Continuous Changes in Performance, Strategy, and Achievement Cognitions Following Failure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 5 (1978): 451–462; Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological Review 84 no. 2 (1977): 191–215, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191.
Jeremy P. Jamieson et al., “Optimizing Stress Responses with Reappraisal and Mindset Interventions: An Integrated Model,” Anxiety, Stress & Coping 31, no. 3 (February 2018): 245–261, https: //doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2018.1442615.
Ethan Kross et al., “Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 2 (2014): 304, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173; Jason S. Moser et al., “Third-Person Self-Talk Facilitates Emotion Regulation With- out Engaging Cognitive Control: Converging Evidence from ERP and fMRI,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 4519 (July 2017): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3.