Adolescent Brain Development, Decision Making, and Parenting

[Dr. Caley Arzamarski] I think that this is one of my favorite tools to use with kids and families in my office. This was – this is an amazing study called “The adolescent brain.” This is just one piece of it. And so what we see and what, as Dr. Danckert mentioned earlier, is that the emotion brain, the limbic region of kids’ brains develops first. The part that catches up is the prefrontal cortex. So why this is important, I always say to kids and families, we are actually serving as these teenagers’ frontal lobes. We are helping them to be able to make better decisions, to help them to stop and plan. This gap here is because there is a deficit there, because their brains are forming from the bottom up. Right, so I always like to show this to parents because they find it so validating in family sessions. Like, “Oh, of course, of course.” So when we have leisure time, how are we helping kids to develop different ways to use that time?