At moments of extreme exasperation, parents may think that there’s something wrong with their teens’ brains, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, in 2015. According to books on adolescence, there is.
“Nothing—whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an ice-cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening, hearing your favorite music—will ever feel as good as it did when you were a teenager,” Steinberg observes. And this, in turn, explains why adolescents do so many stupid things. It’s not that they are any worse than their elders at assessing danger.
This is especially the case when teen-agers get together. A teen driving with other teens in the car, for example, is four times as likely to crash as a teen driving alone. This effect is often attributed to distraction or peer pressure; kids, the story goes, egg each other on, until, finally, they wind up in the E.R. But Steinberg, who has conducted all sorts of experiments on adolescents, both human and rodent, sees the problem as more fundamental.
The tangle of laws that apply to adolescents bespeaks a generalized confusion. Lawmakers can’t seem to decide whether they think teen-agers are under-informed or overly impulsive or just klutzy. A clearer account of “the teen-age brain” would have far-ranging policy implications, though not necessarily the sort that either teens or legislators would be happy about.
Much the same logic applies to drinking, smoking, and doing drugs. Each year, the U.S. spends hundreds of millions of dollars on public-service campaigns designed to alert adolescents to the perils of such dissipations. Hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—more are spent reiterating this message in high-school health classes. The results have been, to put it kindly, underwhelming. A 2006 study by the Government Accountability Office found that $1.
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