There Is A Reason Teens Don’t Sign Contracts

There is a reason they can't sign contracts.  The teen brain is very much still in development, up until about age 22.

According to Mindshift.com on-line magazine, Here are some of the ways your teen shows that they still have some growing up to do:

• Filtering—magnifying the negative details from a situation while filtering out all of the positive aspects
• All or nothing thinking— viewing everything as “good” or “bad” in an overly dogmatic fashion; believing that you must be perfect or a failure, allowing for no middle ground
• Overgeneralization—coming to a conclusion about your capabilities based upon a single incident or piece of evidence; when something bad happens once, the expectation is that it will happen over and over again
• Mind reading—presuming to understand how others feel and to know why they act as they do; particularly believing that you know how others feel about you
• Catastrophizing—expecting disaster from every interaction or situation
• Personalization—thinking that everything people do or say is a reaction to you; constantly comparing yourself to others in an effort to determine who is more intelligent, better looking, and so forth
• Blaming—holding others responsible for the pain you feel, or blaming yourself for every problem

See any of these in your teens?

Cognitive distortions are exaggerated and unreasonable thoughts that cause us to misperceive reality and then subsequently feel bad. Adults too, of course, are vulnerable to cognitive distortions and will sometimes feel bad because they think that someone has ignored them. But adults, by virtue of their age and experience, have had more practice in these matters and usually, though not always, have an easier time letting go of small potential insults.

Adds one of the studies psychiatrists,

I’ve heard parents tell their kids countless times, “Don’t sweat it! Who cares what they think?” or simply, “Please, just let it go.” Parents know that their kids sometimes misinterpret the world around them and need help identifying their thinking errors.

Maybe we should just all stop sweating it!