I’ve never bought macrobiotic cupcakes or hypoallergenic socks. Nor have I hired a tutor for pencil-holding deficiency, or put covers on the stove knobs, or used a leash on a toddler to be safe in a busy airport. At the grocery store, my kids are often in other aisles, but they’ve never felt lost. When they were babies, we weren’t scared to leave them with babysitters. Their preschool didn’t teach Mandarin, nor even worry about teaching them to read. Nor have I ever questioned a teacher about one of my children’s grades.

In fact, nobody I know has done these things. The only parents I know who are superprotective are parents who have to be—and it’s totally justified—because their child has Down’s or Asperger’s.

But like all of you, I still suspect these horror stories—while not representative of reality—shine a light on the unmistakable reality that we are not giving our kids anything like the freedom or independence we enjoyed as children when we were growing up. If we turned out fine, then why do we think our kids have to be raised so differently? This is the grand theme of Nancy Gibbs’s story on the cover of Time, “Can These Parents Be Saved?”

The problem with using these horror stories to make a point is that they’re not helpful in finding the right line between parenting and overparenting. Carl Honore’s book Under Pressure is also filled with bad-parent stories ripped from the newspapers. Obviously it’s wrong to sue a college because it did not admit your child. Obviously it’s wrong for a tennis dad to spike his son’s opponents’ water bottles with Temesta, a drowsiness drug. Obviously it’s wrong for Japanese 2-year-olds to enroll in cram schools.

As Gibbs admits deep into her article, having parents involved in children’s lives is exceptionally good for children. They get better grades, drink less, use fewer drugs, etc. Backing away completely is not the answer.

So the real question is, for regular parents—normal, involved parents who are not crazy, headline-worthy overprotective freaks—in what dimensions do we need to back off?

We think our book NurtureShock, and our column here, have already noted many areas where good parents are going too far. Here’s a summary of those points, in some cases with additional commentary:

• Praise them less, and help them develop accurate awareness of how well they’re doing—so don’t try to spin them into believing they’re better than they are.
  
  
• Protect their sleep hours fiercely.
  
  
• When young children hurt each other’s feelings, give them a chance to come back together on their own. You might not see apologies or overt repair, but scientists are learning that repair can be implicitly implied when kids end up side by side again.
  
  
• Choose schools that don’t assign too much homework (more than an hour in middle school is too much), and the schools will finally get the message.
  
  
• Protect play time, and as children mature, help make sure they still have outlets for fantasy.
  
  
• By the time a child is 11, don’t encourage or expect her to tell you everything. Some things need to be none of your business. Set a few rules and enforce them, but in other domains encourage independence and autonomy.
  
  
• Teens need opportunities to take good risks. They need more exposure to other adults, and even kids of other ages—and less exposure to teens exactly their age. They need part of their life to feel real, not just a dress rehearsal for college. They will mature more quickly if these elements are in their life.
  
  
• Colleges have gotten better. It’s harder today to get into the top 30 name-brand colleges, because so many kids apply, but the next 70 colleges are now just as good as the top 30 were when you went to college, and the next 100 are darn good too. Care about your child’s education, not the notoriety of the name printed on his college sweatshirt.
  

Every Tuesday, my 3rd grader has a spelling test for twenty new vocabulary words. Driving him to school, I usually check in – “do you need any review for your test today?” There’s time on the drive to have him spell them out, if necessary.

The relevant question is, can I trust his answer? In NurtureShock, we wrote:

“Kids who are doing well in school know it; when they write down their answer, they know whether or not their answer is correct. They have a subtle sense, a recognition of whether they’ve gotten in right. Children who are struggling are genuinely unsure; they might get the right answer, but lack such awareness.”

While that’s broadly true, let’s get into this in a little more detail. This field is considered the science of metacognition. It’s important because on a day to day basis, kids can be vastly more efficient in their studying if they focus on what they need to learn, and don’t waste time repeatedly practicing things they already know. The better they are at this self-directed studying – and the more we can trust them to trust themselves – the better off they’ll be, all around. This can foster their independence, their self-confidence, and improve their motivation because they feel in control, not dominated. We want kids to be self-directed learners; one day, when they’re off at college, there won’t be a parent around to check their homework.

To vastly oversimplify the homework debate, just for a moment, the evidence suggests high schoolers school performance goes up, a lot, when they have to do homework. Middle school children, though, only get minor benefits from homework, and elementary school kids get no benefit. One theory as to the reason for these findings is that younger kids can’t correctly choose for themselves what to study. They simple perform homework in a rote way, rather than a targeted way.

It turns out that kids are better at basic facts, like vocabulary. The metacognition for vocabulary in 3rd grade has a correlation of .90 – kids almost always know if they’re spelling words correctly on a spelling test. (They might misspell much more when they’re just writing and paying attention to the content not the spelling). By 5th grade, even as the vocabulary words get harder, metacognition accuracy is still very high.

Here’s the catch: students at this age are not good at applying their metacognition, i.e. they don’t use their awareness to direct themselves to the right study facts to memorize. They’ll study everything equally, or many kids will in fact study mostly words and facts they already know (it makes them feel good). In 5th grade, this ability is still only getting started. They still need teachers and parents to help them focus on what to study.

And kids are not nearly as good as having accurate metacognitions about their reading comprehension as they are for facts. They’re not really aware when they’ve understood a passage in a text. Their brains might have read every word, but comprehension is more than merely decoding text – it’s understanding the point. Even by 7th grade, most kids are not really aware if they’ve gotten the point. They’ve become so accustomed to not getting the point that they can no longer tell. Concept maps can help – this is where students draw a diagram of the main points and how they relate – and concept maps are better than merely reading the passage a second time – but neither makes a drastic contribution to metacognition.

All of which is to say, most kids still need your help – less so with facts, more so with comprehension.

The science of metacognition is still nascent, but it shows a lot of promise. I’m particularly interested in it because the era of pumping up kids’ self esteem might finally have crested. We recognize now that constantly telling kids they’re great or they’re so smart can interfere with their metacognition accuracy, which in turn makes them less capable of applying their metacognition in self-directed study. 

One of the dimensions of children I’m fascinated with is the role of fantasy, and how it finds outlets during the middle phases of childhood.

During early childhood, fantasy is expressed actively, through role-playing in pretend scenarios. The entire body is involved, and kids share authorship in the scenario and how it unfolds. It’s immersive and social, and often the more fantastical the better.

However, this kind of shared pretend fantasy play is so closely linked with early childhood that it quickly becomes uncool during the elementary years. It’s recognized as something little kids do. While older kids might still want to play that way, and hunger for it, they become embarrassed to do so in front of their friends. The rule of the schoolyard is that being older is cooler. Wanting to be older, or at least wanting to be seen by peers as growing up, kids have to carve out secret outlets for their fantasy needs, where they still feel safe being a kid. Often they only feel this way at home, with a few friends. Or the safest place of all, where nobody can ridicule you, is when entirely alone.

I’ve watched this progression the last year or so with my son, who is now eight-and-a-half. A year ago, he was torn between two groups at school. One group still felt safe acting out Ben 10 on the playground. The other group was beyond that; they played 4 square and knockout and soccer. My son, who is quite sensitive to these social codes, did not feel safe joining the Ben 10 group, even though he wanted to. At home, he stopped playing with almost all of his toys, except one, a nine inch tall, all-blue GI Joe ninja figure. But he didn’t play GI Joe with it – he used it as a universal battle figure. He would run around the house, with his “blue guy” held in front of him, and he’d narrate his battles, most of which increasingly revolved around sports. On any given day, the blue guy represented the university of Texas football quarterback, Spain’s striker tandem, or the Texas Rangers infield. One night, while I was watching Iron Chef, my son watched a little and suddenly he was off running with blue guy – who was now a chef. “A little garlic in the pan!” he narrated.

Somedays, when friends were over, he couldn’t wait for them to finally leave, so he could “play,” even though one might say they’d played together all day. He meant play with blue guy – his special time.  Now, when a babysitter is over, he goes up to his room to play, shoving furniture up against the door so he feels safe. Nor will he play in front of his grandmothers any more. I wonder when he’ll feel unsafe playing in front of me, and what that means.

Gradually, the joy of fantasy finds safe outlets in forms that involve the mind, but not the whole body: books and movies. This is especially true when a book crosses over to widespread popularity, such as Harry Potter or Twilight. The tipping point phenomenon is exponential, because once a book reaches a certain level of popularity, its fantasy elements become socially-sanctioned. It becomes okay to like wizardry or vampires. Kids, needing an outlet for their fantasy urges, flock to these accepted vehicles. The rules even get inverted – a kid risks being uncool if she hasn’t read them. The wonder of books is that they take hours and hours to read – letting a child be immersed in fantasy far longer than the 90 minutes of a movie.

So, what makes some fantasy stories socially acceptable? Why did Harry Potter and Twilight become so cool, when Dungeons & Dragons was never cool?
Not to play Joseph Campbell here, but it seems that for fantasy to be acceptable, the fantasy can’t come first. A story has to earn its street cred first – the reality has to feel really piercing, and then put the child in a situation of unusual responsibility. Usually, this involves not having parents around, or having parents who aren’t really in your life. Harry Potter was orphaned as a baby, then raised by his aunt, who hated Harry and instead spoiled her own dumb son endlessly. He soon discovers he has an important destiny. In Twilight, Bella ’s mother goes off with a minor league baseball player, so Bella moves to rainy Forks, Washington to live with her father – to whom she feels disconnected; she cooks for him but must take care of herself. This absent-parent setup is a way to explore a child’s desire for sudden independence, which is both their greatest wish and completely terrifying at once.

Then the fantasy has to leak out in gradual doses. In Harry Potter, he goes to wizarding school; the wizardry starts out small. In Twilight, Edward instantly appears beside Bella to rescue her from being run over by a classmate’s van in the school parking lot.

Over time, the fantasy elements have to help the story be emotionally resonant with kids’ peer dynamics. Elementary-school kids come to feel everyone is watching them, and fear making a blunder in front of others – this sensation is called by psychologists “The Imaginary Audience.” When Harry walks into a room, every kid is literally watching him (because they know the story of his parents), and they’re waiting for him to make a mistake. When they don’t like what he’s done, they don’t metaphorically turn their backs on him – they literally do.

Similarly, when Bella starts falling for Edward, it's a dangerous love – to kiss would simply be too dangerous. But then doesn't all teen love feel dangerous? Isn’t every first kiss incredibly dangerous? Like all teens, Bella  has to hide her secret from her father. Edward makes the petty stuff of teen life seem unimportant – what girl wouldn’t want that? Edward keeps telling Bella that she's too young to know how she really feels – but we know Bella's love is real.

My son doesn’t know about Twilight yet, but he does know Harry Potter. He read one of the books with his mom, and he’s seen a movie or two, but interestingly, they haven’t captured him. I sometimes wonder if the reason is he thinks the Harry Potter series is too fantastical, and I’ve worried what that says about him. I warn him all the time not to grow up too fast. He likes sports books, nonfiction even more than fiction. But this morning, as he was getting dressed, he pointed to a book he’d been reading, called The Great Quarterback Switch. “You ought to read that, Dad,” he said. “It’s really good.”

“What’s it about?” I figured he’d describe something about how the Knights were playing the Eagles for a championship, or somesuch – the usual sports action.

Instead, he said, “It’s about two twelve year old brothers, Michael and Tom. Michael’s in a wheelchair, he’s crippled from a car accident.”

“Wow.”

“Tom plays football because Michael can’t. Michael watches, and tries to guess the plays his brother is going to call. But then – it’s really cool – they learn if they really concentrate, they can switch bodies.”

“So Michael can play again?”

“Yeah. You should write books like this one Dad. It’s really cool.”

Earlier this week, NPR’s Claudio Sanchez reported that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is taking a year to investigate college admissions, to find out if admissions departments are discriminating in favor of boys to achieve gender balance. This investigation will start with a subpoena for admissions records from a dozen (unnamed) public and private universities. They’re unlikely to find any overt discriminatory policies; the question is, will they be able to find a pattern that is itself evidence of discrimination against female applicants.

It’s quite clear that in the current educational system, girls are outpacing boys when it comes to higher education. Boys are now only 46% of the total college enrollment, and it gets worse the higher the level of attainment – female students now earn 60% of the bachelor’s degrees. (Interestingly, this gender split is not there yet for Hispanics, where the boys in college still outnumber the girls. The imbalance is worst among Blacks, and it’s almost as bad for Asians.) Also, one shouldn’t misunderstand the data. It’s not clear that boys are doing worse than in the past (as is commonly misreported), it’s just that girls are doing so much better. As Ashley wrote last week, overall college enrollment is higher today than it’s ever been in history.

What will make it more complicated for the Commission on Civil Rights is the tie-breaker phenomenon. As yet, I doubt any colleges need to admit under-qualified boys to achieve gender balance. Rather, because there is such an oversupply of applicants, there are more than enough girls and boys who meet most college’s SAT and GPA standards (there’s just a lot more girls). Admissions officers can basically let gender be the tiebreaker. Their incoming freshman boys won’t be noticeably behind the girls, just that more girls on the bubble end up rejected.

Why do colleges want balanced gender, other than it’s traditional? Well, what some colleges are finding is that when they tick up to 60% girls, high school boys stop applying there. Why they’re doing so is unclear, but the consequence isn’t: some schools will suddenly have very few boys at all. That tipping point isn’t very far off for a lot of colleges.

Now, to be clear, it is currently illegal under Title IX to discriminate against girls. And also, this is not the same as past affirmative action admission preferences for Blacks and Hispanics. (The difference is that boys have never been historically and overtly discriminated against; all affirmative-action policies [whether you agree with them or not] were sanctioned on the argument that a group was not only numerically underrepresented, but had historically been victims of policy-based prejudice.)

But just for the purposes of argument, let’s say – entirely hypothetically – that the law was changed. What if colleges decided preserving some gender balance was so important to their mission that they started having slightly lower standards for boys than girls. Either because they wanted to prevent becoming female-only campuses, or they just wanted to make sure boys got the benefit of higher education.

My question to our readers is, how would you feel? The following questions all come to mind:

• How bad would the imbalance have to get before you felt such policies had any merit?
  
  
• As a man, how would you feel if you were unsure you really got in on your qualifications?
  
  
• As a woman, would you have any sympathy towards boys, or would such policies only create antipathy? What would happen to gender-relations on campus (and in their lives thereafter)?
  
  
• How imbalanced towards women would some campuses have to get before many girls started reacting like boys, and stopped applying there?

I know many of you will say that the current educational system has discriminated against boys, especially in this era of budget cuts. School districts that have cut gym, sports, voc-tech, recess, music and art are lopping off the few things that actually keep many boys emotionally involved in school. Girls need all those activities too, but they may not lose interest in school to the same extent (we really don’t know). But maybe a change in college admissions policies would finally highlight this problem, so dramatically, that some pioneering high school districts would finally do something about it?

One out of four cases of ADHD eliminated. It almost sounds too good to be true. Nevertheless, a report in the preeminent journal Pediatrics suggests it's possible.

What needs to happen for this to occur? Some new miracle drug or radical kind of psychotherapy? Nope. All it could take is treatment of children's snoring.

ADHD is defined by a list of symptoms, so if a kid has those symptoms, then he likely has the disorder. But what causes those symptoms may vary from child to child. And sleep disorders could be one of those causes.

University of Michigan professor Ronald M. Chervin is one of the world's leaders in investigating sleep's role in ADHD. According to Dr. Chervin, unlike adults who suffer from sleep problems, sleep-disordered children are hyperactive. The version of this we're all familiar with is the crabby toddler who skipped his nap. When it gets more serious, as in the case of the kids Chervin sees in his lab, they are "bouncing off the walls. We treat these kids with a stimulant. Giving them a sedative just makes them worse. That showed that something else was going on."

Why could this be? As we wrote in NurtureShock, some of the brain's most important development─including the ability to regulate emotion─is done during slumber. Therefore, chronic sleep problems may be thwarting early brain development, because the children fail to progress through the necessary stages of deep sleep. In addition, disorders such as snoring might prevent sufficient oxygen from getting to a sleeping brain.

Some estimate that up to 16 percent of kids snore. Kids who do so are substantially more likely to have ADHD.

Chervin surveyed the parents of 866 kids about their children's sleep and behavior. The sleep-behavior relationship was so strong that he ultimately concluded that if children's sleep-disordered breathing could be improved (e.g., through tonsil or adenoid removal), one quarter of ADHD cases would be eliminated.

To test this theory, Chervin then studied 79 kids (5 to13 years old) who were about to have an adenotonsillectomy. Prior to the surgery, 22 of the 79 were categorized as having ADHD, based on standard measures for such a diagnosis. One year later, Chervin's team tracked down the kids for a follow-up. Of the 22 identified as having ADHD, 11 kids no longer qualified as having the disorder.

Chervin is a very careful scientist. He'd rather downplay his findings, rather than give anyone a sense of false hope. Still, he was willing to observe that "ADHD isn’t something that should just disappear a year later. That doesn’t happen."

There's another reason that Chervin remains extremely circumspect about his results. Not everyone benefited from the surgery, and there were some new cases of ADHD.

This suggests that the tonsillectomies were just too late: the damage had already been done. If so, that means there's a limited window of opportunity for the surgery to be effective. 

Chervin's work isn't the only research to indicate that early sleep disturbances are related to long-term psychological problems.

Researchers have determined that a preschool boy with sleep problems is more than twice as likely to use alcohol and drugs and to smoke by the age of 14. He's more likely to be a bully in middle school and more depressed during high school. And he's also more likely suffer from anxiety in his 20s.

It used to be that the American Academy of Pediatrics thought that children's snoring wasn't a cause for immediate concern. However, in light of this new research, the AAP has changed its stance; it now believes there is no such thing as "benign" snoring.

The default answer can no longer be "She'll outgrow it." Because even if that were true, the damage may have already been done.

“We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality.”

The above quote comes from Joe Allen’s compelling new book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, and regular readers of our blog will recognize that the passage was also the basis for one of our most popular recent columns, on why teens are growing up so slowly today.

Teens' lives are so fundamentally similar─both similar to each others’, even very similar to much younger children, too. Teens might try for a different part-time job, or apply to different colleges (but those jobs and colleges are not really all that different from each other, either).

However, amid all this sameness, culture extols the adolescent who is an individual─better yet, a leader of his peers. Yet we give adolescents so few outlets to actually express themselves and allow them to find a place in the social hierarchy. The result being that the slightest differences─like a brand of jeans─become invested with an incredible amount of significance.

As Northwestern University's Adam Galinsky explained: “Maybe clothes matter because, at that age, you're unsure of status. And there may not be much else for them to base status on.” Having the Right Clothes is a way of visually placing themselves within the social hierarchy. In choosing to wear a popular brand, kids brand themselves. Designer sandwich boards that read: "I'm fabulous" (or, quite literally, JUICY).

Don’t make the mistake of assuming this phenomenon is a product of an American consumerist culture. The connection between dressing cool and popularity has remarkably well-established. In study after study, scholars have asked kids to describe the popular crowd, and "dresses well" is always near the top of the list of attributes. A study by Antonius Cillessen and Eddy de Bruyn asked kids in the Netherlands to describe the popular kids, and the Dutch teens also said that fashionable clothing was key to social status. Kids in Canada and New Zealand have also said the same thing. So have kids in Germany. And Pakistan.

(Oh, and just to be clear─we’re actually talking about clothing, not physical attractiveness. Attractiveness is a plus factor for popularity, but it's actually less important than stylish clothes.)

Can you really buy popularity with a pair of $200 jeans?

Well, Galinksy's work suggests that really might be the case. Galinsky, with his colleague Derek Rucke, has been doing experiments on Northwestern college students. Their work is all about the relationship between social power and spending power. Previously, other scholars had theorized that high-powered individuals spend money to show off their status, while those with low power spend less. But Galinsky’s evidence argues just the opposite is true. People in high power don’t need status objects to shore up their social status. It’s low-power individuals who have to spend money to climb up in status.

In fact, Galinsky can prime college students to momentarily feel powerful or weak (by asking them to recall a personal moment where they felt in control of others, or the opposite), and when he then puts them in spending games, it’s the weak who pay too much for items that infer wealth, like fur coats, cuff links, and executive pens.

The best antidote for all this isn't to send a teen to the mall after a bad day at school. (And Galinsky's work suggests that'd be a danger to your credit limit.)

Instead, it is probably to give kids other opportunities to define themselves–activities or interests that they can call their own. But that takes time.

So in the interim, the best option may just being a little more patient the next time a teen daughter goes hysterical over the fact that she doesn't have the latest jeans.

As I’ve been touring the country, whenever I discuss the science of adolescent behavior, audiences have often asked why I never mention the role of hormones.

Ahh … hormones. In a typically-developing child, it starts with the adrenal glands, which begin increasing the secretion of androgens. These become the source material from which other steroids are constructed. The hypothalamus then takes charge, triggering a hormonal game of dominos. Pulsing shots of gonadrophin-releasing  hormone from the hypothalamus signal the pituitary to release its many hormones, which in turn activate the testes and ovaries to release the sex hormones, testosterone and estradiol. The level of testosterone in a boy’s body shoots up 5,000 percent. Children’s body odor becomes noticeable, as is their growth spurt; their bones get harder, muscles get bigger, pubic hair begins to grow, and skin gets greasier. Then, actual puberty begins.

Back in 1904, G. Stanley Hall couldn’t be that specific. But the existence of hormones, and their role in triggering puberty, had been discovered. Hall published one of the first books about child psychology, Adolescence. Some 600 pages, it was broken into two volumes, and it became a wild bestseller, largely because of its salacious and graphic descriptions of adolescent sexuality and desires. Hall gave adolescence its classical characterization as a time of “storm and stress.” Rebellion from parents, a desire to break rules and take stupid risks, aggression, bouts of irrationality – it was all explainable by teens’ raging hormones.

For the next 80 years, the raging hormone explanation for teen behavior remained unquestioned. It seemed obvious: teens bodies and their behavior change together – hormones must trigger both.

But about twenty years ago, cracks in that logic started appearing. For instance, endocrinologists were certainly able to see the correlation between levels of sex hormones and physical changes. But levels of sex hormones have only an infinitesimal correlation with when kids go on their first date or engage in their first sexual acts. Nor do levels of gonadal hormones correlate with any change in brain function. They barely correlate at all with negative affect.

“When I got my first job as a scholar, in 1989, the hormone explanation dominated,” recalled Joe Allen. “People liked the hormone explanation. But the only correlations of hormones (that aren’t physical in nature) are some modest relationships between testosterone and aggression, and between testosterone and sexual interest – but not sexual activity. The problem with the raging hormone excuse is that teens don’t have higher hormone levels than twenty-five year olds. Most have lower levels. And hormones should, in theory, make teens more mature – but adolescence is characterized by a spike in immature behavior, not mature behavior.” Hormone levels, he added, seem to correlate with an urge for autonomy, but the desire to separate and individuate from one’s parents is healthy behavior, not irrational at all. Hormone levels don’t correlate with behavior, such as delinquency, or with psychological states, such as boredom.

Nevertheless, the raging hormone explanation still perpetuates in the popular mind. But the truth is, the physical changes and the behavioral changes associated with adolescence are only weakly linked.

The reason to point this out is that, as Joe Allen aptly called it, hormones are used as an excuse. Blaming it on their raging hormones means not having to look into their lives for legitimate causes. So when a child is acting out, or becomes disinterested, or goes from first date to first sex in a single year – these should be recognized by parents and teachers as a sign of something going on – some stress or problem to help them with – and not written off as the normal side effects of a surge in hormones.

• His religion
• His ethnicity
• The ridicule he endured for each 
• His profession as a soldier
• His profession as a psychiatrist
• His exposure to guns
• Relentless exposure to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in his patients
• Opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Imminent deployment there

Here’s a Twilight Zone-type premise for you. What if surgeons never got to work on humans, they were instead just endlessly in training, cutting up cadavers? What if the same went for all adults – we only got to practice at simulated versions of our jobs? Lawyers only got to argue mock cases, for years and years. Plumbers only got to fix fake leaks in classrooms. Teachers only got to teach to videocameras, endlessly rehearsing for some far off future. Book writers like me never saw our work put out to the public – our novels sat in drawers. Scientists never got to do original experiments; they only got to recreate scientific experiments of yesteryear. And so on.

Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.

In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.

This is the metaphorical vision of adolescent life Dr. Joe Allen paints in his insightful new book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, coauthored with his wife, Dr. Claudia Worrell Allen.

Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time.

Basically, we long ago decided that teens ought to be in school, not in the labor force. Education was their future. But the structure of schools is endlessly repetitive. “From a Martian’s perspective, high schools look virtually the same as sixth grade,” said Allen. “There’s no recognition, in the structure of school, that these are very different people with different capabilities.” Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both incredibly montonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter.

As Allen writes, “We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality.”

And we wonder why it’s taking so long for them to mature. The old explanation used to be they needed time for the wave of raging hormones to dissipate (more on this tomorrow). The newer explanation is that their brains simply aren’t developed yet: their prefrontal cortex hasn’t converted from gray matter to white matter, their amygdalas have a surfeit of oxytocin receptors, and their reward centers have a paucity of dopamine receptors. Few can say for sure yet how these anatomical features actually interact and create modern teenagers, but the gist of it is quite simple – until their brains are finished, they’re not ready for real life.

“Most parents will tell you that this idea of the immature teen brain is one of the few notions that truly provides them comfort,” says Allen. “They feel like it gets them off the hook – that it’s biological, not a fault of parenting.” But Allen speculates that our parenting style may indeed be causing their brains to be this way. Brains of teens a hundred years ago might have been far more mature. Without painful real-life experiences, modern teens’ brains never learn to tell the difference between what they should fear and what they shouldn’t. Without real consequences and real rewards, teens never learn to distinguish between good risks they should take and bad risks they shouldn’t. “We park kids on the sidelines, thinking their brains will develop if we just wait, let time pass, as if all they need is more prep courses, lessons, and enrichment courses. They need real stress and challenges.”

As for the risk behavior we associate with adolescence, Allen cautions that “We don’t give teens enough ways to take risks that are productive.” So they turn to drinking, drug use, delinquency, and the like – because those are the only things thrilling. “According to Allen, teens aren't naturally passive – their environment makes them passive. We’re writing them off at exactly the time we need to bring out their potential.

Allen came to this perspective partly from his scholarly research on teens, which we’ve written about before, and partly from his clinical practice with individual teens. His book tells the stories of a dozen patients who came to him in trouble. At first, these teens all manifested their problems differently, and seemed to have different symptoms. Sam was uncommunicative, unwilling to ever talk (she was forced to see Allen by the rules of her group home). Perry was a high-achieving boy who became an anorexic.  Tim was pushing himself to success, when suddenly he dropped out to draw comic books. Tonya was a small, shy student on path to get pregnant and drop out, like her sister.

But what helped all these kids – Sam, Perry, Tim and Tonya – was a taste of real life. They found a way to do something meaningful in real life, interacting with adults, outside the realm of the high school artificial bubble, and outside the hovering control of their parents. For some, it was volunteering at organizations that really needed their help – where they felt they were making a real contribution. For others it was tutoring younger kids. For others, exploring a passion without regard to its value to their college application. Or it could be a job (not a McJob) where they interacted with adults. A little went a long way.

I hear often from parents whose teenagers are disengaged or withdrawn. They have a hard time caring what other kids think, or what society expects of them. They’re having a hard time playing the game of resume-building for a far-off future. Now I have the perfect book to recommend: Escaping the Endless Adolescence.

A new analysis from the UK, just published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, concludes that kids make married couples happier. The first child only barely improves happiness, but the second child takes married parents to a new level of bliss. A third child makes them even happier.

The curious thing is why this seemingly obvious finding is considered newsworthy. In what possible way is it pushing the frontiers of science?

Well, it actually contradicts all the happiness research that’s come before. And that prior happiness research got a lot of mileage, and media attention, for saying that having kids makes people less happy. The three most-repeated attention-getters in the happiness field are:

1. Lottery winners quickly return to the same level of happiness they had before they won the lottery.
2. Paraplegics are just as happy as everyone else.
3. Having kids makes you less happy, not more.

The argument was that our sense of happiness is a perceptual illusion. We believe kids make us happy because we remember the fabulous moments of joy with our kids, while we tend to forget the stress of changing diapers, defusing tantrums, worrying about school admissions, consternation over them not eating food we so laboriously slaved over, et cetera. Kids give us lots to enjoy, but they give us even more to worry about. They cancel themselves out, happiness-wise.

Furthermore, the job of parenting squeezes out many of the activities that used to make us happy – we simply don’t have time to see friends as much, or attend live entertainment – and so our kids become one of our precious few sources of joy. This leads us to think our kids make us happy, when in fact we’re overall less happy than when we didn’t have kids. These findings had been replicated both in big-picture, longitudinal “life satisfaction” surveys, and in moment-to-moment surveying of temporary happiness.

A month ago, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd stoked the fire again. Her essay, “Blue is the New Black,” was about how female happiness goes down with age, and has gone down over the decades, despite all that women have achieved.  Dowd argued that women’s lives are simply too busy to be enjoyable, and kids are a huge factor in this way. She quoted one happiness scholar, “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children.”

So, it’s against this backdrop that the new analysis stands out. Luis Angeles, an economist at the University of Glasgow, pulled 15 years of data on 9,000 households from the British Household Panel Survey. Life satisfaction in a variety of domains was part of that survey. According to his analysis, life satisfaction and happiness do indeed go down for those with kids – but that’s for all parents. When Angeles separated out married couples from all the others who have kids (cohabitating couples, separated couples, single parents never married, divorced parents), then a different story emerges: Kids do make married couples a little happier. And the more kids the better (up to three).

Perhaps what’s driving this data is less about kids and more about expectations. The vast majority of people who get married (not all!) want to have kids in their family. Doing so meets that expectation, and happiness is the result. By contrast, people do not expect to get divorced, and most single parents (with some important exceptions) didn’t plan to end up that way. Happiness might go down, but it’s wrong to suggest that kids caused the drop in happiness. It makes more sense that life not going to plan is causing the drop, and having kids when life doesn’t go according to plan makes getting back on track even more complicated.

It can seem strange that this is studied at all. Do you need a scientist to help you know if you are happy? I don’t, and I am.