Teen annoyance is part of normal brain development, study shows

A landmark study published last month maps out brain development across the lifespan and shows neurodevelopmental milestones for the teen years.

As many mothers of young children are celebrated with homemade cards and sticky kisses for Mother’s Day, moms of teens may be wondering why their kids just seem irritated by their presence.

“My daughter is the best eye roller in the world. I think most things I do annoy her,” says Katherine Henderson, clinical psychologist in Ottawa.

She and other experts say that if this is happening in your home, it is normal and maybe even a sign of a healthy mother-child relationship. The science of teen brain development explains it too.

While it’s long been known that a teen’s brain is wired differently than a child’s or adult’s, a landmark study published last month maps out brain development across the lifespan and shows neurodevelopmental milestones for the teen years.

“It’s been pretty unknown, in a quantitative way, just how big the human brain is and how it generally varies across the population,” says Jakob Seidlitz, post-doctoral fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study in the journal Nature.

Based on more than 120,000 MRI scans and drawn from more than 100 studies and representing more than 100,000 people from before birth to 100 years of age, researchers mapped out human brain development across a lifespan.

The study showed that the teen years are a unique point in brain development, just as they are a unique time in physical, social and emotional development. In the same way a child’s weight, height and head circumference can be mapped across ages, now brain architecture can be too.

The brain begins to grow in utero, is approximately half its full size at birth and reaches its maximum size in mid-puberty. After this it gradually decreases in size over the rest of the lifespan.