Your teenager isn’t ignoring you... their brain hasn’t grown up yet!

ANYONE who’s spoken to teenagers will be familiar with the glazed expression, lack of eye contact... and the distinct impression that you’re being completely ignored.

Conventional wisdom has it that teens are simply self-obsessed.

However, it looks as if they really do struggle to pay attention during a conversation, which requires them to look closely at the other person’s facial expression to judge their mood and meaning.

In fact, compared to young adults, they spend 12 per cent less time looking at the face of the person they are speaking to, a study has found.

Experts say it may not be teenagers’ fault, because it takes until adulthood to fully develop the skill of empathising with those you are speaking to.

In a study of 268 volunteers, older children and teenagers aged ten to 19 were given eye-tracking spectacles to monitor their gaze during conversations.

A tiny camera in the glasses tracks the wearer’s eyes to judge which way they are looking, while another camera faces outwards to log what the wearer can see.

Taken together, the images show if someone is being looked at. The researchers did the same thing with adults aged 20 to 40 and older people aged 60 to 80.

The youngsters spent just 56.5 per cent of the time looking at the face of the person talking, while the adults did it for 68.5 per cent of the time, researchers said.

Meanwhile, older people looked at the other person 54.7 per cent of the time, which may be due to cognitive decline in later life.

Professor Heather Ferguson, senior author of the study from the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, said: ‘Parents who think teenagers are not listening because they are in their own world might not be entirely wrong.’

But explaining the findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, she said: ‘Evidence suggests teenagers find it harder to juggle the demands of conversation, including memory, attention and processing content, because of their developing brains.

‘ They may look away more because this reduces the amount of complex visual information they need to take in while following the conversation.’