Understanding your teenager’s brain
- Preteen to teenager
- English
- Modules
- Voiceover
- Course Modules
1.1 What is this course about?
1.2 How to work through the course
1.3 A few more instructions
1.4 What changes have you noticed?
1.5 Every cloud has a silver lining
2.1 How do we know about the teenage brain?
2.2 The main changes
2.3 The prefrontal cortex
2.4 The amygdala
3.1 The amygdala and reading faces
3.2 Knowing what you are feeling
3.3 The experiment
3.4 About the results
3.5 What could this mean?
3.6 What can you do to help?
3.7 Some more ideas
4.1 Risk and brain development
4.2 Risks: the positive and the negative
4.3 The accelerator and the brake
4.4 So, who has to be the brake?
5.1 Risk and friends
5.2 An experiment
5.3 The results
5.4 More results
5.5 How does the brain affect risk taking?
5.6 Teenagers and gangs
5.7 How can you help?
6.1 Teenagers and their friends
6.2 Research
6.3 An experiment
6.4 Teenagers' reactions
6.5 Why does this happen?
6.6 What can help?
7.1 Teenagers and their sleep
7.2 Change in teenagers sleep pattern
7.3 Why do teenagers' need their sleep?
7.4 The growth hormone and the sleep hormone
7.5 Changing to an adult pattern
7.6 What can help?
7.7 Sleep and emotions
8.1 The positives
8.2 Eventually
8.3 And finally
9.1 Feedback and certificate
About this course
Adolescence is the second most rapid period of brain development after the first few years of life. Teenage brains are reshaped in this period, and hormonal and developmental changes have a natural impact on how young people feel about their world as well as how they express themselves.
Understanding your teenager’s brain can help you to understand and read their behaviours and how you might best support them in this critical period. The relationship you share remains one of the most important for nurturing their wellbeing and helping them to thrive as kind, sociable and resilient people throughout their lives.
You might be recognising that your child is increasingly sensitive, expressing strong emotions, sleeping differently, and you might feel your relationship is changing. You are not alone. This course will explain some of the major changes children experience as they go through their teenage years and help you to understand their emotional wellbeing as well as their changing emotional support needs.
Understanding your teenager’s brain
Understanding your teenager’s brain has been developed by a team of Clinical Psychologists, Child Psychotherapists, Health Visitors, Child and Family Practitioners and, importantly, parents. Everything you will follow and learn in the course has been informed by experience and is designed to be practical, to help you and your family in your everyday interactions.
The course follows 9 Modules, each taking around 20 minutes and broken up into manageable chunks called Units.
The first few Modules cover some simple principles about brain development as well as some ways of thinking about emotional health and concepts that will help shape the approaches and ideas around the later sections, so this means it needs to be followed in order, one Module at a time. You don’t need to do it all in one go, and our advice is to take breaks and spread out your learning.
We know that there are many different families, with different backgrounds, shapes and sizes. We have tried to consider some of the different needs of families in this course, but it hasn’t been possible to account for all backgrounds. If your personal situation isn’t reflected, we still hope that you find something helpful in the main ideas about developing close, connected relationships between parents and children and welcome your feedback to improve its relevance.