What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?

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Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later.

'What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash?

Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like?

What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?
If you think of the teenage brain as a car,today's adolescents acquire an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake. Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons the dr somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier. andeisthetage. A leading theory points to changes in energy baianuo: Children eat more and move less. At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hurdled yews ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic.