GEN: Professional Resources: Adolescent Development

"John Medina explores the neurological and evolutionary factors that drive teenage behavior and affect both achievement and engagement. Then he proposes a research-supported counterattack: a bold redesign of educational practices and learning environments to deliberately develop teens' cognitive capacity to manage their emotions, plan, prioritize, and focus."--Book cover

... why are so many students struggling? ...This conflict - adults wanting to educate and parent adolescents in healthy and balanced ways, but simultaneously, overscheduling, overworking and, at times, overwhelming them - is at the heart of this book.

Between the ages of 12 and 24, the brain changes in important, and oftentimes maddening and challenging ways. In this book, the author, a psychiatrist busts a number of commonly held myths about adolescence. He shows that, if parents and teens can work together to form a deeper understanding of the brain science behind all the tumult, they will be able to turn conflict into connection and form a deeper understanding of one another. According to the author, during adolescence we learn important skills, such as how to leave home and enter the larger world, how to connect deeply with others, and how to safely experiment and take risks, thereby creating strategies for dealing with the world's increasingly complex problems. Here he presents an inside-out approach to focusing on how brain development affects our behavior and relationships. Drawing on important new research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, he explores exciting ways in which understanding how the brain functions can improve the lives of adolescents, making their relationships more fulfilling and less lonely and distressing on both sides of the generational divide.

Strauch draws upon the latest scientific discoveries to make the case that the changes the brain goes through during adolescence are as dramatic and crucial as those that take place in the first two years of life, and that teenagers are not entirely responsible for their sullen, rebellious, and moody ways.