Parent tips on teenage brain development and learning style

Your high school student is under a lot of pressure. We typically expect them to make sound (adult) decisions about their future college and career path, without their adult, decision-making part of the brain fully functioning. As a parent, you have a huge role in easing the pressure and giving them the experiences they need to facilitate healthy brain development, so they have what they need to make mature decisions in the future.

What do repeated experiences do for the brain?

From the time a baby is born until it reaches approximately 25 years of age, with each stage of development, the brain offers a limited but powerful window to create pathways used throughout a person's lifetime. Pathways forge when new experiences are introduced and repeated or practiced. Who we become as an adult depends on the experiences the brain receives when it is developing. Since your student's prefrontal cortex is developing now, he or she must receive the experiences they need during this window of opportunity to help them grow a healthy brain for the future.

What does brain development mean for your student?

The prefrontal cortex is the brain's decision-making part that gives us the ability to plan and think about the consequences of our actions. It also helps us solve problems and control our impulses. In its absence, your student has to rely on the amygdala to make decisions. This part of the brain is associated with emotions, impulses, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors, which is why you might have a student who is dramatic, moody, or irrational.

How can parents help in healthy teen brain development?

During this development time, parents can work on being safe and supportive as their students make amygdala-based decisions. They can also proactively introduce experiences that begin to engage the prefrontal cortex to forge healthy pathways. Additionally, it affords your student to experience the differences in outcome when decisions are made using two different parts of the brain.

Support, don't fix

Parents tend to take over or jump in with advice to prevent their students from failing or making poor choices. When we fix their problems, we rob their brain of the kind of experiences they need to grow an adult brain. Instead, be a safe and supportive person they can come to when needed. Additionally, create a safe place for your student to experience the consequences of their poor choices. In other words, let them pay for their speeding ticket, go to school without their lunch because they slept through their alarm, contact their school counselor to switch classes, make that dreaded phone call to their coach, etc.

Affirm, don't conform

Do you know that one of the most significant opportunities this stage of brain development offers is for your student to become functionally smarter? This is one of the reasons why students need to discover on their own which experiences result in sound as well as poor learning choices.

I'm often saddened to learn that parents have unknowingly wasted precious time during this stage trying to conform their students to their personal learning style. When we put pressure on them to use our learning techniques to study, plan and stay organized, we rob their brains of the opportunity to discover how they can become functionally smarter. Every person has their own unique learning style and as parents, we need to learn how to recognize and affirm it in our students.

You can help them develop their own learning strategies by allowing them to use trial and error to see what yields the best results. Some may prefer to read out loud, while others can shave their learning time in half by being part of a group discussion or by creating elaborate graphics to connect concepts. Some might need the environment to be quiet, while others need white noise in the background. Some may need a clean desk while other a cluttered one. If you want to learn more about this, we offer free learning style consultations.

Suppose we want to raise students who succeed in college and grow up to become independent, responsible adults. In that case, it is crucial to understand, support, and provide what their brain needs during this stage of development.

Learning Style and Communication

My passion as a pastor, leader and counselor is to equip those whom I serve to be the best they can be. One thing I’ve come to realize over the years is that an effective communicator excels at every part of life. And communication is impacted by many factors; personalities, experiences, the way we were raised, learning styles, along with other influences. My next few posts will be related to this idea of understanding communication through Learning Styles. This post will focus strictly on what learning styles are, and why they are important to effective communication. The three posts following this will drill into how to utilize the knowledge and understanding of learning styles in our marriages, our parenting, and lastly, with our volunteer teams in ministry.

There’s more to the art of communication than the use of words. It’s the exchange of information and how it connects us to people. We live life trusting and relying on the sensory cues we receive from our eyes, ears, mouth, nose and touch. Hence the tones and body language that accompany spoken words influence how communication is received. So many factors influence how we deliver and interpret communication. One of those factors is our own unique learning style. The three identified learning styles are: Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. Understanding our own unique VAK learning style can not only help us become better communicators, but also enhance how we learn, work and relate to others. Once understood, our learning style can be used as a tool to save us time and reduce frustration. I’ve seen firsthand as a counselor how it promotes healing, understanding and purpose.

The VAK model is popular because it’s intuitive and simple to use.

What is a learning style?

Learning styles refer to a person’s preferred way to take in, process, understand and remember information. Psychologists developed this learning style model in the 1920s. The VAK learning style uses the three main sensory receivers: visual, auditory and kinesthetic (movement) to determine the dominant learning style. Everyone uses all three styles as they process and learn. However, according to the theory, a person will have a strong preference toward one or two dominant styles.

Auditory Learners: Tend to:

• Enjoy listening but can’t wait to talk. Talk to themselves a lot. Move their lips while reading as well as read out loud.
• Learn best when they hear their own voice. This is why they vocalize in the middle of a class, meeting or movie.
• Struggle with reading and writing tasks.
• Remember names, but not the face or appearance of someone they just met.
• Talk ‘a mile a minute’ and expect others to drop everything to make eye contact to listen to them.
• Sounds distract them.
• Interpret the underlying meanings of speech through listening to tone of voice, pitch, speed and other nuances. A raised voice might be an argument to them, but just ‘a discussion’ to those with a different style.
• Sometimes remember things by setting information to a tune or rhyme.
• You’ll catch them saying, “I hear what you’re saying, please describe it in more detail”.

Visual Learners: There are two kinds of visual learners.

• Visual – linguistic learners tend to:
  • Learn through written language such as reading and writing.
  • More likely to remember tasks if they write them down, even if they don’t go back to read them again.
• Visual -Spatial learners tend to:
  •  Have difficulty with written language and do better with diagrams, demonstrations, videos, maps, colorful charts and visual aids.
  • A VS tends to gaze into ‘space’ in the middle of a conversation (much to a spouse’s or a teacher’s dismay) to ‘picture’ what is being said (this can appear disrespectful to other learning styles).
  • Find it easy to visualize faces and places.
  • Recall conversations based on where it happened.
  • Easily distracted.
  • Often choose to sit in the front of the class room
  •  They will comment, “I see what you’re saying”, “it’s clear cut”, “in light of”.

Kinesthetic Learners: Tend to:

• Learn by being involved, touching and/or moving.
• Remember what was done rather then what was said or seen.
• Have to move in order to concentrate.
• Easily distracted during a visual or auditory presentation. Will take notes so they can move their hands.
• Need to know the big picture first before getting the details.
• Having the space to draw pictures, doodle, shake their leg, chew gum and fidget while you communicate helps them hear and learn more effectively.
• Use gestures when speaking and stand close when speaking or listening.
• Often they are poor spellers and will write words to determine if they "feel" right.
• Tend to drive visual learners crazy with their constant movement.
• Attack problems and express frustration physically – they’re your door slammers and fist pounders.
• This group will say, “I’ve got a feeling about what you’re saying”, “come to grips with”.

You may see yourself and others you know exhibiting all three styles. This isn’t unusual. However, we all have a strong preference for one or two. The best way to discover your learning style is to take a test. (Your highest score is your dominant style. Your second score supports your dominant style). Once you became a student of the order of your style preferences, you’ll view people and communication differently. I found I was able to understand my responses, improve my ability to learn as well as my kids’, offer more grace, save time and be more effective at leading teams.

My next bog will focus on how to improve our marriages by understanding our learning style, and our spouses style.