Adolescent Brains Are Wired to Want Status and Respect: That’s an Opportunity for Teachers and Parents
Adolescent Brains Are Wired to Want Status and Respect: That’s an Opportunity for Teachers and Parents
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This fact sheet gives an overview of adolescent brain development and explains how access to resources, opportunities, and meaningful relationships during adolescence can build connections within our brains and with the world around us that support us into adulthood.
Brain development during adolescence is fundamentally a story of connections.
Around age 9 or 10, hormonal changes kick off a period of intense learning and development, when brain cells form, strengthen, and streamline connections in response to our experiences more rapidly than in any period of life after early childhood.
Activity increases especially in the brain networks that propel us to explore the world, learn from our mistakes, and connect with others in new ways. In turn, these new experiences prompt our brain cells to connect with other neurons in ways that help us adapt to new events and new information. These neural connections become stronger the more we use them, while unused connections are pruned away, helping the brain become more efficient at acquiring and mastering new skills and new ways of thinking.
This brain-building learning happens through direct experiences in our environments and interactive, responsive relationships—with our families and peers, in our classrooms and neighborhoods, in community activities, and even online. The resources, opportunities, and experiences we as adults provide in and out of school can help young people’s brains build the extensive networks of connections that will manage the complex knowledge and behaviors needed to navigate adulthood.
Learning by Exploring the World Around Us
One of the networks that changes significantly with the increase in hormones and dopamine at the beginning of puberty is the “reward system” in our brain. Heightened activity in this system increases the feeling of reward we get from exploring the world, taking risks, and learning from the results.
Meanwhile, the network of brain regions that make up the “social brain” also changes during adolescence. These changes help us tune into social and emotional cues, like facial expressions or social rejection and approval, and increase our desire to earn respect and contribute to others. It also enables us to learn the nuances of changing social contexts in ways that help prepare us for adult relationships.
The prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that orchestrates critical thinking and behavioral control) undergoes its most rapid period of development during adolescence. It builds on many other systems within the brain to manage our responses to the flood of new information and intensifying emotions. Engaging with other people and our environment and learning from our successes and our mistakes, known as “action-based learning,” helps shape the prefrontal cortex by strengthening the connections within it and between it and other brain networks. We learn through repeated practice—which includes trying and sometimes failing—what is adaptive and appropriate in different situations and how to guide our behavior accordingly, in ways that equip us to pursue new forward-looking goals.
When adults provide youth with opportunities to try new things, to practice navigating emotions, and to learn from failures along the way, it helps build the brain connections that we all need to grow into healthy, thriving adults.
Policies, Experiences, and Mindsets Shape the Connecting Brain
Although we can continue to learn new skills and behaviors as adults, the adaptability of the brain during adolescence means that these connections are much more likely to form quickly in response to experiences. The extent of these changes make the adolescent years a critical window when investments in the right policies and programs for youth can shape long-term positive development.
Likewise, this makes the adolescent years a time when negative experiences including racism, other forms of discrimination, poverty, or abuse can create steeper hills for young people to climb toward a healthy adulthood. When adults ensure that all young people, especially those who have experienced earlier adversity, have what they need along their journey, they can build the skills and capacities they need to thrive as adults. This includes opportunities to explore and take healthy risks, to connect with and contribute to those around us, to make decisions and learn from the outcomes, to develop a healthy sense of identity, and to rely on support from parents or other caring adults.
Understanding how and why the brain develops during adolescence lets us provide the support young people need to build healthy connections—in their world and within their brains—that will help our youth and our communities thrive.
Real-World Practice Helps Adolescents Learn to Make Reasoned Decisions and Manage Emotions
Fact Sheet | Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time
This fact sheet highlights what research tells us about how youth build good decision-making skills and navigate challenging emotions, and highlights how adults can help in this process.
Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity and growth. During these years, changes to the brain networks involved in processing emotions and guiding behavior—combined with the novelty of strong emotions like falling in love—can amplify the intensity of our emotions. This makes our middle and high school years a critical window to learn to navigate emotions.
Policies and programs that support adolescents to practice making decisions and regulating their emotions in real-world settings lead to healthier, more connected communities.
Learning to make good decisions and manage strong emotions in a positive way are fundamental skills to learn in our adolescent years. Fortunately, we’re developmentally primed to tackle these areas of learning during this period.
Throughout adolescence, our cognitive and emotional abilities mature in ways that help us more deeply consider the needs and perspectives of others, think abstractly, and analyze more complex issues compared to when we’re younger. These changes prepare us to develop the skills we need to make good decisions and navigate our emotions. And like every skill, we need opportunities to practice in real-world situations and to make and learn from mistakes.
Research on adolescent development highlights the ways that youth build the necessary skills to make good decisions and navigate challenging emotions and how adults can help.
Some of the most significant changes to the brain during adolescence affect the networks involved in processing emotions and guiding behavior. The amygdala—the part of the brain involved in processing and recognizing emotion—is highly sensitive to social cues during adolescence, helping us adapt to the nuances of social contexts in ways that help prepare us for the complexities of the adult world. This increased sensitivity, combined with the fact that we’re having many intense experiences for the first time (like falling in love or going through a breakup), contribute to emotions that can be more intensely expressed compared to adults.
Our heightened sensitivity to emotions associated with peer acceptance or rejection can influence our decision making during adolescence. On the one hand, we’re more likely to make risky decisions when we’re in situations that are emotionally charged, particularly in the presence of peers, which can sometimes be unhealthy. On the other hand, our friends can also motivate us to do good and to make prosocial choices—choices intended to benefit others—like sticking up for a friend.
Development during adolescence also increases our capability to navigate emotions, plan for the future to achieve a goal, and solve problems. Throughout adolescence, we build the cognitive and emotional abilities to consider the needs and perspectives of others and to assess complex issues. Given the time and space to deliberately weigh different options, many adolescents are capable of reasoning as well as adults when making decisions.
We build our emotional regulation and decision-making skills through real-world opportunities to practice and to learn from the outcomes. Experiences such as finding healthy ways to cope with disappointment and making choices about personal aspects of our lives help us learn how to respond during emotional situations and make smart decisions.
Programs and interventions that help us build emotion-regulation skills and reduce impulsive decision making can support us during this dynamic window of growth and learning. Learning to recognize emotions and adapt emotional responses in a way that is appropriate to the situation can be an important step in promoting healthy decision making.
➢ As adolescents build their decision-making skills, supportive adults should provide them with opportunities for increasing agency in decisions that impact their lives. This increased agency can occur in the many contexts of adolescents’ lives—at home with family, in school, at extracurricular activities, and in the community.
➢ When provided with the relevant information and time to consider the options, young people have the ability to make rational, well-reasoned decisions about their well-being. Adults who support adolescents faced with particularly consequential decisions, such as social workers, attorneys, and health care providers, should ensure young people have the time and information necessary to weigh their options.
➢ The natural inclination to evaluate and learn during adolescence makes it an ideal time to engage young people as partners in policy and program development and evaluation. When done well, youth engagement provides adolescents with skills and opportunities that align with the unique developmental needs of this stage of life.
This roundup provides an overview of the new research into adolescent development, including how neighborhoods affect sleep, the link between prosocial behavior and school performance, the role of location in racial discrimination, and the impact of specific types of adversity on brain development.
In this Research Roundup, we provide an overview of recent research about adolescent development that highlights how neighborhoods affect sleep, the link between prosocial behavior and school performance, the differences in perceived racial discrimination across locations in the United States, and the impact of specific types of adversity on adolescent brain development.
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- The impact of neighborhood disadvantage on sleep changes between childhood and adolescence
- The link between helping behaviors and school performance during adolescence across cultures
- Effects of location on adolescents’ experiences of racial discrimination in the United States
- The effects of different types of adverse childhood experiences on adolescent brain development
The impact of neighborhood disadvantage on sleep changes between childhood and adolescence
(Sleep Health, May 2025)
Sufficient and restful sleep is essential to healthy adolescent development. Research has found that people who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods sleep less and experience more sleep disturbances on average. However, few studies have examined whether these associations between neighborhood disadvantage and sleep change between childhood and adolescence. In this study, Thomas Fuller-Rowell and colleagues investigated the relationship between neighborhood economic disadvantage and sleep in childhood and adolescence. The researchers examined the sleep patterns of 339 youth during childhood (average age about 10 years old) and again in a subset of 167 of the same youth when they were adolescents (average age just over 17 years old). At each timepoint, participants wore wrist monitors for seven consecutive nights. Researchers found that sleep patterns changed between childhood and adolescence: Participants slept fewer hours in adolescence, but also had more efficient sleep compared to when they were younger—meaning that they spent more time actually sleeping between falling asleep and waking with fewer “long wake episodes” in which they were awake for five minutes or longer in the night.
However, the sleep quality of youth residing in neighborhoods with greater socioeconomic disadvantage improved less as they got older compared to youth in neighborhoods with more resources. Researchers also found racial disparities in these patterns–Black children who lived in highly economically disadvantaged neighborhoods experienced less decrease in long-wake episodes between childhood and adolescence. Together, these findings highlight how childhood neighborhoods and racial inequities may shape sleep outcomes as youth progress from childhood to adolescence.
Why this is important: This research provides important insights into how sleep patterns change as youth transition from childhood into adolescence and also sheds light on how neighborhood disadvantage may impact adolescent sleep–which is critical to physical and mental health during this formative period of development.
The link between helping behaviors and school performance during adolescence across cultures
(Applied Developmental Science, May 2025)
Studies have found that prosocial behavior—voluntary actions intended to benefit other people, such as helping or sharing—is associated with a range of beneficial outcomes during adolescence. In this study of 884 adolescents from six countries (Colombia, Italy, Jordan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States), Flavia Cirimele and colleagues examined associations between prosocial behavior and school performance over three time points, spanning from when participants were 10 to 16 years old. They found that youth who reported higher levels of prosocial behavior tended to perform better in school (averaged across reading, math, social studies, and science performance) across time. They also found that at time points when an adolescent reported being more prosocial than usual, they also performed better in school than usual. These effects remained after adjusting for differences in the socioeconomic status of their countries of residence. Together, these findings suggest that, across countries with diverse cultures and economic landscapes, prosocial behaviors and educational achievement are interrelated during adolescence.
Why this is important: By studying a large sample of adolescents from countries throughout the world, this research showcases a connection between prosocial behavior and school performance during adolescence across diverse cultural and national contexts. These patterns suggest that prosocial behaviors and academic achievement may benefit each other and support healthy development.
Effects of location on adolescents’ experiences of racial discrimination in the United States
(Journal of Adolescent Health, July 2025)
Research has found that youth experience increasing messaging about race as they enter adolescence and that young people are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of perceived racial discrimination during this stage. Using longitudinal data from over 4,000 youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, Christopher Fields and colleagues investigated how levels of perceived discrimination changed between the ages of 10 to 14 and examined whether these patterns differed based on neighborhood or state-level factors. At three time points, participants reported whether they had experienced discrimination or unfair treatment based on their race, ethnicity, or skin color in the past year. The researchers found that non-Hispanic Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and multiracial youth reported experiencing significantly increasing rates of discrimination over time, while non-Hispanic White and Native American youth reported that their experiences of discrimination decreased. Additionally, Hispanic youth with immigrant backgrounds reported experiencing more discrimination. Youth living in areas with highly segregated, economically disadvantaged Black households and in states with high anti-Black bias reported greater discrimination, suggesting that structural racism at neighborhood and state level in part shapes experiences of discrimination during adolescence.
Why this is important: We know that discrimination negatively impacts well-being during adolescence. By showing how perceived discrimination increases for young people across multiple racial groups throughout the United States, this work emphasizes the importance of efforts at the community and state levels to decrease adolescents’ experiences of discrimination.
The effects of different types of adverse childhood experiences on adolescent brain development
(Translational Psychiatry, May 2025)
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been found to have lasting effects on the brain. However, it is unclear how different types of adversity uniquely affect the developing brain. In this study, Yumeng Yang and colleagues examined how different forms of adversity related to brain development in a sample of 5,885 adolescents from the ABCD Study over four years, beginning when participants were between 9 and 10 years old. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers examined functional connectivity, the process by which different brain regions work together and communicate via networks in the brain. The researchers examined whether different forms of adversity predicted differences in how these networks developed during early adolescence. They looked at the effects of both interpersonal adversity (caregiving disruptions, caregiver mental health challenges, maltreatment, and interpersonal trauma) and socioeconomic adversity (low family socioeconomic status, community violence, neighborhood trauma, and neighborhood poverty). Adolescents who had experienced both categories of adversity–more unpredictable or disrupted caregiving, as well as living in high-poverty neighborhoods–showed accelerated development in brain networks that support emotion regulation and executive functioning. The earlier maturation of these networks was associated with decreased performance on cognitive tasks. Together, these findings suggest that the adolescent brain may adapt to stress by accelerating brain development in ways that can negatively affect aspects of cognition.
Why this matters: During adolescence, connections between regions of the brain mature rapidly, enabling our brains to work more efficiently as we develop and learn about the world around us. By demonstrating how adversity may alter this developmental process, this work provides further evidence that stable, supportive caregiving environments and resourced neighborhoods are essential for healthy adolescent brain development. Policies that support consistent and reliable caregiving and provide resources to disadvantaged neighborhoods may be especially effective in supporting adolescents who have experienced adversity.