“Adolescents are rebellious because their brain leads them to be”

Deaths by suicide in children under 15 years of age in 2020 doubled the number of the previous year, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics. The frenetic pace of society pushes us all to disconnect, personally and with our environment, but reconnecting with adolescents, spending quality time with them, is urgent.

We’ve all been teenagers but not all of us remember it as it was. Possibly we remember how important our friends were, wanting everything to be forever, the occasional mischief, dreams, and the chaos inside us?

Those moments where everything seemed to have turned upside down, the doubts, the insecurities, the need to fit in… That was also our adolescence and it is that of all young people.

Societies change and young people must face this stage in specific circumstances. Now they have to deal with technological advances, immediacy, social networks… and although at first this may seem beneficial, it also has its downside.

David Bueno, biologist, neuroeducator and father, discover us in The adolescent brain (Grijalbo) how this essential organ of the body works so that we can understand and support them in this wonderful and defining stage of life. We talked about his book, his scientific knowledge and his experience as a father in the interview that you can read below.

It seems that this question is mandatory. How does the brain of a teenager work?
–Adolescence is a peculiar, particular and very important stage of life that is between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents are neither girls nor boys nor adults, they are halfway there, but being something different, and this conditions the way their brain works, which works differently and that is why sometimes it is so difficult for us to understand them.

We cannot treat adolescents as children and, of course, neither as adults. Their brain works through the construction of neural networks that allow them to acquire adulthood, at the same time that they are losing neural connections linked to their childhood. And it is this kind of chaos inside their brain, losing and gaining connections quite randomly according to the experiences they are living, which makes it so difficult for us to understand them and that many times they do not understand themselves.

It turns out that we have been deceived our whole lives and James Dean was always a rebel with a cause. Where is this characteristic so linked to young people?
–The famous film by James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in fact should be titled Rebel with a Cause, although it is surely not the cause that is described in the film. Teenagers are rebellious because their brain leads them to be. However, one must understand his rebellion very well.

Their rebelliousness implies questioning everything they have learned during their childhood to see if it interests them, if it suits them during adulthood. It is questioning everything to find themselves and to be able to empower themselves in the new stage of their life. And this questioning of everything, this search for novelties and even breaking limits is what we see from the outside as rebellion, but it is the brain that drives them to do so. And it is important, because there is precisely the basis of creativity that we later maintain during youth and adulthood.

This rebellion is the basis of social changes, of growth as people, as societies and as a human species from a cultural, technical and scientific point of view. If teenagers weren’t rebellious, they didn’t question everything, we wouldn’t be human. The fact that we are rebellious makes us human.

So you have to break the limits.
–Yes, breaking the rules is good, but, of course, up to a certain point. Teenagers seek to break the rules because it is the way to find their own limits. They must experiment if the limits that their parents and society have imposed on them when they were girls and boys are the ones that are going to be useful to them in adulthood, and for that they have to go to the limit and, on some occasions, even see What is beyond of. But for that they need to have them.

A good maturation of the adolescent brain implies that they have limits, and their environment must know that they are going to break some or other. Without limits they will not mature as well, because they will lack this social framework, and if we are too restrictive, if we punish and do not let them skip them, they will not do it either because it will be much more difficult for them to find themselves.

–However, not all adolescents go through this stage with so many conflicts or so many friends or so much social life…
-Indeed. That depends a lot on the character of each one, but in one way or another they are all rehearsing with their environment, they are seeing what limits there are. There are more reflective adolescents who perhaps do not need to break too many limits, because through reflection they are already breaking them inside and, on the other hand, others are more impulsive and need to live them, they need to experience that break to see what is there is.

Adolescence, like any other cover in life, has no recipes. Every teen is different. Each social, cultural, economic and structural situation is different. Every family is different. What we adults must do is reflect on what it means to be adolescents, why they are changing and what these changes mean in order to understand them better and support them despite the fact that sometimes they do us tricks.

–In what surely the majority agrees is in thinking at some point that: “Nobody understands me”, but are they right?
–I think that we have all thought that when we were teenagers and, let’s see, we were and are right to a certain extent. Yes, there are people who understand them, but they perceive that perhaps at that moment there is no one in their environment who does.

It is very difficult for adults to understand adolescents well because, despite having also lived through that stage, it was different. The historical, social and technological context was different, so our rebellion was shown in a different way.

In addition, due to the way our brain is being built, we have a tendency to constantly reinterpret our past and believe that we have had a linear life, of cause and consequence, forgetting or not remembering so clearly the thousand crossroads in which we find ourselves. , the many tests we did, the nonsense we said… And since we think that this has not influenced who we are now, we tend to not give it importance, almost to forget it, and it seems to us that today’s adolescents have many more problems, doubts …, when in fact they have the same ones that we had. We have forgotten it because as adults we have found an objective, a path, a structure around which we feel reasonably satisfied.

What lessons would you highlight from this stage?
–The learning that I would highlight the most is related to the imitation of adults. Adolescents, although it may not seem like it, are paying attention to us to see how we behave because they know, even inside, that in a while they will be adults. But what does it mean to be adults? They don’t know it, that’s why they have to observe us to imitate us and what they have seen is what will influence them the most when they are adults, so I would highlight the example we give them as something very important.

If we want them to be respectful, we must respect them.

If we want them to be motivated by their own life, they must see that their adult environment is motivated to continue learning, setting vital goals for us. If they don’t see this in their adult environment, how are they going to imitate it?

–When you explained to us at the beginning how your brain works, you talked about the construction of neural networks, and in the book you specify that the secret is that they are good. What does good mean?
–Yes, the secret of adolescence to reach adulthood in a healthy and healthy way is that they make good connections. Here the question is what does good mean. For me, and this is a very personal vision, it means ensuring that when they become adults they are empowered people, capable of deciding for themselves, of clearly accepting the consequences of their actions, of reflecting and setting goals that favor them on a human and professional, themselves and their environment.

And that is achieved, as I said before, through the imitation that they do of us and the basically emotional support that we give them. This means that even though we have to redirect some of their attitudes, they must perceive that their environment, especially their parents, continue to trust them so that they also learn to trust themselves. Confidence is contagious.

–Can the brain be trained to make these types of connections?
–The brain is trained based on trial and error, so if what we want is for the brain of adolescents to be more reflective, we must leave space for them to reflect.

You have to give them time, give them the opportunity and the reasons to reflect and so they can answer their questions for themselves. In this way they will also learn to generate good questions that will lead them to conclusions, to correct answers about their own life. Every time we let a teenager decide for himself, he is training himself to decide.

Every time we help an adolescent to be aware of the implications of the decisions they make, we are making them more aware, more empowered in their own life. Every time we help an adolescent to get over a bump, we are training her to be more resilient, characteristics that are all essential during adult life.

– Does the upbringing of the first years of life influence this neural development?
–Of course, because in this first stage the basic neural connections of social life are already established, to understand what the environment is like and to identify oneself as a person with the capacity to make some decisions.

It has been seen, for example, that girls and boys who live a negative upbringing, which implies little coherence between educational rewards and reprimands – today I punish you for this and tomorrow I congratulate you for exactly the same thing – and who live with little family warmth, form neural connections in the area of ​​emotional management slightly different from those who live their childhood in a positive upbringing that implies emotional support, but not overprotection.

These differences in the area of ​​emotional management mean that as adults, those with a negative upbringing are more impulsive, less curious and have more difficulties establishing healthy and stable social relationships. So yes, the early years of life influence adolescence and through there, into adulthood.

–In the book you insist a lot on positive assessment. What is the line that separates this way of acting with deception? Because saying it’s okay when it’s not, that’s lying…
–Positive assessment consists of making them see that everything they have not done well enough can be improved and that they have our…