For anyone put down by THE TEEN BRAIN myth.

[Avatar Korra]

(Don't worry. It isn't that long)
The Myth of the Teen Brain by Dr. Robert Epstein
http://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/Epstein-T...isphpreq=1

People tend to blame any antisocial behaviors, rebellion, or immaturity of younger people on their "underdeveloped brains" without considering that the restrictions of western culture (like mandatory schooling) or the destruction of potential through isolation from adults and being infantilized can cause these behaviors, and behaviors and feelings can shape the brain.

"Consistent with these modern observations,
many historians note that through most of
recorded human history the teen years were a
relatively peaceful time of transition to adulthood.
Teens were not trying to break away from
adults; rather they were learning to become
adults."


"Surveys I have conducted show that teens
in the U.S. are subjected to more than 10 times as
many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice
as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines,
and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated
felons."

"But
did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil
alter the brain? "

"In his 1998 book Blaming the Brain, neuroscientist
Elliot Valenstein deftly points out that
we make a serious error of logic when we blame
almost any behavior on the brain—especially
when drawing conclusions from brain-scanning
studies"

"Today, with teens trapped in the frivolous
world of peer culture, they learn virtually everything
they know from one another rather than
from the people they are about to become. Isolated
from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is
no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards,
recklessly or irresponsibly. Almost without
exception, the reckless and irresponsible behavior
we see is the teen’s way of declaring his or her
adulthood or, through pregnancy or the commission
of serious crime, of instantly becoming an
adult under the law. Fortunately, we also know
from extensive research both in the U.S. and elsewhere
that when we treat teens like adults, they
almost immediately rise to the challenge."

[The man]

Thnkz

[James Comey]

I can't help but feel there are some useful quotes for this.

[Avatar Korra]

Yeah~
I feel like I made a huge discovery since I've been looking up age of consent related comments and articles, and my self esteem was starting to lower from all of the young people are, "underdeveloped," "idiots," "immature," "incapable of ever understanding ____," "incompetent," and "lazy," generalizations.

[James Comey]

They'll behave that way if you teach them to be that way.

That's kind of an issue when they suddenly become 18 and the future lies on their hands.

[Avatar Korra]

I have two years until I'm 18 yet I feel like I'm still 14 with four whole years left.
~really scared~

For some reason, I've always imagined being dead before becoming an adult.

[James Comey]

Yikes. That's something interesting, thinking of mortality at such an early age. Why do you constantly ponder death?

[Avatar Korra]

I have no idea. It's not that I want to die, but I just can't imagine being alive after 18, as if adult life doesn't exist or can't possibly exist.
It might just be that I fear adulthood too much.

[James Comey]

Ah. I kind of felt the same way too. The truth is that there's no real way to prepare for the transition. It's going to be long as fuck and tedious and you'll fall but just remember that you'll get back up.

[Avatar Korra]

Thanks for your classic wise words.

[James Comey]

I can always link a foreign perspective on the issue as well .

[SoulRiser]

Adulthood? I keep hearing about that thing, but I don't think I've ever experienced it, and I'm 34... I think a lot of it can be avoided, probably.

But what helps me with big, overwhelming things is to just focus on one step at a time. Don't even try to plan out the whole picture at once. I guess that's kind of what you're already doing...

[James Comey]

(04-05-2017 12:00 AM)SoulRiser Wrote:  Adulthood? I keep hearing about that thing, but I don't think I've ever experienced it, and I'm 34... I think a lot of it can be avoided, probably.

Do you happen to be Michael Jackson? God bless that man... he was pretty much a child at heart and always was. (No, he did not molest anyone; those cases were 100% unadulterated media-spinned bullshit).

[Small Axe]

Wow, thank you! I had heard about that paper. Here's what Samantha Godwin had to say about the topic in "Children's Oppression, Rights, & Liberation" (2011) (https://www.academia.edu/2046034/Childre...Liberation)

“In addition to the paternalistic justifications for white dominance over black people and male dominance over women—arguments that fit the pattern of “group A must have legal power over group B for the best interests and protection of group B”—the white chauvinist and male chauvinist ideologies also employed a somewhat different normative justification: an appeal to the good of society, where the subordination of black people and women was said to be necessary for society to function. Defenders of slavery for instance claimed that the institution of slavery was necessary for a functioning society and economy.47 Similarly, the subordination of women to their husbands was widely held to be necessary for the stability and wellbeing of the family, and hence, society at large.48 In both instances, the biological differences between subordinate and dominant demographic groups was said to both causally explain the social relations of domination and subordination, while also providing a normative justification for why those social relations were good, natural, and desirable.

"Today, the subordination of children to adults in general and their parents in particular is similarly seen as being both caused and justified by children’s inferior mental faculties. Both the paternalism argument (children must be subordinate for their own good49) and the social necessity argument (children must be subordinate for the good of society50) are advanced to support the legal disabilities of children. The parallels with “scientific racism” and sexist neurological theories should be obvious: we are frequently told that children and adolescents are mentally inferior due to their underdeveloped brains, and this inferiority renders them incapable of behaving rationally or responsibly;51 in the past, precisely the same claims were advanced against women and black people.

"Many people will instinctively reply that the racists and male chauvinists of nineteenth century were wrong about black people and women, whereas our scientifically superior contemporary society is right about children and adolescents. There are good reasons however not to leap to this conclusion.

"A chief way the black civil rights movement and women’s rights movement responded to racist and sexist stereotypes was not to deny that there are discernable differences between races and genders that might (mistakenly) be called upon to justify social hierarchies, but that social hierarchies themselves produced these differences. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould argues that measurable “intelligence”52 does not casually explain the inferior social status of racial minority groups, rather the inferior social status of racial minority groups contributes to their relatively worse average performance on “intelligence” tests:53 the characteristics that racists appealed to in order to causally explain the conditions of white dominance could themselves be causally explained by the fact of living under white dominance.54 In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond argued that Eurasians have been politically dominant over the rest of the world’s population not because of some biological, cultural, intellectual or moral superiority, but because of their geographic advantages; resources like horses, metals, and sufficiently large populations to develop disease resistance structurally advantaged them against populations who lacked those resources.55

"Similar explanations have also been advanced for gender differences and hierarchies. The cultural materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris argued that patriarchal, male dominant family arrangements arose when agricultural societies developed livestock driven iron plows: men were better equipped for this type of more efficient farming that became economically dominant, and so their social dominance followed from their control of the most efficient means of production.56 In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone offers a different explanation where she argues that while the physical differences between male and female roles in reproduction explain how male dominance developed57—the feminine character traits cited as reasons why male dominance should persist are themselves products of female oppression.58

"The purpose of these arguments is not to show that it is impossible to explain the status of subordinated demographic groups in reference to their biological differences.59 Rather, it is to demonstrate that there are social structural or material explanations that can also account for the social hierarchy and the perceived differences between demographic groups. Given two possible explanations—one sociological, the other biological—where the variables are impossible to control for (we cannot take a child and put him or her in some other experimental social arrangement, nor can we put an adult in a social position identical to a child in our society)—there is no way for us to determine how much of children’s childishness is the result of their innate attributes and how much is the result of their social position.

"What does it really mean when we say that a child’s brain is “still developing”? This is often construed to suggest that the changes that go on in a child’s brain over time are teleological in nature—they begin at a low level of development and lead to the end point of a superior adult level of development, so we only give people adult rights and responsibilities once they have fully reached that superior level. This narrative however has minimal scientific support. The reality is that there is no fixed adult level of brain development where brains plateau—rather brains continue to change over the course of someone’s lifetime.60 Myelin levels in the brain, often cited as ‘proof’ that the teenage brain is still developing, not only continue to increase through teenage years, but well into middle age, at which point they decline.61

"Psychologist Robert Epstein surveyed the literature on adolescent neurology studies and concluded that they were misrepresented in the popular press in several ways: the changes observed continue to take place through our lives,62 and research has thus far only shown correlations between behavior and neurology, but has not demonstrated causality, and it is well known that experience can alter brain anatomy,63 and studies are often simply misrepresented and overstated.64 Epstein notes that while all of our behavior, thoughts and feelings are in some way reflected physically in our brains, it does not follow that something particular about our brains is the cause of those actions or emotional states.65 According to Epstein, environments, studying, diet, exercise, stress, and many other activities alter the brain—so if adolescents have problems, pointing to brain differences does not show that their brains caused the problems as the problems could cause the brain differences.66 There are also numerous differences between child and adult mental capacities where children actually have superior mental abilities. Visual acuity peaks at the onset of puberty, and incidental memory abilities peak near twelve years old before declining,67 so young people actually have an organic advantage in learning new things.68 Intelligence researchers J.C. Raven and David Wechsler using different intelligence tests found that “raw intelligence” scores peak between age thirteen and fifteen and decline through life.69 Needless to say these differences between child and adult mental capacities have not been prominent in political and media discourse about children’s capacities and rights.

"The focus on the difference between adults and children ignores what is at stake from a social justice perspective in according children equal rights. Even to the extent that there are significant natural differences in capacity between most adults and most children, these differences do not necessarily justify all or most of the social structures that privilege adults against children. Just as biological differences between men and women do not determine the specific socio-economic (and, historically, legal) advantages of men over women (such as coverture), the biological differences between adults and children do not determine the form that children’s legal status takes with regard to adults.70 Even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that, implausibly, all people under the age of eighteen have inferior mental capabilities to all those over eighteen, this is hardly an argument for assigning civil rights only to those with superior mental capabilities over eighteen. Reasonable people rightly recognize that those allegedly (or even demonstrably) more rational and intelligent should not enjoy greater rights than those with lesser capacities for rationality and intelligence—we do not see legal caste hierarchies arranged by IQ points or brain size as legitimate or just ways of organizing a society.”

[Avatar Korra]

Duuude! Thank you too! That was a better read than the article I posted, especially the historical comparisons to race and sex.

"What does it really mean when we say that a child’s brain is “still developing”? This is often construed to suggest that the changes that go on in a child’s brain over time are teleological in nature—they begin at a low level of development and lead to the end point of a superior adult level of development, so we only give people adult rights and responsibilities once they have fully reached that superior level. This narrative however has minimal scientific support. The reality is that there is no fixed adult level of brain development where brains plateau—rather brains continue to change over the course of someone’s lifetime.60 Myelin levels in the brain, often cited as ‘proof’ that the teenage brain is still developing, not only continue to increase through teenage years, but well into middle age, at which point they decline.61"

This right here answered one of my main questions of what do people mean when they say "underdeveloped." Is it supposed to mean they are idiots or can't understand certain things? Is it implying that adults are always mentally superior? I was thinking what Samantha Godwin said, but now I have something to support it. <3

[James Comey]

I want to point out that a human brain generally isn't considered 100% developed until age 20, so the protective instinct of adults to children isn't 100% bullshit, compared to say, women or non white people.

Of course, I'm not saying that teens/kids shouldn't be given more independence. In fact, they probably have too little.

This whole shit is worse if you happened to be put in special ed....

[Small Axe]

(04-06-2017 10:28 AM)Hansgrohe Wrote:  I want to point out that a human brain generally isn't considered 100% developed until age 20, so the protective instinct of adults to children isn't 100% bullshit, compared to say, women or non white people.

Câline de bine, mon dieu, au contraire ! Your “100% developed at age 20” statistic is PRECISELY the sort of thing Godwin and Epstein are calling out as “bullshit”, with sources, studies, and science on their side! If you want to “point out” that “100% developed at age 20” is anything less than 100% bullshit, you need more than zero evidence.

[James Comey]

Huh, son of a gun. You're right.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194

Looks like neuroplasticity is much more powerful than we thought, and lasts much longer too! In the end, adulthood is pretty subjective and science seems to very much support this. While I still think some guidance is necessary, the only way people will even develop is if you let them be free. Let kids figure things out for themselves, it's better that way. Sheltering is BS.

[Avatar Korra]

The people doing that the best are parents who unschool their kids.
~Like Ellen Fisher~
https://www.youtube.com/user/MangoIslandMamma1/videos

Adorable ass family..

[James Comey]

All right, with all this new evidence, that suggests there's no such thing as a "teen brain" (brain development continues well into the 30s and neuroplasticity is even much longer lasting than previously thought), it's definitely worth adding onto my new School Survival Book thread in School Talk. Definitely worth integrating this with that

[The man]

YOLO.

[James Comey]

Yeah that was a necessary bump.

[The man]

Totally.

[James Comey]

Absolutely.

[The man]

I know your name.

[The man]

This NEEDS to be listed under important threads.....

[James Comey]

I can always pin it.

[The man]

Just put this

https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comme...this_asap/

on reddit.

[James Comey]

Shit r/teenagers looks like a great place to expand.

[The man]

(04-24-2017 05:00 AM)Hansgrohe Wrote:  Shit r/teenagers looks like a great place to expand.

START EXPANDING THEN!