// posted March 12, 2007 by Lou Schuler

I had a bit of a dust-up this weekend with my eight-year-old daughter. She was convinced a neighbor boy had stolen one of our balls, and she was probably right; another neighbor gave us a bucket of softballs last year, and chances are good the boy thought he could get away with swiping one, since we have so many. The problem is that there was no way to prove the softball he had came from our cache, and the kid's father and other adults were in the vicinity and presumably would've intervened if they'd thought a crime had been committed.

My wife and I both told her to let it go, but she couldn't. Her last words to me, before we got into the house and my expressions of dismay over her behavior melted tile grout in multiple rooms, were that I'm "a lousy excuse for a parent." I should note that she said this loud enough for the aforementioned adults to hear.

If that's a sample of what we're in for when she hits her teen years, we're doomed:

Scientists have found that the mechanism normally used by the brain to calm itself down in stressful situations seems to work in the opposite way in teenagers, making them even more anxious.


When the brain senses a stressful situation, it reacts by switching on receptors, using a range of chemicals, including a steroid called THP. In an adult or even a younger individual, THP would reduce anxiety. But in experiments on adolescent mice, THP increased anxiety.


The experiments, by Sheryl Smith, a physiologist at the State University of New York, offer the first physiological explanation for adolescent mood swings. Previous work has focused on analysing behavioural changes in teenagers during adolescence. Her results are published today in Nature Neuroscience.


In teenagers, the behavioural response to the increased anxiety due to THP would result in even more acute stress, said Prof Smith. How individuals reacted would depend on their personality -- where some people might cry, others would get angry.

And we still have five years to go before she's officially a teen. Looks like Daddy's going to be drinking early and often.

Tags: Mental Health