What frazzled parents can learn from animals
Teen in the house? Barbara Natterson-Horowitz explains how the natural world can help
Adolescents’ predilection for risk-taking behaviour, coupled with their obvious vulnerability, can test the nerves of even the most chilled-out parents among us.
When you add into the mix the perils of social media, and the fact that anxiety and depression in young people is growing at a concerning rate (not disconnected phenomena, I would argue), it can leave us searching for answers about what’s really going on behind those slammed-shut bedroom doors.
In Wildhood, a book I’ve coauthored with animal behaviourist Kathryn Bowers, from an evolutionary biologist’s perspective, I look at adolescence across the animal kingdom, as well as in humans, and identify the incredible similarities with what our teenagers are going through.
Our studies of animals suggest that parental worries are not unfounded. Many are anxious about their children’s consumption of social media: that hotbed of toxic comparisons, in which the number of followers they have, and how many likes they receive compared to their friends, takes on unfathomable importance to them.
While it may seem an unlikely source of insights, understanding the brains of schooling fish, flocking birds or herding mammals is crucial to decoding the impact of social media on adolescents.
The key is grasping that across the animal kingdom, status is a matter of life or death. Higher ranking fish in a school’s hierarchy are more likely to survive and reproduce.
When a fish rises in status (for instance by winning a fight), it is “rewarded” neurochemically. The opposite happens when it descends in status. We found that status boosts and descents triggered similar neurochemical changes in humans.
These neurochemicals include serotonin, which is closely linked to our human moods. In essence, for hundreds of millions of years, individuals have been assessing and competing with each other.
The outcomes of these comparisons in status change an animal’s brain chemistry to alert them to life or death.
Recognising the connection between human and animal social neurobiology can help us all decode social media’s powerful influence and alert parents to an overlooked reality: the neurochemical effects triggered by status descent are painful and powerful.
As rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents are rising, exposing young humans to social media without training and guidance is dangerous.
There are other evolutionary reasons why, across species, adolescents are so vulnerable.
Once any juvenile animal goes through puberty, there’ sa period of time when they may be physically and reproductively mature but dangerously inexperienced.
So while a five and a 10-yearold giraffe may each be fully grown, they differ greatly in their skills, including how to stay safe. The same is true for young humans. Being big enough to roam beyond parental protection but lacking in experience makes adolescents uniquely vulnerable. As a result, they are easy prey.
In the animal kingdom, this is literal: they are predator-naive and so more likely to be targeted, attacked and eaten. And predators are well aware of this, too. There is a type of orca that preys specifically on adolescent humpback whales.
Human adolescents are too often exploited by others. In studies of sexual coercion in the wild, we found that younger individuals were likewise often targeted.
Some female ring-tailed lemurs that live on an island off the south-east coast of the US have been observed to be sexually coerced by males.
This hadn’t been observed previously in this female-dominant species, but the lemurs on this particular island are going through puberty a year-and-ahalf earlier than they would in Madagascar, due to the extra nutrition they receive.
These young lemurs may have sexually mature bodies but they lack the social skills and signals of dominance that keep them safe and which, in Madagascar, coincide with puberty.
Puberty is occurring earlier in our species as body weights rise, so what can we take from this? Well, it reminds us of teenagers’ vulnerability and that even if they look like adults, inexperienced young humans continue to need protection from exploitation.
On the other hand, if the inexperience of adolescents across species makes them vulnerable, many are also good at observing and learning about sexual behaviour before plunging in themselves.
Adolescent male milu deer can be seen hanging back, observing, waiting and practising, before signalling their sexual availability.
Young adult bowerbirds, likewise, observe the older master nest builders for a year or more before they seek a mate themselves.
Something similar can be seen in human adolescents, who also learn about sex and relationships by observing others.
For those growing up in the latter part of the 20th century, this might have been done by reading young adult fiction that deals with sex.
Around the turn of the century and later, teenage girls turned to Sex and the City.
Today, things are a little different: through online pornography, adolescents have access to a constant supply of intense and exaggerated sexual imagery.
Given that both animals and humans at this stage of life are learning not only about the sex act itself but also about how desire is expressed and returned, there are grounds for concern about the kind of example online porn sets and how warped an education it gives today’s adolescents.
In tandem with the rise in adolescent use of online porn, we have witnessed another human trend: a decline in teenage sexual activity.
In 2018, the University of London found that one in eight British millennials is still a virgin at 26. And, according to a Harvard study of 3,000 US adolescents, more students are leaving high school as virgins than at any time over the past 25 to 30 years.
The research indicated that students may be delaying relationships in order to protect themselves emotionally. Whatever other factors lie behind this change in humans, it makes sense from an evolutionary biology perspective, as the timing of an animal’s first sexual experience has great consequences for its future.
Animals who reproduce too young often lack the knowledge and resources to properly feed and forage, and their offspring frequently suffer or die.
For some animals, there are even psychosocial dangers inherent in too-early sexual experiences.
Horse breeders know that stallions and mares who are mated before they are socially ready can suffer lifelong trauma around sexual function.
The animal kingdom can teach us, then, that waiting to have sex sometimes makes sense. Many species around the world experience a lag between being physically ready for mating and socially ready, and the same is true of ourselves.
But if teenagers are now waiting longer before having sex, they are not always engaged instead in a healthy process of watching and learning.
We’d do well to remember that behind their sometimes unruly or perplexing behaviour of adolescents — behind their vulnerability, their interest in sexual content, their uncertainty and their dependence on social validation — lie the rules of the animal kingdom.
Once any juvenile animal goes through puberty, there’s a period of time when they may be physically and reproductively mature but dangerously inexperienced