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 itThe importance of near-missesWhy teens are drawn to horror films and pornographyHow hard-wired adolescent beh...