UCLA CDA Co-Executive Director Andrew Fuligni and Policy and Practice Director Elise Brumbach explain how insights from developmental science could help schools promote attendance and engagement for middle and high school students.
Leveraging the Opportunity of Adolescence to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism
Leveraging the Opportunity of Adolescence to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism
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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.
Four Key Insights to Promote Positive Mental Health During Adolescence
Science Spotlight | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Foster Care | Juvenile Justice
This spotlight presents four key insights from developmental science that suggest ways that adults can help young people build positive mental health.
As a result of decades of research into adolescent brain and social development, we know what helps adolescents build positive mental health. There is ample evidence that certain experiences and relationships support adolescents’ well-being. Adults can have a positive impact on young people’s lives by putting in place policies, programs, and practices to support their development during the important years between childhood and adulthood.
We can help more of our young people build positive mental health by drawing on these four key insights from developmental science:
Studies indicate that mental health during adolescence is particularly sensitive to sleep. There is a consistent link between sleep problems and most of the psychiatric disorders that are evident during this period, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression. What’s more, recent studies in U.S. students aged 14 to 18 have shown both declines in mental health and reductions in the amount of sleep, although it is hard to show a causal link between the two.
While individual youth differ in the amount of sleep they need, most adolescents need between eight to 10 hours per night. Younger adolescents and those already experiencing mental health issues may require more sleep than the average.
Research (mainly in adults) has shown that regular, sufficient sleep is connected to learning and emotional regulation. For example, sleep-deprived people are more likely to have lapses in attention, deficits in memory, and slower learning in some situations than are control groups. Sleep deprivation also affects the reactivity of certain brain regions in response to experiences, which can lead to greater emotional response to stressors and an increased tendency toward risky behavior.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Schools, employers, and youth-serving programs should structure schedules to help adolescents prioritize healthy sleep. This could include delaying school start times, limiting the hours that adolescents can work or drive on school nights, or avoiding early-morning or late-evening meetings or practice times.
➢ College admissions processes, secondary schools, and youth-serving programs should set realistic expectations of adolescents so that pressures to excel academically or build an extracurricular resume do not infringe on young people’s ability to get healthy sleep.
➢ Policymakers should fund programs that support family and caregivers’ ability to identify and promote healthy sleep habits in the home, such as quiet times before bed or limitations on technology use at night.
Exploration and risk taking are an important part of healthy development during adolescence. Numerous studies indicate that brain development during adolescence supports a crucial period of learning and discovery that appropriately entails more risk taking than earlier or later periods in our development. Our brain releases more dopamine during adolescence than during childhood or adulthood, so our reward system is more responsive to new experiences during these years than at any other time in our lives. Experimental studies from developmental psychology provide additional evidence that adolescents are more tolerant of uncertainty than adults and are also more likely than adults or younger children to actively explore new solutions when learning to perform a new task.
School-based extracurricular activities, special-interest clubs, sports, or community-based activities such as volunteering can all provide adolescents with healthy outlets for self-directed exploration. But to have the greatest impact, programs must be designed thoughtfully. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis showed,, that community service positively affected a range of measures in young people aged 12 to 20, including participants’ thoughts about themselves and their level of motivation in school. But this happened only if participants were also given an opportunity to process their experiences, such as through keeping a journal or in group discussions.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Secondary schools and college admissions processes should encourage adolescents to take academic risks. For example, high schools could provide broad access to advanced classes and new subjects for all interested students and college admission offices could value earnest attempts at challenging coursework that may result in lower letter grades.
➢ Identify and eliminate racism and other forms of discrimination. In addition to other negative consequences for young people, such bias can result in young people from different backgrounds facing disparate consequences for taking risks that lead to mistakes. Recognize that racism and bias can cause adults to perceive Black and other minority youth as being more adult-like than their same-aged White peers.
➢ Fund and support an array of opportunities for youth to try new activities at school, at home, in the community, and in the digital world.
The network of areas in our brain that activates in social interactions matures rapidly during our adolescent years, deepening our understanding of the complex feelings, perspectives, and needs of other people. We become better able to determine who needs our help and what kind of help they might need.
Both survey work and experiments in developmental psychology show that adolescents become increasingly attuned to their position and role in the world as they age. This might manifest as a greater concern about their role among peers, or as an increased awareness of how factors such as ethnicity and economic background shape their standing in society. Adolescents also increasingly explore different ways to play a part in society through their jobs, families, and activities.
Work in behavioral psychology, contributing to others has been linked to adolescents having a greater sense of meaning and purpose—which can, in turn, promote better mental health, especially for youth from marginalized groups. Additionally, experimental interventions and surveys have shown that opportunities to contribute to others’ lives can have multiple effects on adolescent well-being. In a 2013 clinical trial, adolescents who spent two months volunteering with children aged 5 to 11 had lower levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 and cholesterol and were less likely to be overweight compared with a control group. Both body weight and biological markers of inflammation have been linked to depression and other mental health problems.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Provide opportunities for young people to make meaningful contributions to their social groups and communities. Programs that support youth to contribute can have positive effects on their mental and physical health and support their academic success.
➢ Policies and programs should address inequities in adolescents’ opportunities to make meaningful contributions.
➢ Families are typically the first context where youth can contribute to others through common household chores. Youth from many lower-income, ethnic-minority, and immigrant families play significant roles in helping their families, and these contributions should be recognized by colleges and employers.
➢ Time-intensive caregiving can sometimes be a source of stress that negatively impacts mental health. Schools can support caregiving youth by offering flexible course schedules, community service hours for caregiving, and training for teachers and counselors to support these youth. Learn more about how to support caregiving youth.
Data show that adolescents who have secure and supportive relationships with their parents or other carers have lower levels of depression and a stronger sense of identity than do those with insecure relationships. Caring, affectionate and validating parenting behaviors—collectively known as positive parenting—have also been linked to the maturation of certain brain regions that are associated with the regulation of emotions. Despite common misperceptions, empirical research shows that parenting is often a stronger determinant of adolescent health and well-being than peer relationships.
Many studies have shown that interventions to improve relationships in families, introduced by public-health and psychology researchers over the past three decades, can reduce the use of substances and improve mental health in youth. Other studies, largely from behavioral psychology and education research, have shown that relationships with caring adults outside the family home can also be important in shaping the lives of young people. Moreover, studies examining the importance of role models suggest that formal mentoring programs, such as those involving a young adult in the community spending time with an adolescent, can positively affect the mental health of youth.
Policy and Program Insights
➢ Fund policies and programs that seek to strengthen relationships in families. Studies show promising interventions may include providing educational tools to increase parental or caregiver involvement in adolescents’ daily lives or guidance on how to improve communication between adolescents and their caregivers.
➢ Natural mentors—caring adults from youths’ existing social circles—can help support healthy development. Sports, extracurricular activities, and faith- or community-based activities can help introduce youth to natural mentors.
➢ Formal mentoring seems to be particularly important for adolescents who lack stable home environments, such as those who experience homelessness or are in the foster care system.
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.