commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Everyone knows that teenagers march to the beat of a different drummer. They delight in taking risks that “sensible adults” would reject without a second thought, and they do it regularly. It can be anything – smoking, experimenting with drugs, engaging in unprotected sex, shoplifting, cutting school, and, in some cases, partaking in violence to the point of no return.
Out of these six vices, I was marginally guilty of at last five during my teen years. I will leave it to you to figure out which category I eschewed (or perhaps never quite got around to because the other ones kept me pretty well occupied).
There is a clear and simple reason why teens are prone to conspicuous risk-taking. We might aptly refer to it as a biological imperative. For a teen to grow out of adolescence and into adulthood, he or she has to break away from the powerful influence of their parents. If the kid doesn’t cut the umbilical cord, he or she would be a kid forever. This would mean that within a few generations, all the adults would have died out and society would be nothing but kids and over-aged kids. It would be horrendous. It would be the end of civilization as we know it.
The biological imperative to escape the smothering confines of mother’s apron strings and father’s authority could not succeed, and thus we would ultimately face the disaster of an adult-free world, were it not for certain quirks in the teen’s brain chemistry that, in effect, egg the teen on to take the risks that so confuse and confound the older generation.
Science writer Amanda Leigh Mascarelli explains:
A major reason why teenagers often respond to those influences with irrational decisions is the presence of a brain chemical (one of the all-important neurotransmitters) known as dopamine. The brain releases dopamine when something makes us feel good, whether it’s receiving a teacher’s compliment or finding a $20 bill. Dopamine levels in general peak during adolescence. In teenagers, the strength of this “feel good” response helps explain why they often give in to impulsive desires.
More dopamine is released “between the ages of 13 and 17 than at any other time during human development.”
Thus, that horrible period when your kid enters high school and in many cases changes so dramatically that you often feel like you don’t even recognize the little monster coincides with their little pea-brains being overloaded with dopamine.
PBS.org breaks down the dramatic increase in dopamine levels that result from various pleasurable activities:
“In lab experiments done on animals, sex causes dopamine levels to jump from 100 to 200 units, and cocaine causes them to spike to 350 units. “[With] methamphetamine you get a release from the base level to about 1,250 units, something that’s about 12 times as much of a release of dopamine as you get from food and sex and other pleasurable activities.”
So if you want to scare yourself, just meditate on the state of a teen’s already over-amped brain if he or she decides to push the envelope further by smoking a little meth. Pretty damned scary…
But what the scientists probably can’t fully explain is why some teens – and we’ve seen it happen over and over again during the 22 months we’ve been running All Things Crime Blog – reach a peculiar point of no return in which (no doubt locked and loaded with excessive dopamine levels peaking in their still not wholly-formed brains) they not only plan to kill one or both of their parents but actually go ahead and do it for the flimsiest of reasons.
This appears to be what happened (in a case that has been reported by myriad news services but with singularly few details) to 17-year-old Seth Ramsey of Harrington, Delaware, who – in an advanced state of teenage delirium – made the horrible decision to shoot and kill his father, 41-year-old Todd Ramsey, with a crossbow because he was afraid that his father would be mad at him cutting school.
Mr. Ramsey’s body was discovered by police during a routine check at the home he shared with Seth after they had been alerted by concerned co-workers that the father had not reported for work.
Peter Holley of the Washington Post writes:
Police say they stopped by the teenager’s home in Harrington on Thursday to check on 41-year-old Todd Ramsey after coworkers reported him missing. Inside the house, police discovered Ramsey dead in his bedroom with a single arrow wound to his upper torso, according to an ABC affiliate.
The ABC affiliate reports that according to a police affidavit, Seth explained that his fatal decision to kill his father stemmed directly from his concern that his father would be angry because he had skipped school:
“He said that his father was in his bedroom from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Seth said that he knew when his father came out he would be mad so he shot him.”
As is our national predilection in capital cases involving under-aged kids, Seth has been charged as an adult with first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon. Despite being charged as an adult, he is being held at a juvenile detention facility without bail.
It hardly takes a neuroscientist to determine that charging Seth as an adult is the height of folly. If the kid had been more mature, which in theory would have resulted in “normal” dopamine levels, he probably would not have shot and killed his father with the crossbow over something as insignificant as him cutting school. Hell, if he were more mature he probably would not have even been cutting school in the first place. He probably would have been like his poor departed dad – a worker showing up at his place of employment regular as clockwork.
As it is, however, he’s screwed… As we’ve pointed out in the past, under-aged felons often get sentences 2 to 3 times longer than adults who commit similar crimes.
So who’s being irrational here? The answer is both sides are. The teens do crazy things because their hormones are out of whack, and the adults – who should know better and can’t use excessive dopamine levels as an excuse – insist on trying them as adults even though they clearly are not.