Risk, Reward, And Belonging: What Drives Growing Minds

Teen emotions can feel like tidal waves—fast, loud, and all-consuming—while adult logic stands on the shore holding a towel. We dig into why that happens and how to turn everyday friction into growth by understanding the science of adolescent brain development.

With clinical child psychologist Dr. Peter Montminy, we unpack the “under construction” brain: a limbic system fueled by reward and social feedback, and a prefrontal cortex still wiring up skills like planning, impulse control, and long-term thinking. We explore why peers matter so much, why risk-taking is adaptive for identity formation, and how dopamine and stress hormones amplify both excitement and anxiety. Rather than treating behavior as defiance, we reframe it as development; and that shift opens doors to better conversations, safer choices, and real learning.

You’ll hear practical strategies you can use right away. Start with the power of the pause to steady yourself. Use connection before correction to keep the channel open. Swap blame for clarity with I‑statements that align expectations to values. Coach instead of control by asking appreciative questions that help teens connect thoughts, feelings, actions, and outcomes. Teach circles of control, co-create guardrails, and repair after conflict to strengthen trust. These small moments of curiosity, accountability, and support are not just nice—they’re the experiences that sculpt neural pathways for resilience.

If the teenage years have you second-guessing your approach, this conversation offers a grounded roadmap: clear boundaries, warm connection, and skill-building in the calm. Share it with a parent, teacher, or caregiver who could use a little science and a lot of relief. Subscribe, leave a review to help others find the show, and tell us: what’s one strategy you’ll try this week?

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for immediate support. 

This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation and A Mindful Village. 

Jana Marie Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization located in State College, Pennsylvania which harnesses the power of creative expression and dialogue to spark conversations build connections, and promote mental health and wellbeing among young people and their communities. Learn more at Jana Marie Foundation.

A Mindful Village is Dr. Peter Montminy's private consulting practice dedicated to improving the mental health of kids and their caregivers. Learn more at A Mindful Village | Holistic Mental Health Care for Kids.

Music created by Ken Baxter. 

(c) 2025. Jana Marie Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

This podcast was developed in part under a grant number SM090046 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The views, policies, and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of SAMHSA, HHS or the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.

Transcript

Welcome And Today’s Focus

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 0:17

Welcome back to Ripples of Resilience, a podcast by the Jana Marie Foundation, where we explore the small moments, conversations, and connections that create big waves of hope for children, teens, and adults who support them. I'm your host, Marisa Vicere. Today we're diving into a topic that comes up all the time when we are working with parents, educators, and community members. Adolescent brain development. Why do children and teens think, feel, and act the way they do? What's actually happening in their brains? And how can understanding this help us respond with more patience, compassion, and effectiveness? To help us unpack this, I'm joined by our resident expert, Dr. Peter Montminy, a clinical child psychologist and parenting coach from a mindful village. Peter, welcome back. Absolutely. So let's get started. Adolescence can feel like a dramatic shift for teens and for the adults around them. From your perspective, why does this stage feel so intense?

Dr. Peter Montminy 1:30

Yeah. Well, it's intense for several reasons. The main one being that adolescence is a period of massive brain remodeling. It's not that teens are being difficult on purpose, most of the time anyway. It really has a lot to do with their brains are under construction. Systems related to emotion, reward, and social connection in particular are developing very rapidly, and they're developing at a faster pace than the rational thinking, judgment, planning, decision making, considering consequences part of their brain. So one part of the brain, the emotional brain, is getting way out in front of the logical thinking part of the brain. And that's one of the reasons why we often find it so intense and challenging.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 2:17

Thank you. That phrase is just so powerful under construction, and I think it does a great job really summing it up. It helps us reframe behavior from something intentional to something that's more developmental. Can you walk us through the key brain areas developing during adolescence in a way that's easy to understand?

Social Sensitivity And Belonging

Dr. Peter Montminy 2:37

Sure. And as we've talked about before, we can think in basic terms of the downstairs brain being the more emotionally driven part of the brain and the upstairs brain being the thinking part of the brain. But we'll break it down a little more specifically today. In that downstairs brain is the limbic system, the part of the brain that's involved in emotions, motivation, and reward, which is tied very closely to the hippocampus and the seat of memory. We learn more when we're emotionally engaged or motivated or piqued one way or another. And so this is the part of the brain that's very highly active during adolescence, this emotional limbic system part. And it's why teens feel emotions more intensely and are more sensitive to social feedback in particular. The main currency of our teens' sense of well-being is social comparison and how they feel compared to the other kids, right? And they feel much more intensely, especially social feedback. They're extra sensitive to acceptance, rejection, embarrassment, and belonging. And we'll talk in a few minutes about why that's actually an adaptive thing, why our brains are designed for us to be more emotionally sensitive to those social connections in the teen years. The second part is the prefrontal cortex, and that's the upstairs thinking brain that handles the executive functions, things like impulse control, planning and considering and weighing consequences before you act, especially looking kind of down the road at possible long-term outcomes before we act, right? And generally problem-solving abilities. This area is still developing. There's a little bit of a lag compared to the emotional kind of racing ahead part of the brain. And that part of the brain, really, the upstairs brain, is developing well into the mid to late 20s. We don't have our full attentional planning and problem-solving capacities. And the third thing that's really happening in that teen brain is a lot of neural pruning and strengthening. That is, all the billions of neurons in the brain and the connections they've made, they start pruning or winnowing back. What are the important connections we want to keep alive? And this happens through the neuroplasticity process we've talked about before, which simply means use it or lose it, basically. The parts of your brains that you use more often, the neural circuits that light up more often get bigger, stronger, and faster. Those that you don't use as much start fading slower, smaller, and actually start getting pruned and going offline. So kids' experiences really matter in adolescence. Their emotional experiences, the problem-solving, guiding, supportive conversations they have with adults and others, those experiences are literally shaping the brain right now and either getting some way of being in the world really locked in and wired, hardwired in more, and some parts fade away. So we want to pay attention to our connections, especially in the teen years for that reason.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 5:37

Your lesson really reminds us that when our teens are emotional, impulsive, or focused on peers, it's not a flaw. It's their brain prioritizing connection and learning from experience. One thing we know about typical adolescent development is that the teen years are a time where we might see more risk-taking behaviors. And as a parent, an educator, or an adult, this is something that we often worry about. Why are adolescents more drawn to risk?

Executive Function Lag

Dr. Peter Montminy 6:10

Yeah, that teen brain is highly sensitive, as we said, to reward more so than other stages of development, and especially to social reward. Dopamine systems are very active at this time, which means new, exciting, or socially meaningful experiences feel especially powerful. And at the same time, the brain's breaking system, the cognitive controls in that prefrontal cortex, is still developing. So we have these emotional reactions. They need to go out and get these social experiences to kind of learn what they do want to do and to start to grow their thinking part of the brain, but the emotional experiences have to happen first. It is the brain literally is constructing and reconstructing itself through the whole lifespan, by the way, but acutely, particularly in these teen years. Now it doesn't mean teens can't make good decisions. It means that they're more likely to make decisions in the moment, not thinking about those long-term implications, and particularly make decisions related to the emotions and relationships to their peer status. Now, I mentioned before this has adaptive value. Why would we be having an adolescent phase of human development that would be built like this? Because the main job of the teenager now is to start to really leave the nest and to go out there and develop their sense of identity and who they are and where they fit in outside of the family unit. So to do that, they have to go out there and they have to be willing to take risk into new experiences. They have to be willing to check out all sorts of new different things to see where do I fit in? Where are my strengths? Where are my limits? And that can happen if you don't go out and try a few things and make a few mistakes along the way. So we want to be wired to get emotionally excited and go out there and try new things without quite being so cautious and thoughtful, because that's the only way we're going to actually learn and grow into who we're going to become. Does that make sense?

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 8:08

It absolutely does. And making mistakes is a fake part of learning. And so as parents, it helps us remember too that our role is to really just be that companion with them and help them when those mistakes happen, of thinking through what can we do different next time?

Dr. Peter Montminy 8:26

Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 8:29

And that really helps explain why a teen might make a decision they know isn't great, especially in a social situation. How does brain development impact stress and mental health during adolescence?

Dr. Peter Montminy 8:41

Well, as we said, the emotional part of the brain and our experiences, the adrenaline, the dopamine, the exciting hormones, including oxytocin, the love hormone, it's all bursting at the seams here more while the cognitive controls aren't quite catching up. So because that's true, we also are going to see a rise in emotional or mental illnesses or difficulties, right? Where uh worrying about things is gonna start being turbocharged by those hormones and we develop more anxiety or depressive tendencies come online here now. So it makes sense that while we're being more emotionally charged, but our ability to regulate those emotions aren't as strong, we're gonna see more emotional kind of difficulties or challenges, and sometimes they turn into mental health problems. Yeah. So the key there for us really is that supportive relationships are one of the most powerful protective factors. When teens feel safe, seen, and supported, their brains are better able to develop those healthy coping and regulation skills. When they're flooded with stress, we all need to feel like we are safe, seen, and supported. We're being held and supported through that journey. And so our adult relationships are more important than ever for these kids right now.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 10:02

This all aligns so closely with our mission here at Jana Marie Foundation. We are often working to create spaces where young people can feel like they belong, where they feel seen, heard, and supported for the young person that they are. So let's make this practical. What can parents, educators, and caregivers do differently when they understand adolescent development?

Dr. Peter Montminy 10:28

Yeah. Okay. So a few things, right? Uh pause before reacting. We're always going to come back to the power of the pause. And remember to model regulation and that your behaviors are communicating something to the kiddo, and that the kid's behaviors are trying to communicate something to us too. Not just being jerks or trying to get back at us. Can we really understand what's the underlying feeling or need or communication that the behavior is coming from the child? So we're seeking to understand before being understood again, yeah? And we're seeking to be as clear, calm, and consistent with our both our expectations and with following through in meeting the child's needs and supporting their problem solving and in following through on accountability, right? So we want to balance as always empathy, empathic understanding, and openness to what their struggles are, what their excitements are, what their wishes or preferences are, and accountability or limit setting, holding guardrails on their exploration of the world and continually trying to find that balance as best as possible. A mantra that helps us do that more effectively with teens is to remember connection before correction, right? We want to make sure we're having connecting relationships, open communication pathways for the kids. And then it doesn't mean we just say, okay, well, you thought or feel that way, so you can do what you want. No, we want to honestly listen to their take on the world and then offer advice, right? And we slowly go from controlling or directing to kind of coaching or advising over the teen years is really important. And we shift from the driver's seat to the passenger seat, if you will. And so the other way as we approach those conversations with open mind and heart, empathic understanding of their struggle, and then offering some advice, I really encourage you to do so with some um some appreciative inquiry, right? Where we go, hey, rather than just, well, you should have done this or you should do this or you need to do this, there's time for that, right? More often, if we can go, hey, what are you noticing happening here? And help them connect the dots. There's this situation, and then you had this feeling, and ask, so was the situation that triggered that? What were the thoughts and feelings you had inside you? What were the behavior choices you made? And how did that turn out for you? What are the consequences? And literally be a companion, guide, coach to connecting the dots of their experience, because that will help them grow the connections in the upstairs brain that we want them to grow. So it's really key to kind of approach, come alongside them, not come at them, and say, let's try to break down what just happened there and why that, you know, worked for you or worked against you or fits with our values. What are your values? Who do you want to become? Here's my values, here's my wish for you. So it's not like you're not giving input, but you're doing it more in this collaborative way. Yeah.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 13:32

Absolutely. We have a group here that focuses on resilience, and we were building some of those different skills the other day. And so many of our conversations were about our thoughts, our feelings, and actions, how they're connected, but getting them to make those connections themselves. Yes. Let's think about like when we wake up and have are in this bad mood and thinking that you know the whole world is against us. How does that impact our feelings? And how does that impact our actions? And what choices do we tend to make? And how do we experience that? And what might we want different?

Dr. Peter Montminy 14:11

So and what are the results of those choices, right? Connecting the consequences to the behaviors. That last part is what's often not online yet, literally in their brain up in their brains.

Why Teens Take More Risks

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 14:23

Yeah. And it's so neat to see them start to make those connections of like how those results came from, maybe a behavior or an action that they had. Um, and it really gets them to understand how we have a choice in our days and that there are consequences for our actions and our behaviors and gets them to start really thinking through a little bit more rather than just automatically responding. Yeah. Which we all still have moments of. But if we could start working and training a little bit more in that front, it can really help us build those resiliency moments and take that pause that we often talk about before we react.

Dr. Peter Montminy 15:03

Yeah, yeah. And if I may, one more thing I'm thinking as you were talking is helping them own their piece of it, right? It's not blaming them. It's help and the other side of that is recognizing doing the perspective taking. Other people are doing things around you. It may feel and at times people are doing things to you. And you have a responsibility still for your either emotional reaction or thoughtful response to that. So really working on connecting the dots of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, also connecting the dots of what's in your inner circle of control, what's in the other person's circle of control, what's their perspective, what's your perspective. So we're really coaching them on building a more adaptive way to see challenging situations so they can cope with it better and build that resilience we're always after.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 15:54

I love it. Circles of control are so important.

Dr. Peter Montminy 15:57

Yep.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 15:58

And one of the things I know as a parent, it's really hard not to take some of their behavior choices personally. So, how do we set those boundaries when we're working with our kids? And how do we not react ourselves when we know that they could have potentially made some better choices?

Dr. Peter Montminy 16:21

Yeah. Pause, breathe, and then use this simple script. Instead of you make me or you did this, lead with the old, you know, old-fashioned I statement, and teach your kids to do the same. And the script can go like this. When this happened, I felt blank because I care about and value blank. And therefore, I would like if you or we could try blank instead. A very, you know. You shouldn't do that. You really pissed me off when you did that, you know, whatever. Pause, breathe. I noticed when you did that, I felt upset because I felt like it violated, you know, this value or agreement. And I'd like if you or we could try to do it differently next time. Boy, kids, that's embodying connection and correction at the same time. So that's something that often will help kids not feel personally attacked, but be more open to some constructive problem solving with you. Does that answer your question or relate to it?

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 17:25

Absolutely. So important and something to definitely give a try to continue to build those relationships. And I think we've talked about it so many times. We're not going to get it perfect all of the time when we're trying to make these connections, and we will have automatic responses that come up even for ourselves. But if we can do it even 20, 30% of the time, we're doing really well in helping to model those behaviors.

Dr. Peter Montminy 17:48

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 17:50

And I know one of the other big things I try hard to remember is that this stage is temporary. So even though it doesn't always feel that way, this is just one stage in their life, and we can really help coach them through it.

Dr. Peter Montminy 18:03

Yeah.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 18:04

So how does understanding brain development help us build resilience in adolescence?

Dr. Peter Montminy 18:09

So remember that resilience grows when any of us really, especially when our teens are allowed to make mistakes and then learn from them. Without making mistakes, without taking risks, without screwing up sometimes and having the opportunity to learn and grow from it, we don't build resilience. And the key there is that they're feeling supported through that process of let's take a look at this. The two keys I offer to help you again process this with your kids in a constructive way is to come alongside them with compassionate curiosity, right? Bring the energy of, I'm at you can ask, why did you do that? Or you can ask, hey, help me out. Why, why did you do that? You feel the difference?

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 18:55

Huge difference.

Stress, Hormones, And Mental Health

Dr. Peter Montminy 18:56

One is command and control, parenting, and one is coming at it with compassionate curiosity. Now it doesn't mean I'm soft about you're still going to be accountable and meet the consequences if you made a bad choice that's not acceptable. But it's the difference between door closing to conversations with your kiddo or door opening. So can we really pause, breathe, hey, kiddo messed up. Let me come at come alongside them with some compassionate curiosity and watch my verbal and nonverbal cues that embody the idea of I'm really interested in what was going on for you, kiddo, and what are you taking from this, and what might you learn from it and do differently, and step into then collaborative problem solving with them on how we might learn from this, how you might do this differently next time. Rinse and repeat from age 12 to 20, and that's what's going to get them going from being immature, emotionally driven, and impulsive to Starting to really grow that upstairs prefrontal cortex.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 20:04

Those small supportive moments really do create ripples. Thank you for reminding us of that. And Peter, thank you for helping us better understand what's happening beneath the surface during adolescence.

Dr. Peter Montminy 20:16

Absolutely. Thanks, Marisa. These conversations truly matter. We need to keep having them with each other as our kids' caregivers and supporting one another and then having them more with our kids.

Marisa Vicere, Jana Marie Foundation 20:27

To our listeners, thank you for being part of the community. This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation, where we're dedicated to opening minds and saving lives through the conversations that matter, and by a mindful village, where Dr. Peter Montminy provides holistic mental health care for kids and their caregivers. And next time on Ripples of Resilience, we'll be talking about parenting through developmental stages. So how our approach can evolve as children grow and how meeting them where they are can strengthen connection and resilience. If today's episode resonated with you, share it with the parent, teacher, or caregiver who might benefit. Together, we can create ripples of resilience that support young people at every stage of development. Until next time, I'm Marisa Vicere and this has been ripples of resilience by Jana Marie Foundation.