What's Your Excuse?

• Author: Puterbaugm, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS

PERHAPS YOU HAVE HEARD about the debate in mental health and legal arenas regarding neurological understanding of the adolescent brain when rendering sentencing. It is an emotionally charged topic, as well as one that, if fairly considered, necessarily will be more fluid than our ponderously slow legislative systems can accommodate. When an 18-year-old has committed a heinous crime, a perfectly normal response is not to give a hoot about what the fMRI or some egg-headed researcher has to say about the immaturity of the brain. Yet, the adolescent brain, as those same researchers continue to discover, is undergoing tremendous reorganization.

We all know about reorganizing something complex. Let's take your garage. If you really were going to reorganize your garage, (for most people) it would require an extensive period during which the space looks even worse than when you started. New piles of stuff would be created, things would be torn down and put up, and you would spend a lot of time standing around with your hands on your hips feeling overwhelmed and, occasionally, kicking random items and wondering aloud what in the heck they even are.

Well, the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe and, when it goes through a major overhaul, it makes cleaning your garage look like picking up alphabet blocks. The point of all this musing on adolescence is to give us a framework to make sense of how befuddled and befuddling adolescents are and to provide some sort of explanation for a lot of supposed adult behavior.

Adolescents are beginning to think abstractly, in terms of concepts--not just material things. The adolescent begins to describe himself/herself in idealized terms--and simultaneously to realize that he or she is not doing so well in living up to his or her abstract, ideal, heroic self. Adolescents feel compelled to compare themselves to other people. They try to figure out where they are in the order of things; are they smarter/prettier/stronger/whateverer, than others? Less than other people? This requires being judgmental, which is one of those traits that adolescents definitely do not want to have. They have to grapple with being judgmental and yet being above such things. They cannot be the sort of person who would judge others. They have to be open-minded while they organize the people around them within their mental pigeonholes.

Adolescents want to achieve great things and their brains run interference For a while...