When teens get terrifying

16 Some young people made life choices with disastrous consequences, writes AMY JOYCE

FOR MORE than a year, Dina Temple-Raston, a counterterrorism correspondent for NPR, has been looking at something else that can be terrifying: the teenage brain. In her new podcast, out now via Audible, Temple-Raston interviews and focuses on teens who have made some life-altering choices with bad consequences. She goes beyond the stories and delves into the teenage brain and how it affected the teens’ decisions.

“The brain needs time to experience things and tailor itself to be an adult brain. If you look at adolescence in that way, not only does it give teens a positive way of looking at this point in life, it shows parents there are things you can actually do,” Temple-Raston says. “And that was the point of this series.”

In the initial episode, TempleRaston was the first to get an interview with Abdullahi Yusuf, a high school football player in Minnesota, turned ISIS recruit. “I’ve been looking at radicalisation for some time. In the old al-Qaeda days, radicalisation happened to people in their late 20s and 30s. But with ISIS, they’re recruiting teens,” she found. It occurred to her that their decision to join ISIS isn’t really an “ideological decision. It’s an adolescent one. I was getting anxious about the fact that you were finding people who just turned 18 getting 20-year sentences for buying a plane ticket.”

Throughout the episode, the listener starts to warm to Yusuf, who is smart and funny, as he explains what led to his astonishing choice to join ISIS. Temple-Raston speaks with members of his family, who were shocked and horrified by his actions. And she talks to the psychologists and counsellors now overseeing his rehabilitation out of prison, working to help him choose more wisely.

Of course good parenting matters. But there’s a reason we hear, “But I did everything right!” from moms and dads whose children make bad decisions. With this podcast, Temple-Raston offers us a glimmer of understanding as to why good parenting doesn’t always result in good kids who make the right choices.

There’s so much new research on the adolescent brain, perhaps in part because MRIs are much less expensive to perform. “Most people say (teens do these things) because of the pre-frontal cortex and hormones and they’re done,” Temple-Raston said, but it’s more than that. MRIs are showing variations among seemingly healthy teen brains, and scientists are starting to link these findings to teen actions. “I think parents either think they’re bad parents, or it’s a phase. I wanted to sort of say ‘Hey, maybe it’s not you.’ And then go somewhere to say there are solutions.”

Among other compelling interviews, Temple-Raston spends time with Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan, who was one of the Columbine High School shooters, in an episode about school shootings. “She’s the kind of mom everyone wanted to hang out with. They were so engaged with Dylan. They had

‘MRIs are showing

dinners together, did projects together. But he was becoming quiet and she didn’t want to invade his space.”

Just like in everyday life, where parents judge other parents, often without a full understanding of their situation, Temple-Raston found herself surprised at most every interview. “In every episode, there were assumptions I had. And in every case, it was something different than I thought it was.”

She hopes that the podcast will help parents understand that there are things they can do to address their teen’s behaviour, even (or perhaps especially) if those actions are driven by brain differences.

For example, in listening to the episode about hacking, parents can learn to help kids use those computer skills in a more positive way. And an episode about suicide makes it clear that there’s a real gap between having depression and committing suicide.

“I want to get to the things that parents always wondered about,” Temple-Raston said. “It also might be a conversation you didn’t exactly know how to have with your kid, but this lets you do that.

“These weren’t my children, but it made me look at other children in a very empathetic way,” TempleRaston said of her work on this series. Perhaps it will help parents do the same – for their own children and others. – Washington Post.

actions.’

A counter-terrorism podcaster helps parents understand there are things they can do to address their teen’s behaviour.