3 Reasons Why Secondary School Isn’t So Great, After All

Adults tend to remember their teenage years as easier, since they only remember it as a time when they didn’t have three kids and a mortgage. But ask any teenagers who are considering suicide over a bad relationship or WAEC Grades and you’ll find them just wishing that the shit would end so they could be grown-ups already. So who’s right? Both of them.

Because while 16-year-olds don’t have decades of debt and regret weighing them down, they do have a long list of biological and social pitfalls making their lives hell. So before you find yourself longing for those simple teen years, consider that …

1. Teen Brains Haven’t Developed to Fully Understand Risk and Reward

Here’s how silly adults can be: They all know that a human body goes through massive and often grotesque changes during the teenage years, but can’t grasp that the brain is just another organ in the body, and as such, it’s also undergoing horribly awkward changes. During the teenage years, every little calculation the brain makes is affected by a system that is in the process of trying to upgrade itself to adulthood.

So while grown-ups like to bemoan how modern teenagers are always running around doing stupid shit while high on bath salts, it’s not totally their fault — the teenage brain is hardwired to make it crave what adults write off as “idiocy.” It’s not that the teenage brain doesn’t understand risk; when teenagers look at a dangerous situation — say, riding a shopping cart down a steep hill flanked by cacti — they know that there’s a risk of winding up in the emergency room having barbs removed from their asses. But whereas an adult is likely to consider this an unacceptable risk, teens consistently put more weight on the possible positive outcomes, like impressing everyone.

That’s because, by design, the teenage brain is built in such a way that impressing other people is more or less the prime imperative, and when you combine this with the thrill of risk-taking, their brains are flooded with excitement. They literally get high off it. In general, this is a good thing for the continuation of the species since, you know, otherwise kids would never move out of their parents’ house and into the real world full of STDs and paperwork.

2. Teenagers Experience Stress as Being More Stressful

Like Grandad always says, these damn kids today don’t know how good they have it. They act as though their lives are so hard even though they’ve never had to deal with a mortgage, or with yelling at people to get off their lawn. But there’s a reason why teens are so whiny about their relatively insignificant problems — quite simply, they actually do feel stress more strongly. It’s another symptom of the not quite fully formed “risk vs. reward” part of the brain we mentioned above.

The part of the human brain that makes you stop and reconsider doing stupid things is called the prefrontal cortex. It regulates decision-making and helps control impulses. So let’s say a girlfriend or boyfriend breaks up with you, and in your emotional distress you are considering doing something that could get you thrown in jail. It’s the prefrontal cortex that lets you stop and look into the future and weigh whether or not a criminal record is worth the short-term satisfaction.

3. The Adolescent Brain Can’t Process Multi-Step Instructions

Remember when your parents used to tell you to do the dishes, take out the trash, brush your teeth, and how you would never get around to all of that?

Once again this comes back to the fact that it’s the awkward years for the brain, too — a new study shows that teenagers’ brains don’t have the part that handles multi-tasking yet. The frontal cortex is the part of your brain that figures out what to do when you get a whole mess of information at once and how to sort through it all, and the problem is that it doesn’t finish developing until after you’re old enough to drive.

This doesn’t mean that teens have trouble remembering all that information; your memory is just fine by the time you get to high school. But what’s still developing is “strategic, self-organized thinking.” That would be the ability to prioritize — being able to juggle six different assignments while still training for the big game.

If this sounds like the kind of bleeding heart, here is a quick advice for the adult folk: Teenagers can’t help doing stupid things! We’re not saying that all teenagers are destined to experiment with selling drugs and going sex spree. We’re just saying that at some point you have to accept that teens are going to be teens. It’s biology. So maybe the goal is to make sure they don’t do anything during those malformed brain years that ruins the rest of their lives.