I’m thankful that I have such amazing parents.

Throughout my childhood and my teenage years they were very patient, kind and understanding. As a child my parents stimulated my desire to read and learn…

Teenage girls have developed advanced pheromonal strategies to help them reach puberty at the right time. A lot of research has been done over the past few decades and many research studies have proven that teenage girls will reach puberty early if their home environment is unstable.

Species that have the biological means to alter when they choose to reach puberty have a higher chance of leaving copies of their genes to future generations, this adaptive timing mechanism will also be passed on to future generations. The Covid 19 pandemic is a perfect example of that. Anyone that has lived through a pandemic or war knows that its not a great time to have a child.

Babies born during the pandemic may have a hard time developing their fusiform face area within their brain, the fusiform face area in the brain needs to see the entire face of others to start understanding other people and their emotional states in relation to environment and other human beings. They learn whats appropriate and inappropriate through observing other humans facial expressions. A baby that has grown up around people wearing face masks a lot of the time may struggle and take longer to form these associations.

The brain is a muscle and in our formative years we are creating patterns of behaviour that usually in most instances end up lasting an entire lifetime.

Teenagers as we have all noticed have a hard time controlling their impulses. This explains why teenage criminals are often allowed to go back home and go back to their normal life after committing a crime.

This is because psychologists and neuroscientists have realised that the frontal lobe which is responsible for controlling behaviour isn’t completely online until were about 25 years of age. This is because the frontal cortex has fewer neurons, dendritic branches and synapses in teenagers. As the entire brain is very busy, this is because teenagers have more dendritic branches, neurons and synapses in the rest of their brain than adults.

The teenage brain is still maturing and preparing to create stronger connections where they will be needed so frontal cortical activation is harder to come by in a teenage brain.

This explains why teenagers take huge risks that adults would not, teenagers are also drawn to activities that will stimulate dopamine release. The peak of sensation seeking naturally occurs in adolescence, if parents are overprotective then teenagers may not be able to express these natural urges.

I would hypothesise that many adults that struggle to maintain frontal cortical maturity have not had the opportunity to enjoy their childhood and teenage years, this could also be a result of trauma, a strict upbringing, or even brain damage.

Michele Surbey who has done a lot of research hypothesises that biological fathers might release a puberty delaying pheromone which delays puberty. In 1972 an Australian research group also found that girls raised without a father because of divorce or abandonment reached puberty earlier.

All of this leads me to believe that good parenting is essential and necessary until the age of 25, its quite disturbing that we live in a society that pressures people to move out of their parents stable family home and start supporting themselves when they haven’t even reached full cortical maturity. Frontal cortical maturity should be reached before people are pushed out into the world. This is especially important for teenagers, because the mortality rate for teenagers is very high. For example in a cave system called the California caverns the park service has found skeletons dating back centuries. The skeletons are always those of adolescents…

The ventral striatum in teenagers is very active and activates in situations that would normally activate the frontal lobe in fully developed adults. Older adolescents activity in different parts of the pre-frontal cortex becomes more symbiotic and streamlined as the frontal cortex develops and matures.