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The Science of Teen Rebellion

• What teens lie about
  • What they spend their allowance on
  • Whether they've started dating
  • What clothes they put on away from the house
  • What movie they went to and who they went with
  • Alcohol and drug use
  • Hanging out with friends their parents disapprove of
  • How they spend their afternoons if the parent is still at work
  • Whether a chaperone was present at a party
  • Whether they rode in a car with a drunk driver
  • Whether their homework is done
  • What music they're listening to
• Teens only use outright lies 25% of the time, mostly to cover up the worst stuff
• 50% of the time, they withhold relevant details that would upset their parent
• 25% of the time, they avoid the topic and hope their parents don't ask
• 96% of teens reported lying to their parents
  • It doesn't matter if you're an honors student or an overachiever, the numbers are largely the same
• The most common reason for the deception? "I'm trying to protect my relationship with my parents. I don't want them to be disappointed in me."
• Kids tend to get in trouble when they have permissive parents; the kids take the lack of rules as a sign that their parents don't actually care.
  • In Chile, permissive parenting is the norm, and kids like to their parents more than anywhere else
• Resistance to parental authority peaks around 14-15.  It's slightly higher at 11 than at 18.
• Oppressive parents don't have rebellious children.  Instead, their children are obedient and depressed.
• The best parenting style
  • The best parents set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence and explain why the rules are there. They expect their children to obey them.
  • Other than those areas, they support their child's autonomy and allow the freedom to make his or her own decisions.
  • Kids lie the least to these kinds of parents; instead of lying about 12 topics, they only lie about 5.
• Boredom
  • Teens turn to drinking and drugs because they're bored
  • Boredom sets in around the 7th grade and increases all the way through 12th grade
  • Intrinsic motivation drops gradually but consistently over the same period
  • Linda Caldwell of Penn State designed an extensive curriculum to teach teens how to not be bored, but it had almost zero effect.  Why?  Teens are biologically inclined to boredom.
• The biology of boredom: The pirate game, with rewards of a single coin, a small stack, and a big pile
  • Kids found any reward thrilling; their brains lit up the same regardless of the prize
  • Adults brains lit up in proportion to the reward
  • Teen brains actually declined in activity with small or medium rewards.  Only the large reward elicited a response, and when that response came, it was larger than either a child or adult's response to a large reward
    • This is the same response curve as a seasoned drug addict; the reward center requires a large dosage
  • The teen pleasure response appeared to hijack the prefrontal cortex (responsible for weighing risk and consequences).  When experiencing and emotionally-charged excitement, the teen brain has trouble gauging risk and foreseeing consequences
  • Teens with higher spikes were more likely to say that risky behaviors like getting drunk seemed fun
• Risk-taking
  • Ironically, there are also risks that terrify teens far more than adults--mainly the fear of rejection by peers
  • The "Bad Idea" experiment asked adults and teens to decide if certain concepts like "Swallow a cockroach" were bad ideas
    • Adults answered almost instantaneously
    • Teens took much longer to answer; brain scans showed they had to think through the scenario.  They had no instinctive fear or revulsion
    • In contrast, an experiment that (falsely) convinced them that they had to answer questions about their favorite music in front of an audience of other teems caused distress and danger signals to light up like crazy
• The opposite of lying is arguing
  • Teens told the truth about things their parents disapproved of if they thought the parent might give in.  Otherwise, they lied to get out of having to argue.
  • Filipino teens respect their parents more than American teens...and argue far more.  While they argued about rules, they didn't argue about the parent's right to set the rules, and were far more likely to obey the rules.  American teens just pretended to agree, and did what they wanted to anyways.
    • Certain types of fighting are a sign of respect, not disrespect.
  • Studies show that over the long term, moderate conflict with parents is associated with better adjustment than no conflict or frequent conflict.
  • 46% of mothers see arguing as destructive to their relationship with their daughter; only 23% of daughters felt that way.  Far more believed the fighting strengthened their relationship
    • Daughters wanted to feel heard, and to get some small concessions
    • Daughters who rated arguing as destructive had parents who stonewalled, rather than collaborated
  • "Parents who negotiate appear to be more informed.  Parents with unbending, strict guidelines make it a tactical issue for kids to find a way around them." (Robert Laird, University of New Orleans)
    • "If a child's normal curfew is 11 PM, and they explain to the parent that something special is happening, so the parent says, 'Okay, for that night only, you can come home at 1 AM,' that encourages the kid not to lie, and to respect the time."
• Pop culture portrays adolescence as a period of storm and stress, even though social science shows that traumatic adolescence is an exception, not the norm
  • It turns out that parents find the teen years very stressful, but the social scientists were polling teens, who didn't find it that traumatic.
  • "Parents are more bothered by the bickering and squabbling that takes place during this time than are adolescents."