Adolescents can be worrisome to parents, but recently they have been especially worrying for society. Covid may have disrupted their social development. Is social media destroying their relationships? One of the biggest hits on Netflix this year has been Adolescence, about why a 13-year-old boy kills a classmate.
In How we Grow Up, Matt Richtel tries to explain the adolescent mind (it’s complex) and decide whether adolescents have it worse now than previously (yes, in some ways).
Adolescence was established in the public mind as a time of tumult in one of the 18th-century’s bestsellers, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Goethe. Boy pines for girl. Boy becomes melancholy, has mood swings and suicidal thoughts. A researcher at the beginning of last century, Stanley Hall, theorised that development mirrored the ascent of human civilisation: adolescents emerged from a time of innocence into a period of grappling with “perversions” before ascending to a higher civilised adulthood. Freudians agreed with the sex part.
Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning health reporter for The New York Times, focuses on the science. Here are studies of puberty in Zambia, scientists counting adolescent synapses, teens being put in MRI scanners to study their brains.
In one study, adolescents were placed in EEG caps to measure brain activity and played the sound of their mother’s voice. Brain activity was negligible. When they were played strangers’ voices, their brains lit up. Risk and reward, the researchers decided. There was little reward in listening to their mother – they knew what she was going to say; she could be ignored. But there was potential interest in listening to a stranger.
Adolescent brains are set up to try new things, no matter the risk. Richtel offers as proof research into two chemicals, glutamate and GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid). The former stimulates brain activity; the latter dampens it. They seem to approximate the “just do it” and the “you really shouldn’t” instincts. Normally, they are in rough balance. During adolescence, GABA levels remain the same but are overpowered by a surge in glutamate.
Teens are also sensitive to dopamine, the chemical that makes a person feel good when doing a pleasurable activity, says Richtel. In other words, adolescents are disposed to trying risky things if it makes them feel good – and the voices of authority can be ignored.
That is largely a good thing, he argues. The species depends on them doing so. Adolescents may do dumb things but they are also creative explorers. The species needs people challenging traditions, seeking out the new, even spreading DNA widely, otherwise humankind atrophies and becomes vulnerable to extinction. “Their diversity is our defence.”
As you would expect, Richtel does a good job explaining the science, but he does overdo folksy asides. “Phew. And: sheesh. Really?” he asks after a discussion of overprescribing pharmaceuticals. He works hard, perhaps too hard, to keep readers reading. His stories of adolescents are often left at cliffhangers (Richtel is a thriller writer in his spare time).
He calls the latest cohort of adolescents Generation Ruminant. They have turned inwards to study themselves, while also hanging out largely online. The question is whether this generation’s risk-taking is more difficult than previous ones. Here, Richtel becomes more pessimistic.
Studies show adolescents are entering puberty younger, meaning they are sensitive to social information very young. At the same time, the internet and social media provide a massive overload of information.
Social media and phone screens are part of the problem – but only part of it, says Richtel. They are a “volume knob”. (He does point out social media is almost the perfect invention to entice adolescents, and media companies gain hugely from them.)
One researcher tells him the core issue is that adolescents face a world in which “the accelerator is pushed to the floor before there’s a good braking system in place”.
Richtel spent years researching the wreckage that endures for The NYT. It reported that ill-equipped emergency departments have faced a doubling of teen mental health-related issues in 10 years. Hundreds of young people sleep in US EDs every night, he found, as doctors try to find proper treatment.
Some of the other effects seem more prosaic but are just as profound. The number of US students physically active for an hour a day has fallen by a quarter in a decade. In 2007, 31% of adolescents got eight hours of sleep; in 2019, it was 22%.
Trying to find answers is hard. Richtel finds hope (largely) in adolescents themselves.
He threads their stories throughout. There is Henry, the decent, perfectionist boy who is also anorexic; Lindsey, a former drug dealer turned management trainee, and others. One of his subjects doesn’t make it to adulthood; the tragedy hits like a physical slap.
Their stories are wonderfully told. The people are charming, troubled and surprisingly open. Richtel is like a kindly uncle trying to understand them, following their stories for years.
In the end, he seems to plump for what generations of parents have probably tried. Love and support children, encourage them, set clear rules “while also trying our level best to hand the baton with grace”.
It’s tough out there, he seems to be saying, but the kids are (mostly) all right.
How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence, by Matt Richtel (HarperCollins, $39.99), is out now.
