UCLA CDA Co-Executive Directors, Adriana Galván and Andrew Fuligni, spoke with PBS NewsHour’s William Brangham about why sleep is so important to youth mental health.
How Teenagers’ Lack of Sleep is Taking a Toll on Their Mental Health
How Teenagers’ Lack of Sleep is Taking a Toll on Their Mental Health
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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.
Providing Positive Pathways for Adolescents to Gain Respect
Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Juvenile Justice
This fact sheet provides insights from developmental science about our need to feel respected in adolescence, and how programs and interventions that meet this need can help support positive development.
Adolescence is a time of remarkable opportunity and growth. From about age 10 to age 25, our maturing brains and changing hormones increase our attention to social status and make positive attention feel more rewarding. These changes motivate us to tune into the social world in ways that help us learn skills to navigate adulthood.
Physical, cognitive, and social changes in adolescence combine to make us more sensitive to feelings of status and respect and to where we belong in our social worlds. This sensitivity is developmentally important. It motivates us to pay attention to our social environments in ways that help us learn to adapt to the more complex social demands of adulthood.
It also amplifies the impact of feeling disrespected, excluded, or given messages that we don’t belong—including through experiences of racism, bias, and other forms of discrimination or harassment.
As adolescents, we’re motivated to find a respected place and role among our peers. To ensure youth can channel this motivation in healthy directions, adults need to give young people ample positive pathways to gain respect and approval from the adults and peers around them.
At the beginning of puberty, around 10 to 13 years old, levels of testosterone increase in both boys and girls and heighten our attention to social status. Around the same time, maturational processes in the brain help us understand the perspectives of others in ways that build empathy, but also increase self-consciousness when we think we’re being socially evaluated. Feeling rewarded from positive attention appears to peak in adolescence, motivating us to find ways to earn approval from those around us.
Youth-serving programs that incorporate opportunities to earn respect and status appear to be more effective than others during our adolescent years. Relationships and environments that provide empathy, support, and positive pathways to earn status can improve academic motivation and increase the effectiveness of health interventions aimed at young people.
The flip side of our increased sensitivity to social reward is the pain of being disrespected or socially rejected. Research indicates that when we feel as though we are being excluded by peers, we report greater distress and show greater activity in a brain region associated with higher levels of depression in general.
Experiences that make us feel disrespected or treated as though we don’t belong thus become powerful social threats. The negative effects of racism, discrimination, and other forms of exclusion are amplified when we’re adolescents,—making efforts to eliminate or at least mitigate exposure to racism and bias for youth especially important.
➢ Preliminary evidence suggests that programs that support adolescents’ desire for autonomy and respect are more effective in delivering their messages. For example, one program found that when middle school students felt program facilitators listened to what they had to say and treated them like competent, independent individuals, they showed greater benefits from the program, including reduced number of suspensions and lower pregnancy rates.
➢ Incorporating respect for adolescents’ values and desire for social status into program messaging can be a way to boost program effectiveness. As one example, a healthy eating intervention for eighth graders that respected young people’s agency by replacing lectures with articles exposing deceptive marketing practices of food organizations and conveyed that higher-status (that is, older) students were choosing to eat healthier was effective in reducing unhealthy snacking—and the results persisted for boys even three months after the intervention.
➢ Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) programs can directly promote adolescents’ sense of agency and their feeling of being respected within their communities. In these programs, youth identify an issue within their school or community, collaborate with researchers to collect data, and use their findings to suggest potential solutions and advocate for change.
➢ Engaging youth as partners, rather than subjects, in policy and program development and evaluation must be undertaken thoughtfully to maximize the benefits that accrue to youth and to the resultant policy or program. Engaging youth as partners helps young people feel like they are being taken seriously and gives them a sense of ownership over developing, evaluating, or improving a policy or program. However, adolescents are keenly aware when their input is not being taken seriously. Therefore, it is essential that offices and organizations that wish to partner with youth prepare in advance to maximize the potential for effective youth engagement while minimizing the potential for tokenism and the reinforcement of youth-adult power imbalances.
- Learn more about how the science of adolescent development can inform practices when partnering with youth.
Key Developmental Needs of Adolescence
Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Juvenile Justice
This fact sheet gives a summary of six key developmental needs that research tells us are critical to healthy development during our adolescent years.
Research into adolescent development points to core developmental needs during our adolescent years. These key developmental needs of adolescence include:
Explore the world and test out new ideas and experiences
Heightened activity in the “reward center” of our brain during adolescence increases our motivation to try new things and explore the world, which help us discover who we are, expand our skills, and ultimately leave the familiarity of home. Policies and programs that provide opportunities for healthy risk taking help youth channel these tendencies in ways that support positive development.
Developing meaning and purpose through contribution
During adolescence, we’re increasingly able to support others in deeper, more meaningful ways than when we were younger. Experiences in which we make a positive difference help us develop a sense of meaning and purpose, which support wellbeing, academic success, and resilience. Policies and programs should ensure all young people have opportunities to contribute.
Build decision making and emotional regulation skills
Our cognitive and emotional abilities mature during adolescence in ways that help us develop new skills related to making good decisions and navigating our emotions. We continue to build these skills as we practice in real-world situations with support to make and learn from mistakes. Supportive adults should provide them with opportunities for increasing agency in decisions that impact their lives.
Support from Parents and Other Caring Adults
Secure and supportive relationships with caring adults when we’re adolescents are essential to our physical and mental health, helping us build resilience, develop a positive sense of self, and form a positive racial and ethnic identity. Programs and policies can help prioritize strong family bonds and provide mentors for youth.
Developing Values, Goals, & Identity
During adolescence, our relationships, experiences, and the messages we receive about our racial, gender, and other identities help us form a positive sense of identity and belonging. Policies and programs that provide opportunities to explore roles and activities can help youth discover what they value, who they are, and who they want to become.
Find a respected role among peers and adults
Changes in our brain and our social settings during adolescence increase our social awareness and motivate us to learn the skills we need for the more complex social demands of adulthood. These changes also amplify the impact of discrimination. Policies and programs can ensure that all young people have ample positive pathways to gain respect.
Get sufficient sleep to support mental and physical well-being
Extensive research shows that healthy development, learning, and positive mental health during our adolescent years all require healthy, restful sleep. Schools, employers, youth-serving programs, and youth-focused residential settings should prioritize providing young people with schedules and conditions that promote quality sleep.