Understanding the teenage brain: how parents can avoid arguments and temper tantrums

The brain is the last human organ to develop fully, but only recently has science established that it isn’t fully grown until a person reaches about 30 years of age.

This helps to explain why behaviour during the teenage years – when an adolescent body is also exploding with hormonal changes – may sometimes be erratic, apparently unreasonable and often frustrating. The fact is their brains are trying to keep up with the rest of their bodies.

Philip Watkins, an Australian-trained, Hong Kong-based naturopath, with more than a decade of clinical practice treating clients of all ages, explains the cerebral changes during what has been called a time of “tinderbox emotions”.

The brain evolves both structurally and functionally during adolescence, he says. During this time, “synaptic pruning” occurs, a process in which connections in the brain that are used often are strengthened through repetition, and connections that aren’t used so much are weakened.

US-trained, Hong Kong-based clinical psychologist Dr Kimberley Carder elaborates: “During neurological pruning, the brain sheds unnecessary neural pathways and strengthens those which are important. Grey matter thins out and white matter takes over, starting from the back of the brain and finishing at the front.

“This process happens faster with girls than with boys. The parts of the brain that allow yourself to see something from someone else’s point of view are still being processed.”