>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Deborah Carnegie and I'm pleased to
welcome Laurence Steinberg to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Laurence will
be discussing his book Age of Opportunity. For anyone who is a parent, it will come as no
surprise to hear that teens are the new toddlers. It turns out they are when it comes to
development of the brain as teens pass through crucial stages during adolescence that play a
major factor in their future happiness and success. Laurence is one of the world’s experts on
adolescence. He is a distinguished professor of psychology at Temple University and has
authored numerous articles and books including The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting,
Beyond the Classroom, and Adolescence, which is the leading college textbook on the subject.
He's an expert consultant when guest on TV, radio and in print. Please join me in giving him a
warm welcome. [applause]
>> Laurence Steinberg: Thank you. And thank you all for coming. What I'd like to do this
afternoon is to change the way that you think about adolescence and along the way change the
way you think about the way we raise kids and educate them and treat them as a society. I
wrote Age of Opportunity because I think that this change is long overdue. I've been doing
research on adolescent development for close to 40 years now and I've studied thousands of
kids from all walks of life and different parts of the world. We are currently doing a study of
5000 people between the ages of 10 and 30 in 12 different countries that range from those that
are very wealthy like Sweden to those that are very poor like Kenya and Jordan. I have a pretty
good sense of what the science of adolescence says and I'm always struck by the disconnect
between what we know from the science of adolescence and the popular portrayal of the
period. If you go to a bookstore and you look in the adolescence section of the bookstore, what
you are going to find are a lot of survival guides and that's pretty much the way we think about
adolescence. We think about it as something to be survived or endured. I did an internet
search the other day using the words survive and adolescence and I got back 2.3 million hits.
And then out of curiosity, I substituted the word enjoy for the word survive and did a search on
enjoy and adolescence and I got back more than 5 million hits, so I thought maybe I'm wrong
about this, until I started reading the actual results. So out of the 5 million, the first five were
all for the same look. It's a book called Surviving Your Child's Adolescence. The reason enjoy it
was in there was because the subtitle of the book was how to understand and even enjoy the
rocky road to independence. I went on Amazon and found no fewer than 12 books on
adolescence that have the word survive or survival in the title. There's actually, and this is
really true, there's even a book called how to survive your dog’s adolescence. Then I went on
and I looked to see if I could find books on babies that had survived or survival in the title and I
couldn't find a single one, which probably comes as a surprise to anyone in here who has
recently had an infant, because I remember the first months of our son’s life and I wondered
often if I was going to survive the sleeplessness and the difficulties that come from having a
newborn. The survivor’s mentality hasn't really worked very well at least not in the United
States. Our high school students typically trail the rest of the developed world in tests of
achievement and yet we lead the world in rates of adolescent obesity, binge drinking, STDs,
unintended pregnancies and violence and crime. So we're clearly doing something wrong. So
what I want to talk about this afternoon is how we can do a better job of raising our kids. This
is obviously important if you're a parent of a teenager or if you're a teacher or if you're
somebody who works directly with young people, but it's really important to all of us because
we all have a stake in making sure that the next generation is happy and healthy and
competent. And that's really what I want to talk about because I think we need a new way of
thinking about adolescence, new vision of this period. And what I hope to persuade you of is
that it is not simply or even a time to survive. It's a time during which people can really thrive
and I think that the signs of adolescence is showing us how this might be true. I want to start
by asking you to think for a moment about your own adolescence. I know personally speaking I
have incredibly rich and vivid recollections of my adolescent years. Not only do I remember the
important people and places and events, but I remember them in a level of detail that is unlike
that for my memories of other periods of life, for childhood or my 30s or 40s or 50s. It's almost
as if my brain has stored these memories in 3-D high-definition format someway. It's very
perplexing to me because my adolescence was quite ordinary. Nothing terrible happened to
my family. We didn't win any lotteries. There was no death. There was no serious illness.
There was no change in our standard of living. Life was about as exciting as a ride on a people
mover in an airport terminal. And yet, I can still recall things that happened to me in 1967
when I was 15 years old better than I can recall things that happened to me last week. It turns
out that this is not unusual. Most people, research shows, remember events from adolescence
more than events from other periods of development. It's a well-documented phenomenon, so
well-documented, in fact, that psychologists as we are want to do, have given it a name and it's
called the reminiscence bump. It had been thought for a long time that the reminiscence bump
was due to the nature of things that happen during adolescence, because a lot of momentous
things happen during this time, your first love, your first job, your first beer, maybe the first
time you lived away from home. But what research shows is that even mundane events from
adolescence are recalled with more detail than mundane events from other times of life. And
it's not just personal events, the books, the movies, the music, even news stories that we were
exposed to during adolescence are recalled more than those that we are exposed to at other
points in time. If the reminiscence bump isn't due to the nature of events, what can it be due
to? We think it may be to the nature of the adolescent brain. The adolescent brain, as it turns
out, is exquisitely sensitive to experience and because of that the adolescent brain is more
affected by experience than the brain is at other points of development. There are only two
stages of development where the brain is this malleable, this plastic is the word that
neuroscientists use to describe a malleable brain. One, is the first few years of life, what we
commonly refer to as zero to three, the second is adolescence. The notion that the brain is very
susceptible to environmental influence during the early years has been around for some time.
But the idea that the adolescent brain is also going through a period of heightened sensitivity to
experience is a relatively new revelation. I think, even in the context of the many things that
we have learned about the adolescent brain in the last decade, that the fact that the adolescent
brain is very plastic is one of the most exciting findings to emerge in adolescent brain science.
Of course, the brain, as I'm sure most of you know is susceptible to the influence of the
environment at all ages. The brain always has some degree of plasticity to it, but the brain is
plastic during adulthood in a very different way than it is during adolescence or childhood.
During childhood and adolescence the brain is being built. New brain circuits are developing.
Unused ones are being eliminated. The wiring of the brain is being laid down. Those kinds of
large-scale transformations in the brain don't take place after adolescence. So even though the
brain is plastic in adulthood, I mean, it has to be because whenever we learn something if we
retain that learning there has to have been some underlying neural change or we couldn't have
retained it. So even though we can learn things as adults, and even though the brain,
therefore, must be a little bit plastic in adulthood, it's not plastic like it is during adolescence.
The changes that take place in brain circuits during adulthood are relatively minor modifications
to existing brain circuits rather than the wholesale development of new ones or elimination of
unused ones. What this means is that adolescence is the last period in development where the
brain is that malleable. That makes it a really important period as to think about in terms of the
kinds of experiences we give young people during this adolescent period. Adolescence is also
especially important now because it's so much longer than it's ever been. It's been stretched at
both ends by the decline in the age of puberty and by the delay in the transition of young
people from adolescence into the conventional roles of adulthood. At the beginning of the
20th century the average American girl began menstruating at the age of 14 1/2. Today it's
about 12. Pediatricians all over the United States are reporting increasing numbers of very
young girls, seven and eight-year-old girls, who are showing the early signs of puberty
development, like breast development. There has also been a drop in puberty in the age of
puberty for boys too and it's comparable to that for girls, so the average American boy goes
through puberty about two years earlier today than he did in the 1970s. At the same time that
this is happening, adolescence is taking longer for people to complete. We see this in the
prolongation of education, of financial dependence on parents, delay in the age of marriage,
delay in the age of parenthood. Just to put some numbers on it, 25-year-olds today are twice
as likely to still be in school than their parents were at that age. They are only half as likely to
be married and they are 50 percent more likely to be taking some kind of financial assistance
from their parents. As a result of these two trends, both declining age of puberty and the
increasing age of the transition to adulthood, adolescence has turned into a 15 year stage of
life. [laughter]. That's three times as long as it was in the 19th century and twice as long as it
was as recently as the 1950s. Maybe when adolescence was a short period of time it was
possible to approach it as something to survive, to just kind of get through. Hold your breath
and you'll come out the other side of the tunnel. But a 15 year period, I think that that is
probably not the right way to approach it. We need a different way. When the brain is plastic
as it is during adolescence, it's not plastic in all parts of the brain at the same time. Different
regions of the brain are malleable at different ages. During adolescence the part of the brain
that is especially susceptible to the environment is the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the
brain right behind your four head. It's the CEO of the brain. It's responsible for all of our
advanced thinking abilities like decision-making and planning. It's also responsible for selfregulation or self-control, our ability to control our thoughts and our feelings and our actions.
Self-control is arguably the single most important trait for a person to have in order to live a
happy and successful life. There are literally hundreds of studies showing that kids with strong
self-control do better in school. They have better relationships. They are happier. They are
less prone to emotional problems. They are less likely to get into trouble. So if you are a
parent even of a younger child, perhaps the most important characteristic you can instill in your
child is a strong self-regulation, strong self-control. It turns out that it's actually a better
predictor of success in school than either intelligence or talent is. On the other hand, poor selfcontrol is a huge liability, a lifelong liability. We can see this in many ways, but one way we can
see it is by looking at the factors that predict which kids are going to end up living in poverty.
Economists and sociologists have identified four rules that if you follow it's pretty much
guarantee that you will have at least a minimally decent life. Graduate from high school, don't
have a child until you are married, don't break the law and don't be idle. If you are out of
school and unemployed take any job that somebody offers you and if you have a job, even if
you don't like it, don't quit it unless you have something else lined up. And if you play by these
rules, you will probably never end up in poverty. And that's not, by the way, a moral judgment.
That's a statistical fact. I know that there are lots of conditions, circumstances in people's lives
that lead them to break these rules, some of which are not in their complete control, but poor
self-control is often a part of it. Poor self-control is why people drop out of school. It's why
they commit crimes. It's why they get pregnant before they want to get pregnant. It's why
they impulsively walk off of jobs without having something else lined up. As I explained in the
book, there are huge socio-economic differences in self-control that are present from as early
as we can measure it. We now understand some of the neural underpinnings of these class
differences. If we could do something to help improve the self regulatory skills of kids from
disadvantaged families, we could probably do something to help close the income gap in this
country. We need to think about how we might do that. Some of you may be wondering why
the age of puberty has dropped so much. It's really due to three main factors. One is obesity.
Obese kids go through puberty earlier than average weight or thin young people and, as you
know, there is an epidemic of childhood obesity. A second is exposure of our children to
endocrine disrupting chemicals. They're ubiquitous in modern society. They are in what we
eat. They are in cosmetics. They are in plastics. They are in pesticides and a lot of them have
been shown to accelerate the onset of puberty. The third is one that I think will interest a lot of
people in this room, and that is that there is some evidence now that exposure to artificial light,
especially light that emanates from computer screens and tablets and smart phones, may also
hasten the onset of puberty. It's not that wacky of an idea. First of all, we know that kids who
grow up near the equator go through puberty earlier than kids who grow up near the poles,
because they have more accumulated exposure to light in their childhood. And if you talk to
poultry farmers, how many of you have talked to a poultry farmer recently? [laughter].
Probably not too many of you. If you want your birds to mature faster, you leave the lights on
longer. There are some well understood biological mechanisms by which light may accelerate
the onset of puberty. Having good self-control during adolescence is also important because it
helps protect people against some of the most significant threats to their health and well-being.
We've made tremendous amounts of progress in the prevention and treatment of disease and
illness during adolescence, and in the developed world the major threats to the health and
well-being of young people are no longer disease and illness. They're behaviors. They're things
that kids do to themselves and to others. So even though we've made these improvements in
the treatment of disease and illness during adolescence, mortality rates double or even triple
between childhood and adolescence because of kids’ involvement in risky and reckless
behavior. Almost all types of risky behavior reach their peak during adolescence. This is true
for crime. This is true for experimentation with drugs. This is true for self-inflicted injury like
cutting. It's also true, and I find this so interesting, it's also true for accidental drownings. Now
there's no good reason to think that 15-year-olds would drown more often than five-year-olds
or 35-year-olds because 15-year-olds are generally pretty strong. And so we can imagine that
the reason that drownings peak during adolescence is not because of a lack of stamina, but
because of the lack of judgment, because of bad decisions that kids make about when and
where to swim. If we could do something to diminish risk taking we can really do something to
improve the public health of young people. Adolescent brain science has revealed some
interesting mechanisms for this increase in risky behavior during adolescence. Puberty has
many important effects on the brain. It doesn't just arouse our libido and change the way that
we look. Sex hormones actually affect the way the brain develops. One of the effects of
puberty which I'll discuss later is to make the brain more plastic. That's one of the reasons why
there is an increase in brain plasticity as we enter into adolescence, because of the chemical
effects of sex hormones on brain development. But another affect of puberty on the brain is
that it intensifies our experience of pleasure. It does this by increasing activity in the brain
involving the neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine serves many functions in the brain,
but one of its most important is for the experience of reward or pleasure. Studies show that
when we anticipate something pleasant happening or when something pleasurable actually
happens to us, food, sex, money, praise, it doesn't matter, we get a little dopamine squirt and
that is what makes us feel good. And because there's more dopamine activity in the brain's
reward centers during adolescence, good things feel even better. In fact, and this is probably
the bad news in today's talk, is that nothing will ever feel as good to you for the rest of your life
as it did when you were a teenager. [laughter]. Because things feel so good during
adolescence, kids are often motivated to seek out experiences that they anticipate are going to
be rewarding or pleasurable or exciting even if those experiences seem risky or dangerous. This
is something that psychologists refer to as sensation seeking. The problem is that this arousal
of the brain's reward center occurs very early in adolescence, around the time of puberty and
at that time the prefrontal cortex, which, remember, is sort of the seat of self-control in the
brain. The prefrontal cortex is still immature; it's still developing. There's a lot of development
of what we call the cognitive control system over the course of adolescence. So the
juxtaposition of this easily aroused reward system and this immature control system has been
likened to starting the engines without a good braking system in place. And that turns out to be
one of the reasons that kids engage in so much risky and reckless behavior. But because the
part of the brain that's malleable and plastic is this region that governs self-control, we can do
something to help build and strengthen kids’ self-regulation abilities and in the book I go
through a number of things of what parents can do at home and what schools ought to be
doing to help strengthen kids’ self-control, which will help them do better in school as well as
protect them from some of these risky and reckless behaviors that threaten their well-being.
When the brain goes through periods of plasticity, it's not simply open to the benefits of
positive experience. It's also vulnerable to the effects of harmful or toxic experiences.
Adolescence also, as it turns out, is a very vulnerable point in development. We see this in a
number of ways. Adolescence is the most common stage of life for a mental health problem to
emerge. If you look across all serious mental illnesses, the average age of onset is 14, right
there in adolescence. Actually, if you can get to age 25 without developing a serious mental
health problem, then the odds are that you will never develop one. Very few have their first
appearance after age 25, and very few actually appear before age ten. Exceptions are autism
spectrum disorders and ADHD. ADHD is kind of funny to talk about in that sense because the
diagnostic criteria includes the fact that it has to emerge early during childhood, so if you never
have ADHD until you're and adolescent, you don't get classified as technically having ADHD.
Adolescence is a time of great vulnerability to mental health problems. It's also a problem of
vulnerability to the harmful effects of different kinds of drugs. If you are using alcohol, tobacco
or illicit drugs before the age of 15, your chances of developing a substance abuse problem or
even an addiction are seven to ten times greater than if you delay that exposure to age 21.
Now I know some of you are probably thinking because we have a lot of scientists in the room,
well, that's because of the nature of people that start using drugs that young. But that's not the
explanation. Because animal studies show that when we randomly assigned animals, all
mammals go through puberty so we can use them to model adolescence. When we randomly
assigned animals to be exposed to these substances near the time of puberty or randomly
assigned them to be exposed after they're full-grown adults, the ones who were exposed
earlier are much more likely to become addicted to the substances, so it has to do with the
plasticity of the brain in the regions that recreational drugs affect during adolescence.
Exposure to those drugs, when you are still young, affects the way that these brain systems
ultimately end up. Adolescence is also a time when we are vulnerable to the impact of stress.
A really interesting paper was published earlier this year by a group of people at Berkeley. They
looked at the relationship between growing up in wartime and life expectancy. What they
found was that growing up during wartime takes years off your life, but it takes more years off
your life if you are a teenager during the wars than if you are a child or an adult. And that's
because the adolescent brain is more stress reactive, more stress responsive than the brain is at
other points in time. We understand a lot about the biology of this. It has to do with the
relationship between the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis and the hypothalamic pituitary
adrenal axis or the stress axis and they affect each other's development. But I don't want to
linger on this notion that adolescence is a time of vulnerability. I want to talk about the other
side of it, the fact that adolescence is a time of opportunity. It's a time when we can help the
brain develop in positive directions, help people develop in positive directions. But we're
squandering this opportunity, in part because of the survivors’ mentality, and there isn't a
better example of how we're squandering it than in American high schools. I mentioned earlier
that in these international achievement comparisons American high school students are almost
always at the bottom of the list. What's really interesting about this is that American
elementary school students are almost always at the top of the list internationally. And
American middle school students are kind of mid-list, so when we read reports about how
poorly American students achieve compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world, it
really is about high school students where there's the problem. And actually if you look at data
just within the United States, you see a really similar pattern. The federal government tracks
the academic competence of American students annually. It's been doing this for about four
years. They test nationally representative samples of fourth graders, eighth-graders and 12th
graders every year. If you look at the trend lines over the past four decades, what you see is
that there have been improvements in the achievements of fourth graders and improvements
in the achievements of eighth-graders. They're small; it's nothing to get too excited about, but
at least the lines are moving in the right direction. The line for 12th graders is absolutely flat.
There has been no improvement in any subject area, no improvement in the achievement of
American 12th-graders in 40 years. And that's despite all the time and money and energy that
we spend in this country discussing school reform. The fact that American high schools are so
bad relative to high schools in other parts of the world and relative to our own elementary and
middle schools, is kind of perplexing, because if you look at the variables that we typically
discuss when we discuss school reform, things like funding for teacher training or teacher
compensation, American high schools are not disadvantaged in those respects at all. We pay
high school teachers more than we pay teachers at other levels. A study last year rated
teachers training programs around the United States and teacher training programs for high
school teachers got much higher grades than training programs for elementary or middle
school teachers. We spend more money per capita educating high school students than we do
elementary and middle school students. The population of people in high schools
demographically should be performing better for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are
more poor children, relatively speaking, in our elementary schools than there are in our high
schools. And secondly, by the time 12th-grade rolls around the really bad students have
already dropped out of high school. And so if anything, that sample should test better than the
younger samples, but it doesn't. Levels of proficiency among high school students relatively
speaking are lower than levels of proficiency among elementary and middle school students.
So what's the reason for this? I think the reason is that our high schools aren't very demanding
and they are not very challenging. I say this because our students tell us this in large-scale
surveys. In these achievement comparisons that we read about so often where they test kids
from all over the developed world, they also administer questionnaires asking students their
attitudes and opinions about different things. The topics of those questions have changed a
little bit from year to year. Not that long ago they asked kids to indicate how boring school
was. There we where near the top of the list. We came in third in the world as kids’ ratings of
high school as boring. If you talk to foreign students who spent a year studying in an American
high school, they will tell you that American high schools are much easier than high schools in
their home country. American students say the same thing if they have had the opportunity to
study abroad. Two weeks ago I was speaking at a European adolescent society meeting that
was held in Turkey. I met a professor from a Turkish university who spent a sabbatical year at
UC Irvine. Irvine has what are considered to be among the best public schools in the country.
When she was on sabbatical she had her 10-year-old and her 13-year-old with her and they
were going to go to school in Irvine for the year. These Turkish kids didn't speak a word of in
question. Their second language was French, not English, so they come to Irvine and they go
into the California schools without knowing how to speak English and within three months they
were complaining to their mother that school was too easy, that what they had already learned
in their Turkish schools was far advanced to what they were learning in Irvine. One out of every
six American high school students says that she's never taken a single difficult or challenging
class, ever, even just one, ever. Seventy percent of American high school students say that they
would learn more in school if their schools had higher standards. Levels of disengagement in
American schools are kind of off the charts. I know the people that get to be in your place
probably didn't have that high school experience and many of you probably when you went to
high school went to demanding high schools and you took a lot of the AP classes and so forth.
But you're a very small minority in a very large wasteland. The percentage of college freshmen
in the United States who need remedial education is higher than the percent that has ever
taken a single AP class. We can't judge what the rest of the education of the country is like
based on your experiences. High schools in America have become these places where kids
meet up with their friends and hang out with their friends. They're contexts for socializing
more than anything else and it almost feels like kids think that those bothersome things like
classes just kind of get in the way of what I'm really here for. The fact that we are not pushing
our kids very much in high school has more than academic implications. There's been a lot of
discussion in the education world in the last couple of years in something that is being called
non-cognitive skills. It's a terrible phrase, but it was coined by a Nobel laureate, James
Heckman and who am I to say that this is a bad way to describe this? But by non-cognitive
skills, he's referring to things like perseverance, determination, self-control, grit, and we know
that those things are fostered by challenge and they are fostered by demanding a little bit more
from the brain than what the brain is capable of doing. And so by not challenging our kids in
high school, we are not only failing to educate them in the conventional academic sense, we
are failing to instill these traits that are so important for success in the world of work and in life.
We are squandering this opportunity because this is a time when that part of the brain is
especially susceptible to influence. We see this problem. What I talk about in the book is kind
of a grit deficiency, by looking at what's going on on college campuses. President Obama the
last couple of years has been talking a lot about the need to increase the number of high school
kids who enroll in college. This is because nowadays we learn to get a decent paying job you
need a college degree. In the past, actually not so recent past, if you had a couple of years of
college or an Associate’s degree, you had an economic advantage in the labor market over
people who just had a high school diploma. That advantage has disappeared. In order to reap
the benefits of going to college, at least in terms of salary, you need to actually graduate from
college and have a degree. If you look at our record as a country with respect to college
enrollment, we're not so bad. We have one of the highest college enrollment rates in the
developed world. Our problem isn't getting kids to go to college. Our problem is getting kids to
finish college. We're tied for last in rates of college completion in the developed world. One
third of all students that enter college in the United States never get a college degree. Why do
kids drop out of college? Some of them drop out for financial reasons and we do need to make
college more affordable for more people. But what studies show is that a lot of them drop out
for other reasons. They drop out because they can't handle it. They can't handle the academic
demands and they can handle the psychological demands, which require that they function
independently without their teachers and their parents looking over their shoulder all the time,
because you need things like determination and perseverance and grid to be able to do that.
And this is costing us a fortune as a country in terms of college dropouts, the amount of money
we have to spend on remedial education, the cost to the individuals who have dropped out.
This is a problem that financial aid is not going to solve. If our policies do nothing other than
put more kids in college without giving them the skills and the capacities that they need to
actually finish college, all we're going to do is increase the number of people in this country
who are not competitive in the labor force but are carrying student debt. We've got to figure
out not only how to get kids to enroll in college but how to get them to graduate from college. I
mentioned a little while ago that one of the effects of puberty on the brain is to make it more
plastic, to make it more malleable. Sex hormones actually increase the development of new
synapses and they actually increase the development of new neurons. We might think of
puberty as kind of opening up this window to our brain plasticity. As we move through
adolescence toward adulthood, there's a neurochemical change in the brain, a neurochemical
change which inclines the brain towards stability, that makes it harder for the brain to change,
and the window of brain plasticity starts to close. Remember, adolescence is the last time
when the window will be fully open. When people move into adulthood, their brains are no
longer plastic in the way they were during adolescence. We've actually identified the brain
proteins and enzymes that contribute to this neurochemical climate change in the brain.
There's really interesting research going on now about trying to intervene in the production of
those neurochemicals to help make an adult brain plastic the way that it was during
adolescence, which could have tremendous implications for the treatment of brain injury,
which is harder to treat in an adult brain because the adult brain is harder to modify. There's
some really exciting new research that suggests that we might be able to keep this window of
plasticity open a little bit longer. I say that because plasticity is itself a malleable trait. Try to
get your head around that, but the plasticity of the brain is itself plastic. And what studies show
is that exposure of the brain to novel and challenging experiences during times of malleability
not only lead to the acquisition of new skills at that moment, but they actually prime the brain
to be able to take advantage of future experiences. They extend the period of brain plasticity.
A paper came out earlier this year showing that people with higher IQs have longer periods of
brain plasticity that stand further into adolescence than people with lower IQs. That makes me
think if we made people's environments more challenging and exposed them to more novelty
during this period of time, we could keep their brains plastic for a little bit longer. There
obviously has to be a ceiling on how long the brain can remain plastic because at some point in
time it's not advantageous to have a completely plastic brain because the risks of having your
brain harmed by the environment outweigh the benefits of acquiring new knowledge and
information. And as I explained in the book, adolescence evolved as a time during which we
are sponges for information because we are gathering this information at a time when we are
preparing to leave the protective environment of the adults and bigger animals that have been
caring for us. So at some point you do want to shift your brain from equities into bonds and
that's really why the brain won't remain plastic forever. If you look at what happens to people
when they leave adolescence and enter adulthood, most of them experience a market drop in
novelty and challenge. You think about going into an entry-level job. You're probably doing the
same thing over and over and over again after a while. If you think about getting married,
you're probably doing the same thing over and over again after a while. There's a huge drop in
marital satisfaction during the first year of marriage and partly because of the decline in
novelty. I will leave it to those of you who are married to think about ways of making more
novelty in your marriage, but by and large most people experience a decline in novelty and
challenge when they make the transition from adolescence into adulthood. And its novelty and
challenge that keeps the brain plastic. It's a really important thing for corporations like
Microsoft to think about in terms of the job environment that they are creating for people for
their employees who are in their early and mid-20s, because by keeping those job
environments challenging and continuing to expose their employees to novelty, they're really
making an important investment in the intellectual development of their future labor force. As
you probably know, there's a lot of hand wringing about how long it's taking people to become
adults in American society. But if this notion about brain plasticity is correct, maybe it's not so
good to rush people into these roles of adulthood along such an accelerated timetable. Maybe
settling down actually isn't all that good for your brain. Millennials, people in their 20s now,
take a beating in the popular press. They're described very often as self absorbed slackers who
are kind of taking their time getting to adulthood because their parents can afford to support
them. These portrayals are based on anecdotes. My colleague Liz Showman and I decided to
see if this was true by looking at some actual data on it. We looked at a large national data set
called Monitoring the Future. Some of you may know it as a study of high school students, but
it actually tracks its samples that it picks up from high school and tracks them through their 20s.
It's been doing this since the late 1970s. We were able to look at the psychological functioning
of people in their 20s today and compare that to people in their 20s in previous generations.
Almost no differences, no differences in self-esteem, no differences in narcissism, no
differences in how self absorbed people are, no differences in how satisfied they were in life. If
anything, 20-year-olds today are more admirable in lots of ways. They're more likely to express
a strong concern for the welfare of the community. They're more likely to say it's important to
be successful in the workplace. They're more likely to say that they're concerned that their
own children have better lives than they do. We also use this data to ask whether entering
these different roles of adulthood at earlier ages is better for you. We found that the age at
which people leave school and enter the workplace, get married and become parents is largely
uncorrelated with their psychological well-being and their psychological functioning. If
anything, it looks like delaying some of these transitions is better for you than doing them
earlier. This is especially true for parenthood. The people who delay becoming parents are
happier than people who have children relatively earlier in their adult years. Not only is
delaying adulthood better for your brain, it may be better for your mental health as well as long
as you are keeping yourself in contexts that are novel and challenging. If you're the parent of a
twenty-something maybe you shouldn't worry quite so much if you are young adult child was
not following the same timetable that you followed at that age. And if you are a twentysomething, you might gently tell your parents to get off your back a little bit. My advice would
be just that you cash the check before you have the conversation with them. [laughter]. I hope
I've changed the way that you think about adolescence. That was my goal for today. That was
the goal in writing Age of Opportunity. We often portray adolescence only in negative terms.
We talk about the vulnerabilities in the period and I don't mean to diminish the importance of
that, but I think we have ignored the fact that adolescence is also a time of opportunity. So I
just want to leave you with five suggestions for things that we can do that might help make this
vision more of a reality. The first is that we need to get the word out about adolescence be
needed second period of heightened brain plasticity. I mean, preschoolers get all the attention.
And who could be against quality early childhood education? But we've got to remember that
that's an investment. It's not an inoculation of some sort. We can't just have better preschools
and then cross our fingers and hope for the best. We've got to invest in other periods of
development too, and one area it looks like we really need to invest is adolescence. So that's
number one. Number two, as I explain in the book, there are lots of things that we know about
how to raise kids who have better self-control and these other psychological capacities like grit.
We, people like myself, can do a better job of educating parents of ways to parent in ways that
help instill these qualities in your children. Third, we've got to make our schools more
demanding. Our own students are telling us that school is boring and too easy. We also can
start incorporating into the school day some activities that are known to help facilitate the
development of these important psychological characteristics. There's a really interesting
research on mindfulness training as a way to help improve brain function, particularly in self
regulation. That can be done through meditation. It can be done through yoga. There are
many different ways of achieving mindfulness. How many of you have a regular physical
exercise regimen that you try to follow? Yeah. I mean, you almost never meet an educated
adult in America who doesn't, and we do that because physical exercise makes us feel better
and also because we know that it makes us think better. It makes us sharper. And we've taken
physical education out of American schools. The only kids that get regular physical education in
American high schools are the star athletes. The rest of the kids don't get it at all. We really
need to put aerobic exercise back in the school day and adding an hour of that to each school
day would do more to improve the achievement of American students than adding another
hour of academic instruction. We need to make schools more demanding and we need to do
more in the way of activities that are known to facilitate brain development. Fourth, we need
to realize our laws with what we know about adolescence development. A country that tries
12-year-olds as adults because they should know better, but doesn't let 20-year-olds by beer is
deeply confused about adolescence, I think. And one that lets people drive when they're 16,
which statistically speaking is one of the most dangerous things you can do, but doesn't let
them watch R-rated movies until they're 17, is really clueless. So I think we can use the science
of adolescence brain development to inform our policies and laws governing young people.
And then finally, let's stop telling young people that adolescence is a race to see who gets to
adulthood first. It's longer than ever and it's a more important period than ever in human
development. Instead of rushing people through it, what we ought to be doing is thinking
about how we can create contexts in schools, in homes and communities that can key to
expose young people to novelty and challenge in ways that we know is going to facilitate brain
development. That's my spiel. I really hope that you will no longer think of adolescence as a
problem and no longer think of it as something just to survive, but instead, think of it as a time
when people can really thrive and think of adolescence as just a tremendous opportunity. I am
happy to take questions on anything about adolescent development. [applause]. Thank you
all. Yes?
>>: Have you looked it all at how habits are formed during this period?
>> Laurence Steinberg: Habits are formed during this period the way that they are formed
during any period, which is through repetition. Because we know neurologically speaking that
when you repeat the same behavior over and over again it strengthens the synaptic
connections of the brain circuits that serve that behavior. Repetition is going to make habits.
But we also know that if you stop doing things, the brain is still plastic. If you stop doing things
that those synapses are going to disappear and so that's the way neurologically that we break
habits. Yes?
>>: I have a question about the plasticity issue, because the things that I've read previously
have said that one of the big things that's happening in our lessons is that all of those, there's
like too many synapses that have been formed and they are all getting pared down. So there's
this huge paring back, which is kind of a little bit in opposition to what you are saying about it
being this kind of openness or growth.
>> Laurence Steinberg: Actually, not. I mean, the first part of what you said is correct. The
second part is not. What you are referring to is a process called synaptic pruning. For those of
you who don't have any background in neuroscience, during the very early years of life our
brains overproduce synapses, many, many more than we will need. Synapsis is the connection
between neurons. The process of brain development really once you exit infancy is not so
much the development of synapses but the elimination of unnecessary ones, this pruning
process. It's kind of like changing from a system of lots of unpaved roads to like a smaller
number of superhighways and it makes the brain more efficient. When we talk about brain
plasticity, we're talking both about the development of new synapses and the pruning of
inefficient ones, the elimination of other ones. Plasticity doesn't necessarily mean more. It
means better or it means change and change can take the form of new synapses and change
can take the form of the elimination of old synapses. Does that help?
>>: Yes.
>> Laurence Steinberg: Yes?
>>: Since it appears that our high schools are becoming less challenging has the same thing
been happening to colleges? Have they been sort of lowering their standards to get graduation
rates higher?
>> Laurence Steinberg: I don't know the answer to that. I do know that there has been an
increase in the number of college students who need remedial education. Now whether that's
due to the declining quality of high school in the way that it's preparing kids for college, or
declining admission standards in which we're so intent on just enrolling more and more and
more people into college that we are enrolling ones who aren't prepared for, I don't know. It
should be easy enough to find out whether the college graduation rate has changed. I actually
don't know the answer to that. Yes?
>>: Question about high schools. Do you think that some of it is because high schools try to be
a one-size-fits-all today? I can remember when I was in high school, I know the Stone Age. I
had a German teacher who visited Germany and talked about the school system in Germany.
Not every school was designed to send a kid to college, that they would segregate. You had
kids who had tremendous hand abilities whose skills would go more into manufacturing type
environment. You had the athletes who were going to go on to the Olympics and they would
go, and the people went to high school who were truly the kids who their vision and their
strength was in going to college. And I think our schools today are very much trying to be a
one-size-fits-all, so you've got all these kids in the same place with different aspirations end
different and goals and so you dumb the system down so you are not preparing the college kids
to go to college. You're not giving vocational training to a kid who wants to be a wrench turner
and you're not, have you seen that?
>> Laurence Steinberg: What you're saying has elements of truth to it, but let's tweak it a little
bit. This is not a change, first of all. The American secondary education system has always had
as its centerpiece what we call the comprehensive high school, which is a high school that
serves everybody. Right from the get go when we formed high schools in this country, public
high schools in this country, they were always designed to be these inclusive institutions as
opposed to the European model or the model in some Asian countries where we test people
when they're 12 or 13 years old and then separate them into either college preparatory schools
or vocational schools. That's the first thing. The second is that even though we have this
system of comprehensive high schools that serve everybody, within them there's almost always
tracking. It's either explicit tracking or implicit tracking, but there are the courses that the kids
are going to go to college take and then there are courses that the other kids take. We might
think of those as multiple schools within the same school building. I do think that we do not do
a very good job in this country of educating the non-college-bound students. I think that's kind
of what you are driving at. Germany is always held up as the model of a country that has
developed an apprenticeship system and a country that hasn't stigmatized going into skilled
crafts and skilled labor as we have here. I can remember years ago talking to our plumber
about this. We had this plumber. He had this very successful plumbing business in suburban
Philadelphia and we recommended him to a friend of ours who needed a plumber and a friend
told me, I called Joe. Actually it was Joe the plumber. [laughter]. Not that Joe the plumber, but
his name was Joe. And he said I'm not taking new customers. So the next time I saw him, we
had been using him for 20 years, I said what's this about not taking new customers? I said why
don't you just hire more plumbers to work for you? And he said I can't find them. Because you
need to be able to do geometry and math to be a plumber, and he said but nowadays any kid
who can't pass 10th grade math is being shunted away from going into skilled trades and
instead is being told that you have to go to college. And if you talk to people in the skilled
trades, they will say that they have a tremendous difficulty finding skilled labor, and it's because
we've gotten on this bandwagon here of saying everybody needs to go to college. Partly, that's
because nowadays you do in order to earn a decent living. And I don't know if we can reverse
this path that we've gone down. There have been attempts to replicate the German
apprenticeship system in the United States and it hasn't worked. Partly it's because our
companies aren't very cooperative in doing that and I think our unions have not been really
cooperative in helping to support apprenticeship systems. So I think the fundamental problem
is that we don't do a good job of educating people that aren't planning to go to college and
therefore, almost everybody ends up on a college track which then creates a diversity in the
high school population which makes it harder to teach to students who have such different
degrees of intelligence and background.
>>: It also may contribute to your extended adolescence because if you are a kid in high school
and you want to be a diesel mechanic, you've got to put your four years in high school and then
spend time going off to vocational school to actually learn where you could have been doing
that. You could have graduated high school at 18 or 19 as a skilled mechanic. We can't do that
today.
>> Laurence Steinberg: Right. That's right. Yes?
>>: I have a couple of questions self-control. How do you teach self-control in kids and are
there any resources that you can share on how to improve self-control?
>> Laurence Steinberg: Sure. The question is how do you teach self-control to kids and are
there any resources that I can share. There really are three different ways to instill self-control
in kids. One is to parent in a way that has been described as authoritative parenting. This is
parenting that combines being very firm but with being very warm. We know from decades
and decades of research on this that if you are warm but you are not firm your kids are going to
be more prone to end up in problem behavior and actually have some difficulties with impulse
control. If you're firm but not warm, kind of like tiger mothering, we know that that's not good
for kids either. It actually elevates their risk for anxiety and depression, so it's combining
warmth and firmness and that's been shown to be predictive of self-regulation in children, both
young children and adolescents, so that's number one. Number two is to encourage certain
kinds of activities at home that we know strengthen self-control and I mentioned some of
them. Like mindfulness, like meditation is really good for the development of self-control.
Aerobic exercise is really good for developing self-control. Sleep is very good for the
development of self-control, and as most of you probably know, we have a nation of sleep
deprived people and sleep deprived teenagers. And adolescent, a healthy adolescent needs
about nine hours of sleep a night and I haven't met too many who get nine hours of sleep a
night. Number two is these activities. Number three would be deliberate attempts to cultivate
self-control. One aspect of self-control that's very important is the ability to delay gratification.
And so one way that you might do that as a parent is that when your child has a decision or a
choice to make, to really actively encourage the child to think about the long-term as well as
short-term consequences of a choice. If you really want this thing, if you buy this now, how is
that going to affect your chances of getting x in the future? And the more that you sort of
encourage self-control, the more it will develop. It's like what I was saying before about habits.
The more often we behave in a certain way, the stronger those synaptic connections get. There
you go. Yes?
>>: You mentioned one possible outcome of time in front of a screen with early puberty. Have
you seen any other effects, positive or negative, just with the liberation of screens, video
games?
>> Laurence Steinberg: Yeah. I get asked this question a lot, about what the effects of
electronic media are on kids’ development. I'm a little contrarian there because I am not
negative about it at all. To me, it's like asking whether television is good or bad for kids without
distinguishing between Masterpiece Theatre and Jersey Shore. It sort of depends. I think it's
very imprudent to generalize about spending time on the computer or on your smart phone or
whatever without asking what you are doing. I mean there our applications that are available
on electronic devices that are deliberately there to help build self-control. There are these
working memory training programs that you can download onto your smart phone and practice
with them. There are a lot of claims about these applications that have not been validated, but
we do know at the very least that working memory training does improve your working
memory. Whether it extends to other aspects of self-control is something that scientists are
studying. That's one. A second is that, and with social media, in particular, a lot of parents
have been concerned about whether kids’ involvement in social media stunts their social
development because their having just their relationships online and so on. There's no
evidence that it does and there's a lot of evidence that the people that kids interact with in
social media are the same people they see face-to-face when they go to school. It's more like
the telephone than anything else. And in terms of video games, I actually am one of those
persons, there's a minority of us who believe this, that videogames have actually contributed to
the decline in crime among juveniles, because they have occupied them doing things during
hours when they might otherwise be out committing crimes. I mean, there's no, the evidence
that watching violent video games causes people to commit violence is so thin and so
questionable that it's just amazing that people continue to say that this is the case. Actually,
the California State Supreme Court reviewed the evidence for this in a case that involved
whether violent video games should be banned for teenagers in California. The California
Supreme Court First Amendment U.S. Supreme Court heard the case. And they ruled that, they
found that there is no evidence that violence in video games makes kids more violent. To me
it's really a question of what kids are not doing if they're spending all of their time doing this. In
moderation, I don't think it's a problem at all. But we know that kids need exercise and we
know that they need sleep and we know that they need exposure to media in other forms as
well. So if they're not getting all of those things then constant exposure to screen time is a
problem, but if they're getting adequate sleep and they're getting adequate exercise and this is
not, their whole life doesn't just revolve around this, then I don't see it as a problem. Yes?
How about somebody who hasn't had a chance yet? Yeah?
>>: You talked about the window of plasticity closing and some of what I've read points to
almost mid 20s before that starts happening. And you also talked about certain things
extending that, so I wondered if that's consistent with your research and also what are the
opportunities in the later period to either extend it or take advantage of that plasticity?
>> Laurence Steinberg: Okay. What we know about brain plasticity comes almost exclusively
from animal studies. The little bit of research on human brain plasticity, a lot of it is in direct in
the sense that we can identify people whose brains still seem to be changing a lot. We assume
that that means that they are more plastic. The maturation of the brain, particularly
connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain, is ongoing into the 20s. It
starts to slow at around age 22 or 23. It doesn't stop, but I would say that from a scientific
point of view the rate of change slows to a point where probably the change is not all that
significant in terms of its practical significance. There are still changes in the brain that take
place after that. The brain continues changing into the 30s, but that actually works against
plasticity because malleated brain circuits are harder to change than ones that are not
malleated. In terms of what we know about what can extend plasticity, I'm basing this on
animal studies showing that when animals are exposed to novelty and challenge it seems to
induce chemical changes in the brain that encourage more synaptic change in the brain. This
research on humans does not yet exist and so it's hard to study in humans now because there
isn't a marker of human brain plasticity where we can look at a brain and say because you have
these proteins in it your brain is more plastic, or because this is what the anatomy of your brain
looks like. This means your brain is more plastic. We are not there yet. We might be there
soon, but we are nowhere near there now. Yes?
>>: I was wondering you talked about the transition into adulthood taking longer and you
mentioned some environmental factors that is intervening to people going into puberty earlier.
I was wondering about this extension of adolescence. Do you think it's due to a kind of actual
extension that's environmental, this brain plasticity or that it's more society that in some levels
we are already there?
>> Laurence Steinberg: The question was, I talked about environmental factors that have led to
this decline in the age of puberty and what were my thoughts about environmental factors or
other factors that contributed to the extension of adolescence. I think probably the most likely
explanation is economics. As the labor force has required more schooling in order to be
competitive, people have had to remain students for a longer period of time. What we call a
four-year college degree, that takes six years on average. People are not going to finish their
education, their formal education until at a minimum, and this is not including, you know, post
college training, they are not going to finish their education until they are 24 or 25 years old.
And what that means is that almost everything else is going to be on a different timetable.
They're going to be economically dependent on their families for longer. They're probably
going to delay getting married and that's going to delay them becoming parents. That's one. A
second I believe has to do with the changing roles for women in American society. A
generation and a half ago women needed to get married in order to get out of their parents’
homes and live an independent life. They don't need that anymore and so women don't need
to be married in order to live a decent life. More and more women are in higher education and
in postgraduate education than ever before, which then leads them to delay getting married
and delay becoming parents. I think these are social changes and economic changes. You had
your hand up.
>>: I did. I'm going to actually cut this off, though, because I know you have another talk at
three and I want to give people time to sign books.
>> Laurence Steinberg: Okay. Thank you. Thank you all very much. [applause]