Puberty and #YOLO!

Pu·ber·ty  (pybr-t)
Noun

The stage of adolescence in which an individual becomes physiologically capable of sexual reproduction.

Alright, everyone's going to have to deal with this one, sometime in their lives.
My fellow lady folks start growing boobs, our hips start widening, and we'll also get to deal with our monthly visitor.. Egh.
My counterpart however, gets to deal with facial hair growth, among others. You men are so lucky you don't get to deal with monthly visitors, grrr..

Aside from changes in our bodies, our behavior changes as well. Some of us go asshat wild - 'Yay for one-night stands, binge drinking and stuffing our noses with drugs!'

Scenario: Aside from studying Health & Life Sciences, I also work at a consulting bureau. An agent of the RIVM decides to offer me a place to complete my interns if I manage to find a solution to one of the problems he's been wrestling with: How do you get youngsters to take their frail bodies into account (in other words: How do you get them to stop YOLO'ing?)


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YOLO - acronym for 'You Only Live Once'. 
The idiot's version of 'Carpe Diem'.
Children, teenagers and adolescents may or may not have heard of it. Basically, we start yelling 'YOLO' whenever we do something risky. Jumping off a cliff while yelling YOLO, for example. 
Some things must be done at least once in your life, because life is too short to not enjoy it, right?
Whereas some people YOLO at the right times (traveling to a beautiful place, bungee-jumping, parachuting are things I consider 'right'), foolish teenagers nowadays use YOLO as an excuse for risky behavior.
Getting drunk and involved in a one-night stand, per example. (By the way, once you're pregnant, it's definitely NOT cool anymore..)

Puberty and adolescence
Puberty is a process during which a child's body changes and takes on the qualities of a mature body (in other words: we reach our baby-making years). Aside from this, our bodies start releasing hormones responsible for changes in our behavior.

Puberty is seen as a starting point of adolescence, whereas completion of education, employment, marriage, and child-rearing, or otherwise becoming socially mature usually signaled the end of it. Long ago, physical maturation generally came hand in hand with social-role maturation. Nowadays however, we study longer and marry and have babies later, which means that the end of adolescence has shifted several years.[1]

Mental disorders and adolescence
According to Sawyer, some mental disorders occurring in adults raise their ugly heads during adolescence. People who started drinking early are said to are more likely to become alcohol-dependent, and so on.
By investing in proper education of adolescents and other things which might aid adolescents, they will become healthier when compared to non-educated adolescents.
Mental disorders are the largest non-fatal contributor to burden of disease (45%)[1]

White vs Grey matter
In the brains, we have white and grey matter.
White matter regions contain many myelinated axons, as myelin has a glossy white appearance, whereas grey matter contains dendrites, neuron cell bodies and unmyelinated axons.[2]
During adolescence and early adulthood, the cortical grey matter of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes of the brain increases in volume as a result of dendritic outgrowth and synaptogenesis. The grey matter later loses volume with synaptic pruning (fine tuning of connections in the brains).
The white matter, however, increases in volume during childhood and adolescence.[1]

Changes in the brain which might lead to #YOLO! during adolescence
The prefrontal cortex(responsible for executive control functions, including planning, emotional regulation, decision making, multitasking, and self-awareness, basically everything which is adult-like) starts to develop very early in life and continues after adolescence until the individual is well into their 20s. 

The limbic system, which is responsible for appetite, pleasure and reward-taking, starts developing earlier than the prefrontal cortex.

The greatest gap in development between those two regions is during adolescence, which might just be the reason why adolescents have the tendency to forsake their responsibilities in order to have fun. And having fun while impressing your friends at the moment is a golden opportunity, right? No matter what your rational-self screams at you, having fun seems to be more important at the moment. ('but hey.. YOLO!')[1]

Estrogens

Estrogens are sex hormones responsible for the changes in a woman's body.
Under the influence of FSH and LH, both released by the pituitary gland in the brains, estrogens change a child's body and regulate her period.

Somewhere at the onset of puberty, the ovaries start producing estrogens. Estrogens promote ossification (bone development) in women, whereas testosterone promotes ossification in men. (This is why elderly women have a tendency to suffer from osteoporosis. After menopause, their bodies no longer produce high quantities of estrogen, go figure..)

Aside from ossification, estrogen is also responsible for breast development, development of the uterus, the lady's privates and her period (high levels of estrogen stimulate LH secretion, which, in turn, triggers ovulation, with subsequent PMSing and killer-periods).[2]

Estrogen's influences

Age of onset of puberty

The average age of onset of puberty has decreased over the last decades. Reasons for this may be the improvements in hygiene, healthcare and nutrition.[1]
Dutch '65: 13.40yo (first menarche)
Dutch '97: 13.15yo (first menarche)[3]
The changes are approx 0.2~0.3yr for girls and 0.5yr for boys.

Factors influencing adolescent health

Factors influencing adolescent health

Solutions to #YOLO!

- Schools could take more time educating kids on substance abuse and other reckless behaviors.

- Parkour/freerunning schools could provide kids with a safe environment to learn and perform reckless, exhilarating tricks.

- Martial arts schools can do the same as above.

- Alliances with popular media, eg MTV could be formed. (Didn't MTV cover some parkour basics sometime ago?)

- Make physical education (gym) classes more diverse and fun. I personally hated PE because the only things we ever did were basketball, volleyball, hockey and dodge ball.
- As suggested by my friends: Hit them with a baseball bat to punish them for misuse of #YOLO!



[1] Sawyer, S.M., et all, Adolescence: a foundation for future health, April 25th, 2012, The Lancet, Volume 379, Issue 9826, p1630-1640

[2] Barthelomew, N., Fundamentals of Anatomy & Physiology, 9th edition, 2012, Pearson
[3] Frederiks, A.M., et all, Continuing Positive Secular Growth Change in the Netherlands 1955-1997, March 2000, Pediatric Research, Volume 47(3), p316-323


This assignment on Puberty and risky behavior was completed by a former student of VU University of Amsterdam / now a current student of the AMC-UvA.
I hereby give any other students my permission to use the info I've gained for their own assignments, although I cannot guarantee any high grades, nor do I recommend you to completely copy this from the internet.
This information is not meant to be placed on any other site, and I will hunt you down if I do find it somewhere.