The Primal Teen

I am reading The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids by Barbara Strauch. It is amazing, isn't it, that the government requires its citizens to learn a certain amount of math, civics, science, etc because that makes for good citizens, but it doesn't require you to learn anything to prepare to be a parent? So, I am educating myself.

Here is an excerpt:
p. 33
...[Teens] want to be adults and they're exposed to a semiadult culture. But they don't have the prefrontal cortex to regulate those adult behaviors; they drink and they drive without seatbelts, all of that."

"Or as Giedd puts it: "They have the passion and the strength but no brakes and they may not get good brakes until they are twenty-five."

More excerpts later