Why You Need To Know This About Your Child's Brain

Recent metro area news saddened and impacted a local school district when a 15-year-old boy allegedly accidentally shot his 14-year-old girlfriend and then ran off and shot himself. The girl survived. The boy is dead. Every school in the district followed up with gun safety lessons for each age group. It might prevent future horrors - and I hope it does. But it cannot change this tragedy.

A quick visit to his social media page shows a buffet of photos where the boy was either posing with a gun or acting as if he was holding a gun. Those pictures go back more than a year. He loved guns, and he apparently had relatively easy access to them.

Let's use Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, but in everyday language. If you have taken any psych class you have run into the four stages that get us from birth to mid-teens. The stages move from touching and sensing to doing and thinking. The kiddos are "doing" (concrete thinkers) from about 7 to 12 and then "thinking" (abstract thinking) from 12 on up. These stages do not follow chronological development, so a 13-year-old could easily be stuck as more of a concrete thinker. That's how old the boy was in the earlier photos. He was holding a gun, looking cool with no thought of the potential damage it could cause. Click - he was just looking cool at that moment.

If you add drugs or trauma into the mix, a child could feasibily be stuck at the development stage he was at while the chronological age marches on. I know someone now 55 who began doing drugs at age 13. Guess what his social media posts read like? Yep. An early teen still anxious to party on Friday and a fixation on demeaning photos of female anatomy.

The human brain does not even stop growing until the late 20's or early 30's. When you think about that, doesn't it make you wonder why we culturally normalize an 18-year-old-going off to war or a 21-year-old getting married? They have another decade of maturing to do yet we allow them to take on tremendous responsibility. I was a beginner adult when I married the first time at age 21. But in title only. I wasn't a woman and I wasn't mature. The next ten years of brain development and life experience put the icing on the cake of who I am today.

One of my teen clients recently had a baby. She's 15. Part of her is a teen wanting to use her cell phone and gossip. The other part of her pushed a baby out and talks about her weight loss. Technically she is a mother. She gave birth. The statistics and her trajectory indicate that sadly, she will not give life to this little baby. Both she and her mother ignored my suggestion to have the baby adopted in to a two-parent family that was craving children.

Many of my parent clients complain about their children "not listening" or "arguing" with them. Upon further dialog, I learn that the parent has expected adult thinking in the body of a 10-year-old. Time and time again, I remind them that their brains are not even capable of drawing the conclusiion the parent intended. They are literal and concrete. We need to cut them some slack while helping them learn to think on their own. Do you really want your college student calling you to ask how to do the laundry or how to load their backpack?

Even though our kids are concrete thinkers, it doesn't mean we can't coach them in drawing their own conclusions. Rather than tell kids what to do about something, ask them what they think should happen. Get them to process what is going on and to arrive at the answer without you spelling it out for them.

Examples:
1. It's cold outside and you are all going out. Instead of saying "Go get your coat" and not giving them the reasoning,  say "It's cold outside. We'll need coats." The older they get, you can merely state "It's cold" and they can determine if they prefer to be cold or warm.

2. Your kid is working on a presentation. Instead of telling them to say this and that, then more of that. Explain what an introduction is. Teach them how to identify main points. Show them how to wrap it up in a conclusion. You can just call it the begining, the middle and the end. Coach them in identifying what pieces of information should go where. Now you have not only helped them with one project, you have equiping them for the next ones.

3. You are showing your kid how to cook. At least you thought you were. Instead of telling them to pour the sugar into this measuring cup, teach them how to read the recipe and find the corresponding measruing cup from the set. Model the correct way to hold the spatula by showing how much more control there is when we hold it at a certain angle.

Less  talking, more doing.

Concrete thinkers will follow instructions just fine, but don't we want them to make good decisions  their own? It starts with the way we talk to our kids and what we expect from them. Just because you showed them once doesn't ensure they will do it that way again. They are learning how to think. Instead of saying "I told you that already!!" give them a cue.

You can't role-play enough safety scenarios as far as I'm concerned. They have to pre-think a plan so that they get out alive and know just what to do in case they are faced with a friend's bad decision. The day a friend shows them a gun to play with is not the day for them to wonder what to do.

Warning Signs

A friend of mine asked me if I would address the subject of teen suicide and it got me thinking about how we should not ignore warning signs. We are supposed to take behaviors and threats seriously and get help for the child. Sadly, sometimes we hear about the child who didn't display enough or long enough and they succeeded at their death attempt.

Does this mean we need to be on red alert? I think so. I remember standing in a theme park and looking away for a second. When I looked back our young son was gone. We found him unharmed 10 minutes later much farther away. We acted fast and had a plan. We worked together. I will never forget the sickening state  of alarm when I realized how quickly he could be gone. We ran into action.

If our child is doing something out of sync, we need to run into immediate action. Rather to err on the side of safety than ignorance leading to harm. It is how we handle it while it's happening that will make the difference. Rather than scream the entire way to have your kid drug tested, drive calmly. Rather than threaten or warn, act swiftly. Don't tell them you are going to take them to a counselor, take them. Their health and very lives are non-negotiable. Argue about the clean bedroom if you want, but not their safety. Make sure they know there are no secrets to keep if a friend has shared about abuse or suicide. Don't be afraid to call a friend's parent. There may be no next chance.

There's another kind of warning sign that can get ignored. It's the suicide that doesn't kill your child, it just ruins their life. I know of a family whose older child told them about the drugs the younger brother was doing in middle school. They did nothing. That kid began running away and stealing at age 15. They bailed him out and flew him home. The arrests and drug use went up, the older sibling kept telling the parents he needed treatment. The parents were afraid of what people would think, so they did nothing except hire better lawyers. When he beat his sibling and ran away again, the parents said nothing about the injury but worried that he might not ever come home.

Fast forward. They say that the age at which serious drug use begins is the emotional age the untreated person stays at. I've seen this truth unfold. There's an angry "man" out there who is emotionally just 13 years old who has led a life entirely focused on his own destructive pleasure. He is over 50 and counts the days til Friday like that middle schooler. He has been in and out of prison, treatment centers and probation. He lives steps ahead of the things that come after him and continually blames the world for his troubles. If he knew where any of his birth family was right now, he would have no qualms about harming them - perhaps fatally.

This lost life could have been prevented if the parents would have stepped into action and cared more about their son's well-being than what people would think. Those "people" have certainly had a lot worse to "think" now. Had the parents acted at the first warning, how different might things be for this entire family?

Sometimes the warning signs are as large and obvious as a fire. Sometimes they are that quiet gaze of a withdrawn second grader staring past you. Don't ignore them. Take note. Maybe it is just a stare, but you need to know the circumstances so find out. Don't be embarrassed to get help.

Don't be afraid to go down that hall and open the door or read your browser history. Just don't do it like a police dog and if you need to take action, make it CALM, swift and immediate. You may just save your entire family's lives.

Thinking Ahead

When I was in high school, the state I lived in legally allowed you to drink at the age of 18. Even though I was several years younger than my peers, I attended parties in their homes. Sometimes the parents were there, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes the parents even bought the keg. I am certain I was not the only illegal drinker. There were other things going on in back rooms or outside. I naively stayed near the largest group of people inside. I had read novels, so I could guess what was being smoked or otherwise inbibed.

I didn't go to that many parties, but one surely stands out in my memory. Two boys from one of my classes were really, really out of it. One of them I suspected accurately as having taken some illegal substances combined with booze and was really whacked. Slurring and stumbling, he decided that he just wanted to lay down and sleep. Alarmed, I forced him to go outside and walked him around the large yard. He was hard to hold up and was furiously insisting he just needed to sleep. I figured if he passed out he'd never wake up. So we kept limping around the yard til the other buddy relieved me and at my insistence, kept walking him around. At school on Monday, the first guy somberly thanked me for saving his life. I do not recall any adults noticing any of this.

My parents never knew about this incident, and had not prepared me for what to do. Even though I didn't know God at the time, he knew me and was acting in my life. And I just remembered there were times when people should not go to sleep.

The other day I heard that the three boys who raped an unconscious 15-year-old girl last fall at a party were finally arrested. It seems that there was a co-ed slumber party and sweet Audrie drank until she passed out. Then three different boys each took a turn with her while other classmates looked on and took pictures. Audrie did not know what had happened until she saw the pictures online a few days later. Her friends had turned against her and she believed her life was ruined. Within the week she had hanged herself. Ever since then, her parents have been putting the pieces together trying to learn why their bright, beautiful, loving girl with her whole life ahead of her would suddenly take her life. The arrests are a huge step in some form of justice. Her parents want her name and picture public so that others can see and learn and stop another such horror.

I cannot fathom the behavior in that room - from the boys commiting such acts with no conscience - to the audience so intrigued they felt justified to capture this depravity for more to see. If these acts would have had an odor, it would have been so dank and insidious the entire street would have needed to be evacuated. In my mind they all go to jail. The onlookers might not have touched Audrie, but to watch and do nothing is criminal. They could have stopped what the boys were doing! But no, being part of a crowd watching and enjoying the torture of another human being was more important at the time.

And... What parent hosts a slumber party for both sexes? What parent lets their child attend such a party? We don't know what Audrie's parents knew. But you have to think at the very least the host home knew a number of people were there. The media will probably never fill us in on this part of the story because the rest of the story is so sensational.

Forgetting the parents for a minute, what has become of people who will watch a horror, treating another human as a disposable commodity of no value? People who will keep their mouths shut out of self preservation?

One of the hallmarks of maturity is the ability to move from concrete to abstract thinking. By the time our teens hit the age of 18, we hope they can navigate life in a balanced manner. Part of getting them there is to teach them to think ahead about what they might do in unexpected circumstances.

My parents did not prepare me ahead of time for the situations that required more wisdom than I possessed. It would have helped even more. I began to prepare my kids once they were about 4 to be stranger-wary. We even practiced what to say if someone said they had a puppy in the car or they had a little child their age. Next came what to do if they were at a friend's house and the dad's gun was brought out or an unacceptable video game or video was shown. By 13, we added details about alchohol, prescription drugs and sexual actions. In addition, we hit the whole "crowd mentality" thing pretty hard. We wanted our kids to think ahead and devise a plan so that if the unforeseen happened, they had an idea of what they would do. Rather than have them overcome with bewilderment or fear, we wanted them to have some sort of predetermined opinion along with an escape plan.

Both of our kids were very uncomfortable with these later discussions and I can be very graphic. I wanted them alive and safe more than anything and I think some of the imagery helped warn them. They knew they could make us the "baddest guys" ever in order to get out of any situation. We always told them they could call at any time, and we would come and get them no questions asked til morning.

I have never come even close to what Audrie's parents have experienced, although in my years of coaching parents have heard some scary stories - but the kids lived. My heart breaks for any parent who walks through such horrors on any level because if the child lives, a part of them has died. And if they die, a part of the parents dies with them.

This is a wake up cry to teach the next generation what it means to have a moral compass and what that looks like in every situation. We can't pick and choose as if life is some de-personalized video game or we will stand for nothing. And then we'll be just like those empty teens in the room that horrible night. Doing nothing.