We learn to embrace our adult brain

When, as a 16-year-old, you’re given a curfew of 11.45pm on New Year’s Eve – not 12.15am or even 12.03am – a few light bulbs go off: life really is unfair, parents draw the most ridiculous lines in the sand, and my mother and my friend’s mother felt genuine terror about what might happen after counting backwards from 10 in 1991 in downtown Auckland.

A sure sign your boil-over teen years are coming to an end is when you can manage to be more bemused than incensed by dubious parental rulings. Perhaps you’re starting to engage your prefrontal cortex a little more than the amygdala area of your adolescent brain, according to this week’s cover story about the teen brain.

“People use the term amygdala hijack. That’s getting overwhelmed by your emotions. And that obviously happens more easily in somebody who’s still developing the prefrontal cortex,” Dougal Sutherland, from Victoria University’s School of Psychology, told reporter David Skipwith.

Despite a desperate wish to be given some credit and go out like everyone else, there was a flicker of sympathy for what my mum was imagining. Like most young women, my friend and I had seen our fair share of lecherous behaviour by then.

One of the classic teen-parent battles during those years is managing the fear alongside a teen’s need to go out and live their lives.

Another classic is taking all those teen outbursts personally as a parent, and feeling helpless.

Parenting adviser Nathan Wallis’ advice is to factor the emotional brain into any strategy.

“I would do a two-to-one ratio,” he says on page 10.

“For every one minute you want them to listen to your logical brain, you need to have done two minutes reflecting back their emotion, without offering corrections or solutions.”

Unsurprisingly, my New Year celebration in 1991 was a bit of a fizzer. We didn’t even make it into the city. I think we just stayed up, well past 11.45pm, chatting. And our mothers knew exactly where we were.