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.
Young People Who Have Experienced Earlier Adversity Can Thrive with the Right Supports in Place During Adolescence
Science Spotlight | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Adversity, Bias, & Discrimination | Juvenile Justice
This spotlight summarizes the impacts of early adversity on development and the interventions during adolescence that can help youth thrive.
Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity and growth. Throughout our lives, our brain changes and adapts to new experiences, but there are periods of development when our brain is especially responsive to input from our experiences and our environment. Adolescence—from about age 10 to age 25—is one of these windows.
During our adolescent years, connections between regions in our brains are strengthened and streamlined in response to our experiences, becoming more efficient and effective to support the skills we need for adulthood. Research has shown that crucial brain systems such as the prefrontal cortex develop rapidly during adolescence, and effects of environmental factors on this development are amplified. This makes adolescence a critical period for cognitive and social development. It also makes the adolescent years an important period of opportunity when research-informed interventions can address the impact of earlier adversity.
The Impacts of Early Adversity
When we experience adversity—such as toxic stress, trauma, and neglect—early in life, the ways our brain and body adapt to these traumas can create steeper hills for us to climb toward positive behavioral development and healthy functioning in adolescence and adulthood.
Following are research-based insights about the impact of early adversity on adolescent development.
Altered development is an adaptive response to stressful environments
When we experience stress, our brain and body respond to prepare us to handle the stressor and its consequences. For example, if we lived in an unsafe environment as a child in which we were often exposed to significant threats, we might have a heightened attention and vigilance about potential threats, which could accelerate the maturing of neural emotion circuits in our brain. This vigilance could serve an adaptive purpose, by helping us protect ourselves and avoid danger. However, once we were no longer exposed to the stressful environment, these once adaptive changes could negatively impact our social, emotional, and cognitive functioning. Support through positive relationships and research-informed interventions can help us learn behaviors that would better serve our health and wellbeing.
As adults who want to support young people, we need to understand how early adversity affects development and apply evidence-based interventions and developmentally appropriate support to address these negative impacts and help these young people thrive.
Early adversity can impact behavioral development
- Young people who have experienced early adversity may struggle with regulating their emotions, which can manifest as heightened emotional reactivity and difficulties managing stress.
- Early adversity can also impact social relationships: the disruption of secure attachments in childhood may lead to difficulties maintaining positive relationships with peers and caregivers in adolescence.
- Early adversity can impact academic success by impacting young people’s ability to pay attention, remember information, plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, or follow multiple-step directions.
- Experiencing early adversity also increases the risk of behavioral issues such as aggression, impulsivity, and conduct disorders.
- Young people who have experienced adversity may face a higher risk of physical health problems such as heart disease and diabetes and may engage in more health risk behaviors such as violence and substance use.
- Early adversity is one of the strongest risk factors for developing mental health disorders in adolescence, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Early adversity has an impact on brain development
- The negative behavioral and health-related outcomes associated with early adversity appear to result from a cascade of intertwined changes in processes within the brain that regulate an individual’s response to threat and reward.
- Early adversity can affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—which helps control an individual’s physiological stress response and the release of the stress hormone cortisol.
- Early adversity has been linked to differences in the size and functioning of brain regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and striatum that are important for memory, emotion processing, and learning, as well as neural regulatory systems that are important for executive functioning (including the capacity to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions) and inhibitory control (the ability to suppress or redirect a thought, action, or feeling).
- Adversity may also affect the development of amygdala-prefrontal communication which can contribute to the behavioral and emotional problems often associated with experiencing trauma early in life.
These impacts on development can create steeper paths for youth who have faced earlier adversity. Adolescence offers a window when targeted support from adults could help these youth to navigate their way to a thriving adulthood.
Adolescence Presents a Critical Opportunity for Intervention
The adaptability of our brain to our experiences and relationships during adolescence make these years a time when targeted interventions may have significant impacts on brain and behavioral development, leading to long-term positive effects on development and life outcomes.
The effectiveness of an intervention can vary based on individual differences in trauma response, the nature of the adversity, and the quality of support and resources available to an individual. There are many forms of early adversity, so it is important to focus closely on the nature of the adversity a young person has experienced as well as the unique needs of a specific youth to design the most effective and targeted intervention strategy.
Successful interventions also require adequate resources and support to ensure that youth can access these resources. Programs that increase access to resources and build supportive environments for young people who have experienced adversity are crucial for reducing inequalities and supporting healthy brain and behavioral development for all young people. For example, state-level programs such as cash benefits for low-income families have been shown to mitigate the negative effects of low income on brain development and mental health.
Following are examples of interventions that may be effective for adolescents who experienced early life adversity.
➢ Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a therapeutic approach that focuses on identifying and changing negative thought patterns and behaviors. CBT can help youth who were exposed to trauma regulate their emotions and respond to stress. Trauma-focused CBT that is specifically tailored to address negative responses to childhood trauma and adversity have been shown to be especially effective for treating PTSD in youth who have experienced adversity.
➢ Mindfulness and meditation can be effective in adolescents who have experienced various forms of early adversity and have been shown to support cognitive abilities, mental and physical health, and academic performance. Meditation treatment can help improve attention and academic performance by strengthened communication between frontal brain systems in adolescents who experienced early childhood neglect. Such findings suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may impact adolescents’ regulatory neural systems.
➢ Reward-based therapies can be effective, because adolescents tend to show heightened sensitivity to rewards (including social, monetary, or even sweet-tasting rewards) that provide incentives for engaging in positive behaviors. Research shows that rewards—which can range from delicious food to fun or relaxing activities with friends—may help encourage adolescents to participate in treatment and seek out enjoyable and rewarding activities. Therapies focused on positive reinforcement may be especially effective for improving mood and reducing stress reactivity in vulnerable individuals.
➢ Safety signal learning helps adolescents learn to identify cues that a situation is safe and reduce the perception of threat, which counteracts the hyperarousal and hypervigilance that can develop following trauma exposure. Identifying safety signals can help youth regulate their emotions and decrease their physical and cognitive reactivity to stress when faced with stressors or trauma-related triggers. Safety signal learning may be effective even if other approaches, such as standard exposure therapy, are unsuccessful.
➢ Positive relationships with supportive adults and peers during adolescence are critical for promoting healthy emotional development after a young person has faced earlier adversity. These kinds of developmental relationships can occur through connections with peers, parents, or other caring adults such as teachers or coaches, and can nourish young people and support their healthy development and growth, like a root system supporting a tree.
Research suggests that adolescents who live in high-quality caregiving environments in which their emotional and physical needs are met experience lower levels of anxiety and depression and are better able to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions—even if they were originally raised in caregiving environments that did not meet their emotional or physical needs, such as institutions. Given the benefits of high-quality caregiving for adolescent resilience, therapies focusing on improving caregiver-adolescent relationships can be useful for promoting positive mental health outcomes in adolescence.
Peer relationships and friendships also play an important role in helping young people process and regulate their emotions. Group therapy sessions and peer support groups can be especially effective and help adolescents connect with other young people with similar lived experiences. Connecting with peers also helps foster a sense of belonging by providing social support and strengthening social networks.
➢ Psychoeducation can help adolescents feel a sense of agency over their situation by providing information about how their experiences may have impacted their brain and behavior. Learning about the effects of early experiences can help empower youth to understand more about themselves and seek appropriate support. Combining psychoeducation with interventions that promote self-awareness, self-esteem, and a positive self-concept can counteract effects of early adversity and promote a positive sense of identity. Interventions that target growth mindset—or the belief that personal characteristics are changeable—may be especially impactful for successfully improving academic performance and mental health.
Similarly, recognizing and uplifting an adolescent’s cultural background can help build a positive
➢ Academic support such as tutoring and educational programs can help young people exposed to adversity catch up academically and develop a sense of self-efficacy if they have experienced negative impacts on academic and cognitive functioning.
➢ Extracurricular activities, hobbies, and/or volunteering are also promising avenues for helping adolescents develop a
A Developmental Path to Policy and Programs
Science Spotlight | Education | Mental Health | Foster Care | Adversity, Bias, & Discrimination | Juvenile Justice
This spotlight offers examples of policies and programs that take a research-informed, developmental approach to supporting adolescents.
Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity, both for young people, who are learning and growing rapidly during these years, and for our broader society as we choose how to support young people on their path to adulthood. By aligning policies and programs with insights from developmental science, policymakers and youth-serving organizations can find ways to more effectively meet the distinct needs of adolescents and support youth to become healthy, thriving adults who can contribute to their families, communities, and the wider world.
In the last several decades, research on adolescent development has dramatically increased our understanding of how young people ages 10 to 25 develop psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Scientists with research expertise in neuroscience, psychology, biological sciences, sociology, education, and public health, among other disciplines, have contributed to our understanding of the core developmental needs of young people. Researchers, often in partnership with young people themselves, have also investigated how these needs might be met in settings that shape adolescents’ lives, such as school, home, the workplace, faith-based communities, and out-of-school activities. As a result of this work, we know more today than ever before about the types of experiences and relationships young people require during adolescence to advance toward healthy adulthood.
Understanding the developmental science of adolescence can help generate new ways of thinking about the challenges and opportunities our youth face and ultimately advance science-inspired solutions, systems, and support.
We offer below a few examples of policies and programs that draw inspiration from a developmental approach toward adolescence. In addition, the appendix included in the PDF highlights external clearinghouses that collect and assess evidence on existing programs and practices relevant to adolescents, which may be useful as you consider how to identify and support the core developmental needs of adolescents in your policy or program.
Young adult courts
Research suggests that young people ages 18 to 25 who have committed moderate criminal offenses experience worse life outcomes and higher rates of recidivism when they are formally processed in the criminal justice system–that is, when they proceed through a standard series of court appearances and resultant sanctions, such as time in detention. This suggests a misalignment between the treatment of these young people in the adult criminal system and their developmental needs and capacities as adolescents.
One approach that several jurisdictions in the United States have implemented in response to the needs of older adolescents is to establish “young adult courts.” For example, in partnership with developmental scientists from the University of California, Irvine, the Orange County Superior Court in California launched a pilot Young Adult Court in 2018. Young men ages 18 to 25 who proceed through the Young Adult Court receive intensive case management, supervision from officials who have received training regarding adolescent development and behavior, and resources to “strengthen their health and wellness, life skills and employment, housing, and education.”
Upon completion of a minimum 18-month, court-supervised program, a judge may dismiss or reduce a young person’s felony charge. Structured as a randomized controlled trial, the Young Adult Court in Orange County will allow researchers at the University of California, Irvine to investigate the relationship between participation in this court and young people’s short- and long-term outcomes across several areas, including health, behavior, education, and career.
Later school start times
In 2019, California passed legislation requiring non-rural middle and high schools to begin the school day no earlier than 8:00 and 8:30 a.m., respectively. During the legislative process, the bill’s author noted that this shift aligns with research about the importance of sleep during adolescence. Indeed, studies have shown that later school start times make a difference for young people. In 2016, the Seattle School District shifted its school start times from 7:50 to 8:45 a.m., and a before-and-after study found that rather than simply staying up later, students slept an average of 30+ minutes more at night. Other research links later school start times to improved moods, better class attendance, and fewer car crashes among 17- and 18-year-old drivers.
Extended foster care eligibility
The earliest design of the child welfare system in the United States responded to the needs of physically abused infants and toddlers and prioritized protection and caregiver permanency for young children. As a system, it was not aligned with the unique developmental needs of adolescents, who can increasingly exert agency in their own lives as they practice reasoned decision-making and who may look to a variety of supportive adults and peers to help build resilience and a positive sense of identity.
One notable example of adapting this youth-serving system to better align with our understanding of adolescent development is the series of major federal policy reforms in the last 25 years that noted and aimed to address the needs of older adolescents with foster care experience and paved the way for state-level action. In general, these reforms have expanded the opportunities for young people beyond the age of 18 to receive services and establish or deepen connections with supportive adults.
Today, in approximately 48 states, the District of Columbia, and American Samoa, young people may elect to remain in extended foster care past the age of 18 and receive supportive resources. Although extended foster care services vary by jurisdiction, they might include a range of resources that align with the capacities and needs of older adolescents as they learn to navigate life choices related to healthcare, housing, education, and employment with appropriate support from caring adults.
Treatment Foster Care Oregon
The Treatment Foster Care Oregon program is a research-informed alternative to placing youth with severe emotional or behavioral disorders in residential group care settings. First developed in 1983, Treatment Foster Care Oregon today offers separate programs for (defined by TFCO as 7 to 11, which encompasses early adolescence) and adolescence (defined by TFCO as 12 to 17) that prioritize family settings and effective parenting over approximately nine months.
The program involves weekly meetings for foster parents that teach positive parenting strategies, crisis support and respite care for foster parents, one-to-one mentorship for youth with a young adult to promote social skill building, and family and individual therapy for caregivers and youth. The program’s design explicitly takes into account the unique developmental needs of middle childhood and adolescence. In fact, the program’s effectiveness seems to be related to the support it provides for some important developmental needs of the adolescent years, including by tapping into youths’ need to find a respected place among peers and to maintain secure relationships with supportive adults.
In randomized control trials, this program has been shown to cut in half the arrest rate of both boys and girls. In addition, girls in the Treatment Foster Care Program experienced half the rate of depressive symptoms, a third less drug use in their early to mid-20s, and about half as many teen pregnancies.
Strong African American Families Program
Strong African American Families (SAAF) is a family-centered program for rural, Black families designed to strengthen early adolescents’ relationships with their caregivers and prevent unhealthy risk taking. The University of Georgia’s Center for Family Research created the program expressly to apply key research insights about healthy adolescent development, including the importance of developing a positive sense of self and racial identity as well as maintaining relationships with supportive adults.
While participating in SAAF, youth ages 10 to 14 and their caregivers attend weekly program sessions over a seven-week period. Through interactive games, discussions, and role playing activities, youth work through topics such as setting goals, developing their sense of identity, understanding their values, and handling peer pressure. Parents complete separate sessions focused on developing communication skills and discussing ways to support their children’s development. Adolescents and their parents also attend joint sessions focused on working together, staying connected, and supporting youths’ goals.
The program reduced risky sexual behavior, substance use, and behavioral problems, and increased positive racial identity. In addition, a recent analysis suggests that SAAF participation may reduce negative mental health effects in adolescents caused by experiencing racial discrimination.
Partnering with young people to design California HOPE accounts
Young people have the ability to make well-reasoned decisions about their well-being when given the time and information to consider their options. Including young people in the design of policies and programs that impact their lives can benefit both adolescents and their communities.
The approach taken by the California HOPE for Children Trust Account Program (the “HOPE Program”) is one example of intentionally engaging young people in the earliest stages of policy development. In 2022, the California legislature created the HOPE Program to provide financial trust accounts for youth from low-income families who lost a parent or guardian due to COVID-19 and young people who have spent at least 18 months in the foster care system. The legislature required a Board to oversee the program, advised by a working group of subject matter experts. These groups recognized “that the HOPE program could not be designed without significant direction from a set of youth who were most likely to be beneficiaries of the program.”
As a result, the groups sought assistance to assemble a Youth Panel of Experts. These 12 young people ages 15 to 21 had experiences that mirrored the qualifying criteria for a HOPE account and were compensated for their participation in the HOPE Program’s design. The HOPE Program’s 2024 report to the state legislature outlines an implementation plan for the program and other critical administrative choices that reflect the contributions and collaboration of the Youth Panel of Experts. The report also outlines an ongoing role for the Youth Panel of Experts, who will provide insights into future public outreach and educational materials for young people eligible for the program and their families.