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Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain
by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore · 2018 · 1 reading card
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Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain · 2018
A refusal that already exists as a sentence gets used; one invented on the spot does not.
What changes: the biological clock shifts two hours later, so a ten o'clock bedtime is no longer realistic, and sensitivity to the group's judgement is at its peak. What you can do from fourteen. One, rehearse refusal with concrete words, said out loud: "no, I'm driving", "no, my dad picks me up at eleven", "I don't like the taste". A refusal that already exists as a sentence gets used; one that has to be invented on the spot in front of five people does not. Two, make a pickup pact: any hour, any place, no questions that night and no punishment — the conversation happens the next day. It is the cheapest insurance policy you can buy. Three, their own money and a monthly budget, not money on request: a teenager who has never run out has not learned what it means. Four, a first paid job, even twenty hours a month over the summer, counts more than a third after-school activity. Five, the phone leaves the bedroom at night, yours included — a rule that applies only to them does not last two years. Six, talk about pornography once, explicitly and without panic, because it has already been seen, and about consent in practical terms. Seven, keep one shared non-intellectual activity: cooking, a drive, fixing something. Hard conversations come out sideways, shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. What you do not do: you do not raise your voice in a crisis, you do not humiliate them in front of their friends, and you do not confuse privacy with concealment.
“For an adolescent, exclusion from the group is not social discomfort, it is a threat. The brain treats it as danger, which is why a risk taken in front of friends has a different price from one taken alone.”