Ever wonder why your teen is so much more emotional than you are?  Well, the reason has been discovered.  An article in Science Daily entitled "Are Teenagers Wired Differently from Adults?" explains: "High emotionality is a characteristic of adolescents and researchers are trying to understand how 'emotional areas' of the brain differ between adults and adolescents. Scientists from the National Institute of Mental Health, publishing in the November 15th issue of Elsevier's Biological Psychiatry, have helped to advance our understanding. They studied the amygdala, the major emotional center in the brain, which undergoes structural reorganization during adolescence."  What these scientists found when studying this is "that emotional behaviors in adolescence are less precise and more irrational because they are driven more by subcortical than by cortical structures."  In other words, when your teen has an outburts, it is because a different part of their brain starts working when they are emotionally triggered than when you are emotionally triggered.   I know it's hard, but the next time you have had it up to here with your teen's emotional outbursts, take a break, and remember, it's not their fault....it's the fault of their brain structure :) 

Be Well
~Emily