Teens’ Brains Really Do Tune Out Their Mother’s Voices, Study Shows

Teens and their selective hearing have been a plague on the face of motherhood since time eternal. Now we know why.

By Tinybeans Team April 29, 2022

teen boy not listening walking down the street

A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience sheds some light on one of the most mystifying and irritating behaviors of the average teenager: their inability to hear (and let’s be honest, do) what moms tell them. Is it defiance? Hearing loss? Distraction? That freakin’ cell phone (probably)? Nope. Turns out, they’re wired to tune us out. And apparently, it’s a good thing.

According to the study, “Children’s social worlds undergo a transformation during adolescence. While socialization in young children revolves around parents and caregivers, adolescence is characterized by a shift in social orientation towards nonfamilial social partners.” Translation: When they’re little, your kids pay attention to you. When they’re teenagers, not so much.

But why? No, really. Why? Apparently, it has to do with the parts of their brains that house the motivation and reward centers. In the study, researchers took scans of kids’ brains, ages 7-16, while they listened to a series of voices. To exclude subjective meaning associated with each word they heard, the voices—which included their mom’s and other women’s—said three gibberish phrases in random order.

The scans showed that when “younger children hear their mother’s voice, reward processing regions (in the brain) show greater activity compared to when they hear nonfamilial, unfamiliar voices. Strikingly, older adolescents show the opposite effect, with increased activity for nonfamilial compared to mother’s voice.”

Basically, listening to your mom when you’re a teenager just isn’t as rewarding as it was when you were a little kid. So what’s a mom to do? Up the ante and start tying everything they say to a reward? No parenting expert here, but that doesn’t seem like something that would end well. Instead, parents might need to accept the basic truth of raising children: In becoming more independent and able to fend for themselves, they need to turn their attention away from their parents… to a degree.

Rewards—and threats—will be everywhere as they get older, and we won’t be there to make choices for them. Tuning us out when there’s little risk involved gives them the ability to flex their decision-making skills, learning along the way what’s worth it and what’s not. So the next time you tell your teenager the same thing five times in a row, remember this: It’s not you. It’s just them developing successfully.