Teens will be teens: the latest brain research has a lot to say about adolescent behavior.(Teen Talk)

MOST ADULTS ARE CHALLENGED WHEN IT COMES TO UNDERSTANDING teens' motives. "What were they thinking of?" is an all-too-common response. Without a doubt, no developmental period in our lives is more confounding and baffling than adolescence.

Until recently we blamed erratic teen behavior on raging hormones, but scientific research in the last decade has revealed that it's not hormones, but the brain itself that is tire culprit. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, and the author of the first long-term study of the adolescent brain, used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 145 teens over two-year intervals. …