[Intrepid Homoludens]

Discussing this in another forum....

Originally Posted by fellow forum member

I don't know. I hated teenagers even when I was a teenager. I think generally speaking most teenagers are immature.

I'd take that in a scientific sense. And of course there will be variances, even exceptions, as pointed out. Some teens' brains may develop a little faster than others'. And you could try to sugar coat it for some of the teens reading this thread, but the fact is the fact - in your teen years you, your brain, your body, really are immature insomuch as you're still developing physically and mentally. As the study shows, it's a continuing process, a biological phase.

So it's perfectly understandable that teens may act the way they do. As I stated before elsewhere, many teens think the world revolves around them, they expect everything to be put at their feet, they think they can rule the world, they hinge their entire identities and plane of existence on what they wear, who is within their social circle, who that circle excludes, what music that circle chooses to listen to, what game console to own, what books to read, etc. That's how you behave. That's how I behaved when I was a teen (if I had to use the 1980s movie The Breakfast Club as a litmus test I would be Ally Sheedy's character, the recluse).

This state of mind makes sense when you consider that "the nerve cells that connect teenagers' frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish."

I wouldn't be surprised that most any teen would take offense at that, even when it's a scientific fact. Many teens may feel that they are full pledged adults, and that makes sense behaviorally. They want to impose as much distance as possible between who they are now and what they were before they turned 13, 14, or 15. And what they were were.....kids. And they want to eliminate the distance between who they are now and what they will be when they finally enter university, move away from parents, and can freely enter a bar or club where alcohol is served, and enjoy fully exploring the pleasures of sex.

There are exceptions of course. But most of the people in my high school only cared about drinking beer, getting stoned, and getting laid.

I'm pretty sure I was one of the few kids in my high school that cared about anything other than the small little world in which we grew up. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

I was hermetic myself when I was in high school. I think I went through essentially the same painful process of maturation in my teens. But I did so in a non-typical way. I had no truly close friends in h.s., I never hung out at the mall, did any social clubs in school, attended football games, none of that.

I actually didn't crawl out of my shell until I entered art school and that's when I began making up for lost time, because I was finally surrounded by people who were individualistic and creative like me, in a world where individuality and creativeness is very strongly encouraged and rewarded.