As a fan of TED talks, I was pleased to watch this TED talk by Sarah-Jane Blakemore on “The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain.”

The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain

While friends and fans of neuroscience (I know there are many, many of you!) won’t learn much new information, Blakemore’s video is a great primer on some of what we’ve learned recently about changes in adolescence, such as:

• The prefrontal cortex, which is involved in a range of high level cognitive functions like decision-making, planning, behavior inhibition and self-awareness, goes through extensive development in adolescence.
• There’s extensive pruning happening during adolescence in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain. This pruning actually allows synapses in other portions of the brain to grow stronger (similar to what happens when we prune branches in trees or bushes).
• Adolescents use a different cognitive strategy to make social decisions, one that lacks the ability to take into account another person’s perspective (parents of teenagers are nodding emphatically here).

Blakemore concludes with one major implication for adolescence: Proper schooling and intellectual challenge are pivotal.

If I could go back and re-start my season in youth ministry, one of the top three things I’d do differently is help students wrestle more with theology and Scripture until they pinned down answers. I don’t even want to admit how many times I cobbled together a talk in only a handful of minutes - a talk that sounded very similar to previous talks I’d done. I regret that.

Now that I’m a parent and a volunteer in our youth ministry, I am more and more aware how important it is for parents to proactively stretch their own kids’ intellectual development. As a volunteer small group leader, I teach 5-10 girls per Sunday at various intellectual and spiritual maturity levels. There’s no way I can adequately respond to each of them. Those of us who are parents generally have the best opportunity to respond to our own individual children - if we make time to do it that is.

As a parent or leader, how do you try to stretch young people’s brain development and simultaneously deepen their faith?