“Your brain is growing at a rapid rate during adolescence....

“Your brain is growing at a rapid rate during adolescence. There’s a lot of emotion, confusion, thrill seeking. It’s a time when you try a lot of things and make a lot of mistakes. We all went through it. But in this neighborhood, there’s not a lot of maneuverability. There’s not a lot of room for teens to make mistakes, and the mistakes have higher consequences. To make things worse, adolescence seems to be prolonged here. Many young people in the community view adolescence as a pinnacle, and not a stage. Girls become mothers at a young age. Fathers are absent, so young boys are forced to act like men. So what you have are adolescents who become authority figures, and spread the adolescent mindset through the community. Instead of thinking through a conflict, young men feel a social pressure to immediately react, so they don’t appear ‘soft’ or ‘weak.’ That’s one of the reasons I feel that mentorship programs are so important. They give adolescents a space to remain adolescents.”