The Wall Street Journal posed a question that parents have been asking themselves forever that you can read here http://on.wsj.com/yq8Nc3. It appears that scientists, educators, politicians have finally noticed that there is - as the Journal puts it - a  lot of teenage weirdness going on.

Why does an 18-year old brainiac leave for Boston College holding a $200,000 scholarship only to start dealing cocaine three months later, wind up arrested, convicted and is now doing time in prison? Why does a girl brought up by loving parents run away at fifteen to live on the streets for six years?

I personally know the parents of these children. The actions of their children not only devastated them, but mystified them. How could this happen to their family?

I’ve studied and written quite a lot about how teenagers are arriving at adulthood unprepared, uneducated and untrained to succeed in a world where mom and dad can’t pay for their mistakes - like an arrest for dealing drugs - or their wildest dreams - like a fully funded year in New York City to break into acting. But I think the answer is that kids are unprepared for the teenage years as well.

So are teenagers today simply dumber than the teens of yesteryear.?Well no, not really. In many ways, they’re smarter. Certain I.Q.’s have grown over the last fifty years and as young adults spend more time sequestered in school, they are learning more . . . sort of. They are learning more about chemistry and art history and how to design websites. But they’re not actually practicing being an adult. By staying in school longer, with no responsibilities other than to make decent enough grades to justify wiping out their parents’ 401K, their frontal lobe development is being delayed, and the front lobe is what turns hormone fueled teenage behavior into adult behavior. Delayed front lobe behavior is why a scholarly teen becomes a drug dealer. Why a loving daughter seeks to become a runaway.

What’s missing today are parents channeling their kids into thinking, acting and reacting like adults beginning at a young age. Instead of sheltering our kids, we need to encourage them to get jobs. (And if that fails, make them get a job.) We need to let them taste responsibility, experience consequences of failure, learn from their mistakes. We need to reinforce the fact that TV is make believe, you can’t afford to live in a penthouse apartment at 22, you can’t be sexually irresponsible without making a baby, you’re not going to get a gold star for just showing up to work on time.

Handing a driver’s license to a newly minted sixteen year old is like handing one to a two year old if she hasn’t been gradually taught over time how to drive, to stop at red lights, slow down in the rain, drive in low gear in the snow and that kind of learning takes time. Parental time. And simply raising the drive age won’t change a thing if the eighteen-year old has never driven before.

The bottom line is, as it always is, the problem with the teenage brain is usually the adult parents.  We shouldn’t be making their life easier, we should be doing everything to prepare them for the adult world that waits.

Teens will always make dumb decisions. But the more we prepare them for the adult world, the odds are great that they won’t be making the same dumb decisions as starter adults.