I have been thinking about this video for several days now. It is called The Teenage Brain Explained. He does talk about "hormones" but he explains that there is a lot more going on in the brain that hormones causing this stage called the Teenage Years.
What I found most interested was the fact that the brain does not finish developing until the mid-twentys. The last part of the brain to develop is the pre-frontal cortex, the rational/decision making part of the brain. Before it is fully developed, reactions, rather than being guided by rational thinking, are guided by gut emotions. That combined with a few other things that the prefrontal cortex does, like emotion recognition on the faces of other people, is often what I find to be most difficult to deal with in teenagers and early twenties.
Pardon me for sounding old, I feel it regularly, but I don't mean to be patronizing. I found it incredibly helpful to think that the teenager who just flounced out of my rehearsal probably is under some sort of misunderstanding, rather than me having done something horribly offensive. I can then analyze triggers for that individual and help them respond with more beneficial actions. Similiarly, when a teenager is acting like everything is stupid, they probably don't see the long term benefit of what I am explaining. Giving them a short term goal with an immediate reward might motivate them better, while I show them the long term benefits also.
I am not saying that we should cater to their whims or emotions, but realizing that they don't have the tools to respond differently does help my attitude in dealing with them. I am not saying high school and college students should not write rational papers, but that they need to be taught a lot of the basics of reasoning, beyond gut emotion. And they need to be shown what to do with that gut emotion. As he points out at the end of the video, "There is a lot of awesome energy floating around out there."
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