“This hill is savage! Let’s zoom down it on our hoverboards.”
Sixth graders are often reckless, carpe diem action-seekers bouncing from one high-stimulus activity to the next. Accident prone? You betcha. My sixth grade daughter has a classmate who’s been to the ER five times this year, for two sprained ankles, a broken wrist, a broken arm, and a concussion.
Impulse control? Sorry, that region of the brain 鈥� 鈥� is still embryonic. Sixth graders might eat desserts until they get sick, they often leap before they look, and 鈥� endearingly 鈥� they frequently raise their hands enthusiastically in class before they realize they don’t know the answer.
Dopamine is a hormone that encourages , sensation-hunting behavior and sixth graders are, alarmingly, ditsy dopes on dopamine. Self-control isn’t part of their neurological package.
Judgment or lack thereof
From sixth grade to maturity, the brain’s primary growth area is the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobes, a region that’s referred to as the “CEO” of the brain. This cognitive control or executive function center is responsible for general intelligence and activity like mediating conflicting emotions, making ethical decisions, inhibiting emotional and sexual urges, and predicting future events. If you’ve noticed your 11-year-old son can be frightfully disorganized, or that your tween daughter now seeks a private area for secret items or a journal, you can trace these behaviors back to the brain of their brains, so to speak.
And right now it’s changing tremendously in a sort of synaptic pruning process that fortifies certain neural highways while virtually abandoning the majority of others. The transitional activity of this rewiring phase is disorienting for your sixth grader, and often rears its ugly head in the form of recklessness, poor decision-making, and emotional outbursts.
Weird growth
Yikes! What’s growing? If you haven’t already, tell your child immediately about the physical changes ahead with puberty, which are triggered by their adolescent hormone releases. For girls the physical changes are breasts, acne, pubic hair, body hair, menstruation, and wider hips. Boys will experience underarm hair, pubic hair, facial hair, acne, larger testicles, wet dreams, erections. , the brains of children of both genders will undergo significant changes via release of sex hormones, reorganization in the amygdala, visual cortex, and hippocampus regions, and growth in the prefrontal cortex. If you don’t warn your pre-pubescent progeny, they’ll be freaked out by “gross” surprises.
Sixth graders, especially girls, are often self-conscious about their body’s developments, with anxiety about how others view them. It’s important to tell them — even if they squirm and cringe — that they might start to develop crushes.
Social media can be risky
A shows that frequent use of social media (Instagram, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc.) by children ages 10 to 19 is associated with multiple risky behaviors, including drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, vaping, drugs, gambling, unhealthy dietary behavior, and risky sexual behavior. Read more about how social media negatively affects the developing brain. Parents need to rigorously manage their child鈥檚 participation on social media to protect them against the dangers.
Feed the brain
Many sixth graders want to gorge on unhealthy junk food because the pleasure centers of their brains develop sooner than their ability to calculate long-term consequences. They’ll beg for it. But don’t cave in: junk food can lead to obesity, , and .
Instead, help your child eat healthy food and explain that it fosters their brain development. The of fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, and dairy products, that is moderate in sugar, salt, and saturated fats. This doesn’t mean putting your child on a no-fat diet. So-called “healthy fats,鈥� such as egg yolks, avocado, and salmon, are known to support brain function. If you can, help your child avoid the obesity that weighs down . Obesity can cause a decline in the brain鈥檚 cognitive abilities, particularly in learning and memory, claims .
It’s equally important to protect your tween from eating disorders 鈥� for both their physical and mental health. Studies indicate that involved in the reward circuitry, and according to researchers at Yale, .
Smart and strong
indicates that aerobic fitness increases the volume of the hippocampus and improves memory. shows that aerobic fitness increases the volume of a child鈥檚 basal ganglia, a region associated with academic success. John Ratey, MD, author of Spark, believes exercise elevates a chemical he dubs “Miracle-Gro for the brain” because it builds the brain鈥檚 infrastructure. Conclusion? Encourage your child to participate in physically challenging activities for 30 to 60 minutes per day. Team sports are superb for sixth graders鈥� health and well-being. And since what you show your kids matters more than what you tell them, try working out with your child. Being a healthy role model really is the most effective thing you can do to help your child.
Keep calm
Sixth graders should not be over-exposed to violent scenes of murder, mayhem, rape, and other violent activity, in any real or imaginary form. Parents should not devote the majority of dinner conversations to violent news topics, and should strive to keep real and screen violence to a minimum. Frightening scenarios create traumatic stress in children and release cortisol into their brains, a hormone that weakens the immune system and structure of the hippocampus. determined early adolescent stress negatively affects the limbic and cortical brain regions, increasing the risk of anxiety and depression. Additional research indicates children in chronic stress view the world as an unsafe place and this impairs their learning ability. Parents and guardians can also reduce the threat of violence in the home by avoiding conflicts where family members yell at or physically hurt each other.
Tuning in to tweens
An article in Journal of Adolescent Research called “” reports that in a study of 6,026 middle schoolers, “students enrolled in formal instrumental or choral music instruction 鈥� outperformed [their peers]” in algebra. The correlation was especially noted with African-American pupils. Seem like a coincidence? Think again: research suggests that musicians process music in the same cortical regions that adolescents process algebra. More recently, a indicates learning increases to a large effect when mathematics and music are used together in educational lessons.
Gender gap
Girls’ and boys’ brains are vastly different in sixth grade. The National Institute of Health discovered that the halfway mark in brain development (called the inflection point) occurs in females just before they turn 11, but dawdling males don’t get there until they’re nearly 15.
Academic performance may vary by gender at this age. In girls, language and fine motor skills generally mature first, up to six years earlier. In the past, girls were found to lag behind boys in math, raising the possibility that girls’ brain development differed from boys. But since recent research finds girls now perform as well as boys in math, a more probable cause for the gender gap is culture, not biology.
Additional reading on the developing 6th grade brain
by The Brainiac
by Callie Noble
by Shawn Marie Edgington and Emily Scheinberg
