My two previous posts, on the role of frontal lobes in adolescence, are background to this.

The impetus to those two posts was to provide background to an article,
New Study Gives Hovering College Parents Extra Credit, which appeared in the Washington Post on November 5.

Data from 24 colleges and universities gathered for the National Survey of Student Engagement show that students whose parents were very often in contact with them and frequently intervened on their behalf “reported higher levels of engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities,” such as after-class discussions with professors, intensive writing exercises and independent research, than students with less-involved parents.
“Compared with their counterparts, children of helicopter parents were more satisfied with every aspect of their college experience, gained more in such areas as writing and critical thinking, and were more likely to talk with faculty and peers about substantive topics,” said survey director George D. Kuh, an Indiana University professor.

The study attracted attention because it goes against an assumption that when someone leaves for college, parents should butt out. What I especially like is that it isn’t generalized parent involvement the study seems to describe, but support for executive functioning:

The study says that 13 percent of first-year students and 8 percent of seniors reported having a parent or guardian who “frequently intervened on their behalf to help them solve problems they were having at the college.”

Bottom line? This is all about “downloading some frontal lobe.” I’ve talked to a couple college students since this came out, and they are clear about what’s helpful. It isn’t calling up to nag that helps. It’s good advice – the sort of executive-function support that a developing frontal lobe still needs.

If you haven’t read the post just below, “Frontal Lobes,” please start there.

We don’t develop a fully adult frontal lobe until the early twenties. This means that teenagers have to handle the most dangerous time of their lives without a fully functional CEO. Impulse control, anticipation of consequences, the ability to make and hold a plan of action – their brain isn’t yet entirely wired to handle those executive functions.

When teens blow it? What they just did – it was about brain wiring. To demand fully mature problem solving and decision making from a teen brain is like insisting to a six-month baby that she could ride a bike if she only tried harder.

Although I haven’t seen anyone say it, it seems to me that a simplistic definition of adolescence is that it’s the period from pubescence, with its rush of tough-to-manage hormones and body changes, until the frontal lobes mature and can take control.

Adolescence terrifies us parents most when we see that our precious half-child is about to (or just did) something dangerous, destructive, harmful to their future. But when we try to come to the rescue, what happened to “Thank you, Mommy / Daddy"? Repulsed and wounded, we try to control, we nag, we accuse… And if you’ve been there, you know how well that works.

I love the reframe the fMRI research exemplified by Jay Giedd allows when I talk to parents and kids. Teens are willing to hear about brain research that says this important brain function isn’t all there yet. They aren’t being stupid or irresponsible when they blow it. And parents can see that kids aren’t trying to screw up. The part of their brain that could have helped isn’t quite online yet.

The reframe has a major implication. Pointing towards the front of my head, I say to kids, “So picture yourself with a USB port about here. If you don’t have a full-grown frontal lobe yet, you sometimes need to download some frontal lobe. And there’s a full-grown frontal lobe sitting right next to you.” Making it about neurology, about development, takes the embarrassment out. You didn’t screw up because you wanted to, or because you’re stupid. Your brain just wasn’t ready to think things through. But that’s a problem. Sometimes, you need some support. You need to talk to someone who has been there, and figured it out, and can see the pitfalls and help you plan good actions. Sometimes, you need to download some frontal lobe.

If you are the parent of an adolescent, you need to be familiar with one fact about the teenage brain. Jay N. Giedd, of the National Institute of Mental Health says, in an article, Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Adolescent Brain

The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early 20s.

Here’s my version: The CEO of the brain, the part that controls impulses, plans and holds to a course of action, helps us anticipate consequences, and in general helps us “act like adults” isn’t fully developed until well after the teen years.

Here’s Jay Giedd again:

The frontal lobe is often called the CEO, or the executive of the brain. It’s involved in things like planning and strategizing and organizing, initiating attention and stopping and starting and shifting attention. It’s a part of the brain that most separates man from beast, if you will. That is the part of the brain that has changed most in our human evolution, and a part of the brain that allows us to conduct philosophy and to think about thinking and to think about our place in the universe. …
I think that [in the teen years, this] part of the brain that is helping organization, planning and strategizing is not done being built yet … [It’s] not that the teens are stupid or incapable of [things]. It’s sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision making before their brain is finished being built. …

Although I want to focus the frontal lobe aspects of Dr. Giedd’s work, his conclusions are far reaching and sometimes enormously optimistic. Here’s an article that embeds the frontal-lobe thread in his more general work with the non-adult features of the adolescent brain. And here’s the always-excellent Sharon Begley, also in the larger context: Getting Inside a Teen Brain

This research gives us the most important new knowledge about the teen brain since I was a teen myself, just before the last mastodon kicked off. In my next post, I want to talk about how I use this new knowledge in my own practice. Then, I want to comment on an article about “helicopter parents” that appeared last week.

I should be ashamed of myself for turning a funny op-ed in today’s NYT into something serious. My only defense is that I think David Brooks is playing a Voltaire on us: sneaking in a serious idea under cover of silliness. Please read the original – just be careful you aren’t sipping coffee while you read, it could be tough on your keyboard. Here’s a sip of the essay:

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S….
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like…. Memory? I’ve externalized it…. Personal information? I’ve externalized it….
Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

In GWTF I talk about External Intelligence (see, for example, page 54). If we know how to find a tidbit of knowledge when we need it, that knowledge is part of our potential intelligence. Attempting to store it before we need it is impossible (too much info) and maladaptive (we waste time learning it, and it will likely change before we need it). “The ability to find and evaluate information,” I say on page 55, “has become one of the most important skills you can help your child develop.

I was thinking narrowly about knowing how to find the population of Brazil when you need to know it. But Brooks points to the range of information “we” customarily download, and asks where the process might end. Consider these:

* I ask Wikipedia to tell me the population of Brazil. “Here’s your fact, sir.”

* Netflix suggests some movies I can order if I want. “You might like this.”

* I let Pandora Radio choose my music for me. “You want to listen to this.”

* The Society to Ease Dave’s Mind only sends me the news I should read….

Of course that last one is ridiculous. Next thing you know, I’ll be suggesting that the culture that surrounds your teen – the sum total of the External Intelligence she downloads – will be telling her what she thinks and how she should act.

The MacArthur Foundation board is putting $1.1 million into an experimental middle- and high school in New York City. The school’s focus shows us how schooling needs to change if it is to again become relevant.

But I think the NPR feature I listened to misses the bulls-eye when it says “The curriculum revolves around teaching kids to make video games.”

Closer here: “The MacArthur Foundation says video games and the dynamic systems they use will be key to information management in the future.”

Dead center: “Parsing… the operating system of the world.” What a great phrase! That’s what schooling should do – teach kids to parse the OS of our planet and its inhabitants.

Hello, students in CSU’s HD 310, Infant and Child Development in Context. I’m writing these notes before I talk to you. I wonder if they’ll have anything to do with what I said? My overall plan: To show one way of looking at what makes up effective intelligence, to discuss the interference with one part of effective intelligence that we call ADD, and hopefully, to look at recent research about executive function in the normal adolescent brain.

First, I talked about my book, Grow With the Flow, and the model of intelligence I present there. Several recent theories help us understand what makes up effective, real-world, on-the-ground intelligence. To talk about those theories, and that practical definition of intelligence, I use the metaphor of a river with five tributaries:

• Basic Cognitive Abilities – There are basic cognitive building blocks which we blend and harness to yield effective tools to operate on and in the world. I focus John Carroll’s work. The basic cognitive abilities have special application to early childhood.
• Many Ways to Be Smart – Multiple Intelligences Theory, exemplified in the work of Martin Gardner. Instead of asking “How smart are you?” this theory leads us to ask, “How are you smart?”
• The Director – Management Functions, best called Executive Functions, refer to our ability to plan, direct, and coordinate our intelligences and abilities. My work here was strongly influenced by research about ADD, especially the theory of Russell Barkley.
• Motivation – Without the motor, nothing moves. Motivation is the key to human development.
• Knowledge, External Intelligence, and Information Management – Knowing stuff isn’t as important as it used to be, because we can’t know it all. What matters is to know how to find and manage the world’s knowledge.

Second, I focused on The Director, the Executive Functions that are so important to real world intelligence. I looked at the current definition of Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and some criticisms that have been made of that definition. Against that backdrop, I talked about a major article by Adele Diamond that attempts to divide the ADHD turf up more logically.

Here are links to some of the articles I mentioned:

Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Adolescent Brain
JAY N. GIEDD
National Institute of Mental Health
“…. The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early 20s.”

Imaging Study Shows Brain Maturing
“The brain’s center of reasoning and problem solving is among the last to mature, a new study graphically reveals. The decade-long magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of normal brain development, from ages 4 to 21, by researchers at NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that such “higher-order” brain centers, such as the prefrontal cortex, don’t fully develop until young adulthood.
A time-lapse 3-D movie that compresses 15 years of human brain maturation, ages 5 to 20, into seconds shows ….”

THE RELEVANCE OF BRAIN RESEARCH TO JUVENILE DEFENSE

Robert E. Shepherd, Jr.
American Bar Association
“It seems apparent from the research that the impulsivity, disregard of long-term consequences, irresponsibility, vulnerability to peer group pressure, tendency to risk-taking, and other characteristics of adolescents, especially in those who commit delinquent and criminal acts, are not just reflections of emotional immaturity, but are products of neurological immaturity as well. These characteristics are built in–literally hard-wired into the adolescent brain–and are not aberrant symptoms of moral weakness.”

Who’s Minding the Teenage Brain?
RICHARD MONASTERSKY
Chronicle of Higher Education
Volume 53, Issue 19, Page A14 , January 12, 2007

My apologies for the lack of action here:

* We took a little vacation.

* Spring has sprung, and clearing out flower beds, although an annual joy, does take time.

* We’re doing a major revision this year of the Poudre Wilderness Volunteers Field Guide. By the way, that’s me in the photo, in the Rawah Wilderness last summer – photo courtesy of Jeremiah Kost.

Yesterday’s NPR feature, Students’ View of Intelligence Can Help Grades is fundamentally important. If you think that’s exaggerated praise, consider what it’s really saying.

As regular readers know, Grow With the Flow presents evidence that intelligence is dynamic, multi-dimensional, and eminently influenceable. Its goal is to help parents see why that is true, and how they can use that knowledge.

Carol Dweck’s research gives us a new sense of how important our influence can be: Teaching kids that their brain can become smarter leads to improvement in their performance – actually helps them become smarter:

By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

She shows not only that intelligence is influenceable, but that if we teach kids that they can influence their brain’s development – that they can become smarter through effort – their new knowledge leads to better achievement.

I’m reading Michael Pollan’s fascinating (and sometimes terrifying) look at food in the U. S., The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He says (p. 147):

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.

To assume that what you can measure is all that really matters. Hmm, must be time for the CSAPs again.

The Marino Mission: One Girl. One Mission. One Thousand Words.
Karen B. Chapman
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Alexa McCurry, an everyday kid who happens to know a lot more about DNA than you or I ever will, combines romance, astute lab work, and gutsy if sometimes ill-considered actions to solve a mystery during a summer internship at a marine biology lab in Central America.

In the course of the summer, Alexa uses a lot of big words. An even thousand of them are defined for the reader, as a painless way to prepare for the SATs.

Karen Chapman, the author, holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics, and puts her knowledge of the field to good use in the descriptions of the lab work. (She also graduated from Cornell; our heroine is a student at Ithaca High School, which I’ve often passed driving from downtown Ithaca up to Sid and Minna’s – fond memories.)

I wonder how adolescents of SAT-prep age will react to the book? Some indignant intelligentsia will withhold their endorsement, asserting that the patently pervasive punditry precludes or perhaps preempts profundity. (Did I mention that there’s a handy Vocabulary List in the back, as well as chapter-by-chapter vocabulary quizzes?) In truth, the device is necessarily heavy handed; at the end of Chapter 12, I read a few lines of Pride and Prejudice to cleanse my palate. But I agree with the blurb: seeing the words embedded in a story beats going brain dead studying word lists. I’d add that it is almost certainly more effective.

I’ll put it out in the waiting room tomorrow, and if I overhear spontaneous reviews, I’ll let you know.