The Teenage Brain Quotes

“Well, no,” you have to say, “your brain is sometimes an explanation; it’s never an excuse.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes. This is the last part of the brain to develop, and that is why you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“It’s important to remember that even though their brains are learning at peak efficiency, much else is inefficient, including attention, self-discipline, task completion, and emotions. So the mantra “one thing at a time” is useful to repeat to yourself. Try not to overwhelm your teenagers with instructions.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that the ability to successfully switch attention among multiple tasks is still developing through the teenage years. So it may not come as a surprise to learn that of the nearly six thousand adolescents who die every year in automobile accidents, 87 percent die because of distracted driving.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Recent research shows that fear of losing their parents’ trust and respect is the greatest deterrent to adolescents’ drug use.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“obstacle to sleep that you should be aware of is the bright LED light of a computer screen, which should be turned off about an hour before bedtime to relax the overstimulated eyes and brain. In 2012 a study released by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, found that just a two-hour exposure to the self-luminous backlit displays of smartphones, computers, and other LED devices suppressed melatonin by about 22 percent.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Encourage your adolescents to make lists—such as what they need to take home from school in the afternoon in order to do homework, or what they need to accomplish before going to bed.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The most critical issue for teens is that THC disrupts the development of neural pathways.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“When rapid or binge drinking results in a blackout—a period of time for which the person cannot remember critical information or entire events—the hippocampal damage can be severe, impairing, in particular, a person’s ability to create new long-term memories.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“The more you learn, the more you need to sleep, it would seem.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Scientists have calculated that the average adolescent actually requires nine and a quarter hours of sleep. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adolescents get eight and a half hours to nine and a half hours of sleep a night.) Only about 15 percent of all American teenagers actually get that much on a regular basis. Worse,”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“could sit my kids down and tell them, Look, you don’t believe me when I say that you’re being irrational or impulsive or overly sensitive, but let me tell you why it’s your brain’s “fault.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“There is solid data to show that your IQ can change during your teen years, more than anyone had ever expected. Between thirteen and seventeen years of age, one-third of people stay the same, one-third of people decrease their IQ, and a remarkable one-third of people actually significantly raise their IQ.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time—for instance, remembering to return a phone call when you get home from work. Researchers have found not only that prospective memory is very much associated with the frontal lobes but also that it continues to develop and become more efficient specifically between the ages of six and ten, and then again in the twenties. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development. The parietal lobes,”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Our best tool as they enter and move through their adolescent years is our ability to advise and explain, and also to be good role models.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“You have to stuff their minds with real stories, real consequences, and then you have to do it again—over dinner, after soccer practice, before music lessons, and, yes, even when they complain they’ve heard it all before.”
― Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

“Nuestra forma de afrontar la vida y enfrentarnos a sus retos supone para ellos una experiencia de aprendizaje, así que lo hemos de compartir con ellos pero sin abrumarles.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Hemos de ser siempre lo más positivos que podamos para dar fuerzas a nuestros adolescentes y ayudarles a que comprendan la maravilla de la edad que están viviendo, el tiempo de las oportunidades.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Comuniquémonos y relacionémonos con ellos: insistamos en lo positivo de la vida de nuestros adolescentes y animémosles a que intenten hacer cosas distintas y a que piensen las cosas de otro modo. Repitámosles que estamos para ayudarles cuando necesiten algún consejo.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Seamos tolerantes con los desvaríos de nuestros adolescentes, pero procuremos hablarles con calma de sus errores.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“La conclusión —y sé que, cuando uno tiene adolescentes en casa, pocas cosas se pueden concluir— es que los hijos han de crecer, desarrollarse y madurar solos. No lo podemos hacer por ellos. Espero que este libro haya ayudado al lector a entender que los adolescentes no son alienígenas, una especie procedente de otro planeta, sino que se encuentran en una fase decisiva de su desarrollo en la que todavía no está todo sincronizado, y cuanto mejor lo entendamos —y sepamos explicárselo—, más sosegado será ese período de su vida. Nuestros adolescentes nunca se mostrarán tranquilos y razonables, por supuesto, y habrá momentos en que nos llevarán al borde de un ataque de nervios. Ahí van, pues, algunas cosas que conviene que recordemos”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Lo más sorprendente de ese estudio fue el descubrimiento de que un solo día de consumo de cigarrillos durante la adolescencia puede desencadenar un estado depresivo en momentos posteriores de la madurez.6”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Recordémosles que el tabaco mancha los dientes, impregna de olor el cabello, la ropa y el aliento, y probablemente les provocará tos crónica y agotamiento en la actividad física. Asimismo, hablémosles de algún amigo, familiar o famoso que tuvieran problemas graves de salud como consecuencia directa del tabaco.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“Los adolescentes son muy vulnerables al poder de la sugestión, y hoy, a través del ordenador, las sugestiones están al alcance de cualquiera.”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)

“El adolescente abandonado a su suerte con frecuencia accede a información inadecuada y hasta peligrosa en Internet”
― F.E. Jensen, El cerebro adolescente: Guía de una madre neurocientífica para educar adolescentes (NO FICCIÓN)