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> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retros
by tablespoon 5y ago
> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities.
That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect, though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.
- XorNot 5y agoThere's been some fMRI work done on this[1]: if you pose various moral dilemmas to adults and teens under fMRI, they'll give you similar answers. But: teens have dramatically higher frontal cortex activation then adults do while giving the answer. Frontal cortex is associated with high level reasoning: the interpretation is that while teenagers are able to resolve the same sorts of issues as adults, they're spending a lot more mental effort to do so - it's taxing. Hence the phenomenon of teenagers tending to oscillate between "mature and capable" and "complete breakdown" when the stress gets dialed up (not that this doesn't happen to adults, but relatively we handle more better). Not unsurprisingly, the frontal cortex is also one of the last regions of the brain to undergo maturation: the neural remodel you get at the onset of puberty starts from the back of the brain and moves forward. In short: adults take an observation of adult-like behavior at face value and presume it implies adult-experiential reasoning, then get surprised and angry when the environmental stresses suddenly collapse the entire facade. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788780/