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.
Early Adolescence: A Window of Opportunity for Educators to Support Positive Mental Health
Council Report | Education | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time | Digital Tech
This council report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence provides research-informed recommendations for middle-school and other early-adolescent educators to help promote mental health.
Early adolescence—roughly ages 10 to 13, or the middle school years—is a unique time in development. During these first few years of adolescence, young people experience accelerated physical changes related to puberty, rapid brain development, changes in self-image, and more intense peer relationships. These changes make young adolescents particularly sensitive to the relationships and experiences around them, creating a window of opportunity to support youth to build positive mental health.
Middle school educators can be a crucial first line in promoting each young person’s well-being. Teachers are not mental health professionals, but the time they spend with their students during this pivotal period of development puts them in a position to help youth build positive mental health and reduce the likelihood that mental health challenges become more severe over time.
This report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence offers recommendations and resources for educators to support students based on four key areas that are especially important to positive development during early adolescence:
Resources cited in this brief
For more information, visit the resources called out within this brief:
- Protecting Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2021
- Do School-Based Depression Prevention Programs Support Youth? Analyzing School-Based Interventions for Primary and Secondary Prevention of Depression, The HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice, College of Education, University of Oregon, 2023
- Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools: An Action Guide for School and District Leaders, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Adolescent and School Health, 2023
- Suicide: Blueprint for Youth Suicide Prevention, American Academy of Pediatrics, 2024
In this online panel discussion, report authors Jennifer Pfeifer, Leslie Leve, Rhonda Boyd, and Joanna Williams, discuss with sleep expert, Ariel A. Williamson, what the research says on how we can effectively promote positive mental health during early adolescence.
This spotlight explains the unique consequences to health and development that result from food insecurity in adolescence, and offers suggestions for using insights from the science of adolescent development to help ensure that adolescents get the reliable nutrition their developing bodies and minds need.
Adolescence is a period of remarkable growth and opportunity. During these years, from about 10 to 25, we are growing and maturing faster than at any point in our lives, second only to early childhood. This makes adolescence a critical window for physical, cognitive, and social development, when our experiences and environments can have a profound effect on our trajectories throughout adulthood.
One of our most basic needs throughout our lives, and particularly during adolescence, is reliable access to healthy food. Yet adolescents are more likely to face food insecurity than younger children, and face unique consequences from limited or uncertain access to food.
Food insecurity refers to limited access to nutritional food, but also to uncertain access, such as when the availability of food fluctuates from paycheck to paycheck or between the school year and school breaks.
Adolescents experience food insecurity both at home and on campus, and at higher rates than younger children.
Adolescents are more likely to experience food insecurity than younger children, and they face unique consequences from limited or uncertain access to food. Households with children ages 13 to 15 are more than twice as likely to be food insecure than those with children 4 or younger. Among families with both younger and older children, the adolescents are more likely to miss meals so that younger siblings have enough. Being away from home does not always help–nearly one-quarter of college students experience food insecurity as well.
For young people in this key developmental window, which spans the ages of about 10 through 25 years old, the consequences of food insecurity include more than hunger.
Lack of stable and adequate food during adolescence may have long term effects on physical, cognitive, and mental health.
Physical health
Physically, adolescence is a time of rapid growth and important brain development that requires more calories and nutrients than earlier in childhood. Malnutrition during this important period of growth can not only stunt adult height, but also shorten overall life expectancy. Research clearly shows food insecurity is associated with worse long-term health outcomes including greater risk for diabetes.
Cognitive development and mental health
The second decade of life is a sensitive period of brain development, similar to the first three years, particularly for socioemotional learning. Early adolescents, about 10 to 12 years old, who face food insecurity may have more trouble concentrating in school and may have lower high school math and English scores compared to youth who have more reliable access to food. Young people who face food insecurity during adolescence are also less likely to attend or complete college. Food insecurity in adolescence has also been linked to worse sleep quality, which has been shown to have a range of negative impacts on youth mental health. Even when controlling for family income, adolescents who experience food insecurity are about 2.3 times more likely to have depression and suicidal thoughts compared with their peers. These effects on mental health also harm academic performance in college.
Social Development
Adolescence is a time of increased sensitivity to social evaluation, and many young people feel embarrassed to be seen accessing charitable help or to be unable to participate in food-related social activities including holiday feasts, inviting friends over for meals, or dining out with peers. At the same time, their increasing empathy for others may leave them feeling responsible for solving this problem for their families by eating at friends’ houses, going without food to ensure that younger siblings have enough to eat, or sometimes turning to illegal routes to secure food.
There are long-term benefits to addressing food insecurity during adolescence, and young people are well-positioned to partner on solutions.
Although young people in this key developmental window face unique impacts from food insecurity, they also have the cognitive capabilities and drive to contribute to others that make them essential partners in tackling this problem for themselves and their families.
Following are three suggestions for using insights from the science of adolescent development to help ensure that adolescents get the reliable nutrition their developing bodies and minds need:
- Provide sufficient support for households to access enough food for healthful growth and development of all family members. The structure of food benefits or assistance programs should recognize the increased need for food to fuel the physical and cognitive growth of the adolescent years. Changes to benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), free and reduced-price school lunch programs, and Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) should weigh the long-term societal benefits of adequate nutrition during our adolescent years.
- Consider adolescent perspectives when planning food distribution. Youth need to feel comfortable accessing food, so distribution methods should be discreet (by ordering food online, for example). Young people receiving food assistance have suggested that locations that combine teen-friendly programming with food assistance can engage youth who don’t want to be seen going places solely for food.
- Engage adolescents in the solutions. Many adolescents are already acutely aware of food insecurity within their own families and among their peers, and actively work to solve this problem by helping acquire food for their families, sharing food with friends, and rationing their own food intake to support younger siblings. Around the country, young people are working on solutions, including mapping food sites through their tech clubs and working at urban farms to increase supply for local food banks. Including adolescents in the planning and execution of solutions to food insecurity will lead to more robust solutions for communities.
Consistent, reliable access to healthy food is a fundamental need for all of us, but is even more critical amidst the rapid growth and development of the adolescent years. Youth are not only uniquely affected by food insecurity, they are uniquely capable of being an essential part of any successful solution.
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of NSCA member Linda Wilbrecht, PhD, in highlighting the research and shaping the insights in this science spotlight.