My God, you’re here from Planet Boring

By Andrew McKenna

‘Dear Dr Michael, at times I think my son is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.’

This was in a letter Dr Michael Carr-Gregg received in one of his roles as Agony Uncle for various magazines. Dr Carr-Gregg was in Castlemaine last week giving a lecture with the topic ‘Demistifying Adolescence’, and he gave the packed hall at the Steiner School plenty to take away.

Dr Carr-Gregg has worked with adolescents for 25 years and is is one of Australia’s highest profile psychologists. He works  in private practice in Melbourne, and is a founding member of the National Centre Against Bullying. He is a columnist (or ‘Agony Uncle’) for  Girlfriend Magazine and Australian Doctor,  and is a regular on Radio 3AW.

‘The science of neural imagery tells us what’s happening in a teenager’s brain,’ he said in opening.

‘I couldn’t have given this talk ten years ago as the knowledge didn’t exist.’

And the knowledge that has been accumulated over the past ten years in the realm of adolescent brain development is extraordinary.

‘We used to think the brain was fully developed at fifteen when the skull stopped growing,’ he said.

‘Then everything changed. Magnetic Resonance Imaging was used over thirteen years to look into the brains of 1800 teenagers, and it was found that they only mature much later.

‘The pre-frontal cortex – the voice of reason – reaches maturity last. We now know it’s fully developed in girls at 23, but the male brain is not developed completely until age 29.

‘This explains emotional outbursts, risk taking. They weren’t thinking. They need guidance as their brains are not fully developed. They are unable to predict the outcomes of their actions.’

He referred to a ‘tattered cloak of immortality’ that a lot of teenagers seem to have around them, that they can’t foresee the results of their actions and hence the rule breaking, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

A 14-year-old boy has just undergone an 800 per cent increase in testosterone levels, so along the way blind hormones take the driver’s seat.

Cory Worthington, the young man who invited the world into his parents’ house and the world then proceeded to wreck it, was interviewed and asked ‘what were you thinking?’ His answer was, ‘well, I wasn’t really’. That’s precisely the point. They don’t and they can’t.

‘Adolescence has been redefined,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘It’s no longer 13-19, but more like 10-24. This extends the “period of vulnerability”. There’s a primacy of materialism in their lives, and a huge pressure on academia and careers.’

He described the role the hormone leptin plays in the teenager’s body. It’s the hormone responsible for secondary sexual characteristics, and is stored in fat, so larger kids – more fat cells – will mature physically more quickly.

Chemicals in the environment also mimic the actions of sex hormones. That ‘plasticky’ taste you get from a water bottle left in the sun sure enough is a plasticky taste, as the sun leeches some of the chemicals from the plastic into the water. Many man-made chemicals can mimic the actions of hormones in the body, or act as ‘endocrine disruptors’, messing with the body’s endocrine system, of the natural ebb and flow of hormones in the body.

More highly sexualised television plays a role in the early onset of adolescence, the sexualisation of children … he pointed to an ‘amalgam’ of reasons for the early onset rather than one simple reason. And he said he put himself out on a limb in speaking out against the photographs of Bill Henson. Henson recently defended his work in The Age, saying ‘our zeal to protect innocence should not come at the cost of violating artistic experience’. You can argue around that statement for ever, but Carr-Gregg has come down firmly on the side of innocence.

He quoted a longitudinal study in New Zealand, which demonstrated that puberty is delayed in girls with good relationships with their fathers. But all males emit pheromones, and those from an ‘alien’ male in a household bring on puberty earlier in girls. Think of the millions of ‘blended’ families in Australia and it’s not hard to see where semi-trailer loads of stray pheremones are coming from, and imagine they may be playing a role in early onset of female puberty.

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‘Storytelling has been hijacked by Hollywood,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘One in four British homes no longer have a dining room table.’
While brain research has shown adolescence may have become elongated, there is nevertheless also ‘developmental compression’ in teenagers and adolescents, which is bound to – and is – causing psychological problems.

He says the early onset of puberty short circuits childhood. Children are going straight from the Wiggles to Britney, which is like taking a cake out of the oven before it’s cooked. And if we think this is nothing to worry about, think again: our young people have record levels of depression, anxiety and eating disorders. Teen suicide is rampant. As a society we are off course. Carr-Gregg argues that the early adultification of children is just plain wrong.

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3 stages of adolescence:

He suggests there are three stages of adolescence.

In early adolescence kids are asking am I normal? They’re incredibly embarrassed about everything and need reassurance.

By early adolescence children are starting to look at their parents with adult eyes, and they may say ‘oh my God, you’re here from Planet Boring’.

In middle adolescence they’re asking who am I? This is the key question through adolescence.

‘Art, music dance, drama offer young people the opportunity for definition. The great enemy of young people is boredom, which is when they can engage in unhealthy risk taking.’

The family focus shifts to peer focus, but he says parents can remain firm: This is my house, these are my rules, they need to say. (Good luck! We tried it at home. Our early adolescent child laughed to scorn in our faces.)

‘Teenagers are the most sleep-deprived segment of the population,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘If kids come to school sleep deprived and haven’t had a proper breakfast, they can’t learn.  I may sound like my mother, ‘make sure they have a good breakfast’.’

Peers and islands of competence: The single most important factor with kids’ success at school is the teacher. Kids will work for teachers they love. But peer relationships are one of the strongest influences on young people, and you would hope your child is mixing with others already excelling in their own ‘islands of competence’, with flexible thinking, and who are not too judgmental. A high risk-taking group, particularly in early adolescence, can be damaging, and Dr Carr-Gregg argues that if necessary, parents must intervene.

See the sidebar for a little more on peers.

Carr-Gregg says young people need to explore and discover their ‘islands of competence’ – those things they do well, whether it be in sport, or art, or business or something else altogether.

‘Every child has a set of key inner strengths and our job is to help the child locate and consolidate those strengths and help them design their life to use them. Having meaning and being engaged in what they do.’

As if early and middle adolescence weren’t trying enough, he says late adolescence is also a time also of great uncertainty, but also a time for young people to find themselves.

Some kids go through an identity moratorium – postponing making that decision by travelling or doing voluntary work. Some are forced into ‘foreclosure’: being forced into something by their parents, which he says is disastrous.

In late adolescence kids are seeking individualisation by spurning adult control and support. They need a guide to nourish their individuality, they need to feel safe, loved and listened to. And by late adolescence the storm can be over.

No improvement in resilience

Over hundreds of years of material gains, and psychological, medical and technological advancement, Carr-Gregg argues that we haven’t improved young people’s resilience.

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘Is it cultural intangibles? Our focus on materialism? Under-fathering? Excessive individualism? The media?’

He says it is all of these.

‘Dr Leonard Sax talks about the toxic elements in society and pinpoints five: video games, teaching methods, prescription drugs, endocrine disruptors, and the devaluation of masculinity. While you could write a tome on each of those, my notes began to peter out and this is what I came up with.

Murders, murders and more murders – is this a joke?

‘Why would violence (in video games, films etc) not desensitise a young mind to violence?’

Turn on the television any night – and you may notice it more if you haven’t watched the box for a week or more – previews for shows coming up are about murders, murders and more murders. Is this a joke? How did we get to this stage in our society? Violence as entertainment saturates our media.

We’ve already read a little about endocrine disruptors.

The medical profession and drug companies are increasingly turning to the magic pill to save our kids (and us) from the mad society we have created, which is a little like handing out burn cream to someone who habitually presses their hand on a hotplate, and not counselling them to remove their hand.

Carr-Gregg said that 75 per cent of all mental illness starts before the age of 25, and fully one in five Australians have a mental health problem, half of which are never diagnosed.

Dr Carr-Gregg is pictured with Deb Wardle from the Castlemaine Steiner School

‘You should be the world expert in your child.  Keep an eye out for changes, and you have to act if something is wrong.’

‘As a parent you must observe your child’s self talk,’ he said.

‘The happiest kids are the ones with flexible thinking. The key is self talk, positive, optimistic thinking.

‘Parents need to be a mentor, not a mate.’

Resources:

Hanna Modra on the ABC website – Australian Story.

Mood GYM online behavioural cognitive therapy. Six modules your child can do online can change a child’s way of looking at the world. Similar is Reachout Central

Dr Carr-Gregg is the author of:

Princess Bitch Face Syndrome
Boys Adrift
Girls on the Edge
When to Really Worry

Go to his website