Understanding adolescent development is key to successful teen services

If you’ve spent time in a grocery or retail store, you’ve probably seen a two-year-old stomp his little feet, scream at the top of his lungs, and lash out at whomever dares to stop his childish, embarrassing behavior.

If you’ve spent time in any place populated with teens, you’ve probably seen something very similar. Suddenly, the “terrible twos” have morphed into the “terrible teens.”

It doesn’t take someone with a degree in child development to know that tantrum-throwing toddlers are bearable simply because we understand that this behavior is part of the natural developmental process of growing up. Yet this same logic is rarely, if ever, applied to a young person deep in the throes of adolescence.

Surely those emotional outbursts seen all too frequently in hallways, classrooms, libraries, and living rooms around the country are simply the by-product of newly raging hormones, right? Well, yes and no.

While hormones play an integral part in adolescent development, the process of growing up isn’t so easily explained. In her book The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids (Doubleday, 2003), Barbara Strauch says, “Teenagers may, indeed, be a bit crazy. But they are crazy according to a primal blueprint; they are crazy by design.” In other words—there is a method to the madness that is adolescence.

According to research conducted by neuroscientists at the National Institute of Health, brain development is a major factor in a teen’s developmental process. Jay Giedd, an expert on adolescent brain development and one of the first to use advanced technology to prove that the adolescent brain is not a finished product, has spent the last decade scanning and analyzing the brain activity and growth of thousands of teens.

Contrary to the widely accepted idea that a person’s brain has finished developing by the age of six, Giedd found that a young person’s brain continues to grow and change throughout childhood and well into adolescence. By repeatedly scanning the brains of many of the same teens over several years, Giedd was also able to ascertain that an adolescent’s frontal lobe, or the area of the brain that helps a person make good decisions, act rationally, and resist impulses, is the last area of the brain to stabilize.

This helps explain why teens often exhibit impulsiveness, mood swings, and poor judgment. Or for those of us who work with teens on a daily basis—why teens slam the door on their way out whether they’re angry or not, why they’re happy one minute and filled with despair the next, and why a teen who just burped the alphabet in front of his entire class can be embarrassed by a compliment from his teacher. This also helps explain why teens often do things that drive adults nuts, like requiring instant gratification or reacting immediately and irrationally to an external stimulus.

Adolescence is an evolution. Giedd’s research provides tangible, scientific proof that teens really are a work in progress. While this knowledge won’t inherently make you a better librarian, it will help you understand the teens in your library. You can’t change what’s physically happening within a teen’s brain but you can use this information to change how you react and respond by developing a method for working with teens that’ll help them rather than send them racing out the door.

Think of teen reference as an opportunity for you to act as a surrogate frontal lobe—stepping in to help with planning, processing information, and problem solving. You can’t tell a teen what to do, but you can lead her to the place where she can discover a solution on her own.