Modeling behavior for your teenager can literally affect their brain on a structural level. And here’s the catch, you’re ALWAYS modeling behavior for your teen, whether you’re consciously focused on it or not.

[5:00 minutes to read]Neurons are the basic working cells of the brain. When you do anything at all (think, walk, …

The thing about habitual ways of thinking is that once we have them they’re really hard to get rid of. This is mostly fine because a great number of our thought patterns are super helpful. But every now and then we run into one of our habitual ways of thinking that is not helpful or even unhealthy and destructive. What are we to do in this case? This is where cognitive reframing can help.

When most people think of parenting they don’t think about it in terms of cultural idealism. Most people think of changing diapers, losing sleep, having your teenage daughter huff at you, groaning at the dinner table, getting into fights about cell-phone data usage, you know, the usual. Let’s take a break from that for a second.

When’s the last time you questioned the nature of your reality? Every human being on this planet is out there living their life, right now, believing things about themselves and the world that don’t match up with reality and those beliefs are affecting their behavior. Yes, even you, reading this article.

We at Teen Brain Trust are big fans of CBT, and if you’re a regular consumer of our courses and other content you’ll find a lot of CBT nuggets sprinkled throughout it. In fact, part of our mission is to reframe a schema for our whole society, the one that views adolescents and teenagers as a ‘problem, or as problematic’. So for you nerds out there, let’s dig in a little deeper and take a look at how and why it works.

If you’re a human being, it’s natural for you to create schemas around what things are and how they work. If we didn’t then we’d go through life encountering every thing and situation as if for the first time, with none of our previous experience to back us up. It would be an incredibly inefficient way to live.

“Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” – G.I. Joe. What a lovely sentiment, right? It’s certainly something that every parent everywhere has tried at least once or twice (or a thousand times). The thing is that modern research into behavior and decision making shows us that knowledge is very rarely a central factor in decision making.