Ep 103: How Risk-Taking is Hardwired in Adolescent Brains

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, authors of the new
book Wildhood (and bestseller Zoobiquity), explain the four needs
of every adolescent as they transition to healthy adults. Plus,
the surprising biology behind teen risk-taking behavior,
particularly in groups!


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Full show notes


Watching teens gobble down five plates of food, grow six inches
in one night and flock in groups to the mall as they attempt to
attract “mates” really makes you think...teens aren’t so
different from wild animals! And just like wild animals, our
teenagers are up against quite a bit as they begin setting out on
their own in the world. They’ll need to know how to protect
themselves from danger, how to socialize with others, how to
develop effective sexual communication, and how to provide for
themselves as they become independent adults.


We can’t protect our teens from the force of nature forever...so
how can we prepare them to master the art of survival? Amazingly,
there’s a lot we can learn about priming out teens for adult life
from studying the patterns of adolescent wild animals. Whether
it’s uncovering connections between the ways animals and humans
both learn to avoid danger, or finding similarities in
reproductive patterns across species, our guests today are here
to shine light on how wild animals can teach us all about teenage
behavior.


My conversation today is with Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and
Kathryn Bowers. They’ve been researching animal science together
for the past ten years—and they’re also both mothers of young
adults. Investigating the behaviors of wild animals while
simultaneously wrangling teens at home caused them to identify
similarities between teen adolescence and animal adolescence.
Their book, Wildhood: The Astounding Connections Between Human
and Animal Adolescents, discusses how we can use research on
animals to help our teens grow up safe, confident, and
independent.


The key according to Barbara and Kathryn is getting your
adolescents’ four main needs met.


How Teens Learn to “Sense” Danger


When it comes to talking about safety, you as a parent may know
the difficulty of drawing boundaries for your child. You want to
shelter them from danger, but you don’t want to overdo it,
leaving them totally helpless when they enter adult life.


Kathryn and Barbara elaborate on this idea by explaining how it
plays out among fish, specifically salmon. Salmon that are raised
in the wild are much more equipped to defend themselves against
predators than those who are sheltered and raised in captivity.
Wild salmon naturally form a network with others, creating a
“school.” By using safety in numbers, they’re able to defend
themselves against predators.


Those raised in captivity, however, are unable to form those
connections to other fish, and are simply unaware of the danger
of predators. When they were released into the wild, they are
immediately snatched up by predatory fish–so much so that the
predators often wait by where captive fish are released, ready to
pounce as soon as one swims by!


Barbara and Kathryn warn that while of course it’s a good idea to
protect your child as they grow up, it’s not always the
healthiest to shelter them too much. In the episode, we talk all
about how you can walk this line–keeping kids safe while also
ensuring that they are aware of how intimidating real life can
be.


Teenagers are Stressed about Status


Another similarity between creatures in the wild and the teens in
our homes is that both tend to have a preoccupation with
status...that is, they want to fit in with the flock, sometimes
even become the leaders of the pack! As a parent, you might
struggle with guiding your teen through their sudden obsession
with popularity and the opinions of their peers.


The best explanation for why your teen is consumed by the idea of
status is because, like wild animals, their brain is in survival
mode. In the animal kingdom, status is deeply linked to who gets
the access to the most resources, mates, and protection. That’s
why status is so important to teens; as their survival instincts
are developing, so is their need for a high status.


This is why they can become so distraught when it feels like they
don’t fit in. When someone leaves a mean comment on their
Instagram page, it doesn’t just hurt a little, it causes a
disruption to their brain’s perception of their chances of
survival.


In the episode, Kathryn and Barbara emphasize how important it is
that we be gentle with teenagers as they navigate the social
order of teenagerhood. Although hurt feelings may seem
insignificant or small, there’s a lot more to it than you might
think. We talk in depth about how to approach a teenager who’s
feeling a sudden loss in status, and how to remind them that it’s
not life or death, even if it may feel that way.


Pushing Teens Out of the Nest


After we help our teens learn how to move through the world
safely and survive the ups and downs of status, it’s time for us
to step back and let them figure it all out on their own...right?
We don’t want them to be overly coddled, living at home until
they’re thirty!


We hope that kids will be able to adapt and develop the skills to
get by without us. That’s why we can sometimes be bothered by the
possibility that teens will stick around longer than we might
expect.


You might be familiar with the image of a young bird being pushed
out of its nest by its mother, so it can spread its wings and
learn to fly. It’s often used as an analogy for parents
pressuring young adults to learn to make it on their own, in
order to keep them from becoming too reliant on having parents to
take care of them.


However, Barbara and Kathryn are here to tell you that in several
different species of birds, older offspring stick around to help
parents take care of the younger ones. In some cases, birds leave
the nest of their parents for a period and experience
independence, but come back for what’s called “extended parental
care.”


Although it may feel unnatural or uncomfortable for teens to take
a little bit longer to leave the nest, humans are not the only
species that exhibits this behavior. It’s totally normal for
young adults to take a little extra time to figure things out.


In the episode, we chat about how every teen, just like every
species, is different. When it comes to watching teens grow and
change, there is no normal! What Barbara and Kathryn want to
remind us is that the animal kingdom is full of diversity and
variation, and so are our teens. No one teenager is going to be
the same, and there’s no script for how to be the perfect parent.


In the Episode…


In addition to these topics, Kathryn, Barbara and I discuss all
kinds of ways studying the animal kingdom can help us
contextualize the struggles our own teenagers are facing. By
looking at animal science as a basis for human behavior, we can
find ways to to start conversations about important things like
sexual communication, maturity, social adjustment, etc. We cover:


Why teens of all species are bad at assessing risk...and what
to do mitigate it

The importance of near-misses

Why t...