The Sample Life

So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They're parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they're sometimes moody, they're veryself-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after puberty was their level of embarrassment in front ofhim. So, he said, "Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I'd say, 'Hey, stop messing around and I'll sing your favorite song,' and instantly they'd stop messing aroundand he'd sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave.
So people often ask, "Well, isadolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we've invented recently in the West?" And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that soundvery similar to the descriptions we use today.
So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from "The Winter's Tale" where he describes adolescence as follows: "I would there were no age between ten andthree-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." (Laughter) He then goes on tosay, "Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?" (Laughter)

So almost 400 hundred years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescentsin a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today,
But today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
So for example,take risk-taking.
We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults,
and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're...