Jon: Good afternoon and welcome to today's webcast. This is Jon Berg and I am an abstinence content specialist with Pal-Tech. We provide abstinence education training, technical assistance and capacity building for grantees with the Abstinence Education Division of the Family and Youth Services Bureau. Today we'll begin with part one of a two-part series of web casts that will provide the science behind nature-based theory which explains how developmental differences may manifest in the way boys and girls grow and learn differently. Implications of these differences for educating boys and girls will also be addressed. Part two of the series will build on the developmental differences explained today. We'll focus on how to communicate effectively with boys and girls and how to implement the ideas to improve program effectiveness. We are excited about this opportunity and believe it will help you to continue to improve your programs and therefore positively impact the health of teenagers around the country. I am the moderator for today's web cast and on behalf of our team, I would like to thank you for taking part in today's web cast. Please be ready at the end of the presentation with any questions or comments as we will provide time for discussion. Before I introduce our speaker, I would like to go over a few key points. You will receive an email shortly after the conference call with the evaluation form attached. Please take time to complete and return the evaluation form. Your feedback is very important to us as we continue to look for ways to improve our webccasts and how we serve you. Currently your telephone lines are in listen-only mode to avoid any background noise during the presentation. Prior to the question and answer period, I will go over the directions on how to "un-mute" your lines so you can comment or ask questions. It is an honor to have Kathy Stephens, Executive Director of the Gurion Institute present, present on this topic. It is my pleasure today to introduce her. Kathy Stephens is a professional trainer, international presenter and co-author of several books. "The Minds of Boys" - "Saving our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life" - "Strategies for Teaching Boys & Girls -Elementary Level" and "Strategies for Teaching Boys & Girls - Secondary Level." Her work has been featured in national publications including  Newsweek ,  Readers Digest ,  Educational Leadership , (blip) and  Library Journal and she is regularly interviewed by national media. Kathy works with educators, parents and other youth-serving professionals helping them understand nature-based theory and adapt curriculum to help both boys and girls maximize their potential in the classroom and in life. Kathy also facilitates training for adults, helping men and women appreciate the nature of their differences and learn how to better understand each other as they work and live together. Kathy has over 30 years of experience including teaching music, pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, designing and administrating - administering programs in early childhood care and education, domestic violence, juvenile corrections, adult-community corrections, teen pregnancy prevention, cultural competency and women's issues. Much of her early work was done in economically disadvantaged minority communities. Kathy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology and education from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, a masters in public administration from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Kathy lives in Colorado Springs with her husband, Don, and has two sons and seven grandchildren. Okay, Kathy. The time is yours. KATHY: Okay. Thank you very much, Jon. JON: And Kathy, you might also want to hit on your experience as far as abstinence education? KATHY: That was my next point to make. JON: Okay. Great. KATHY: Good. It is a real honor to be with you all this afternoon. And in addition to the things John mentioned that I've been involved in, I was also the executive director of a non-profit in Colorado, working in the Colorado Springs School District for five years with Abstinence Education funding from the federal government coming through the state. So I know exactly what you all are dealing with in terms of, you know, the mandates that you have, the goal objectives that you're hoping to accomplish, and we worked with both boys and girls in our program. Not as effectively with the boys, but worked on developing that and I'm hoping that some of the information you learn today about how boys and girls learn differently will help your programs as you work with both boys and girls to try to forward the mission of your program. So let's get on with it. First thing I want to do is tell you a little story. And this is a story that was written to my co-author Michael Gurion by an 8th grade girl who said, having read this in the newspaper, she said, "This is how it feels to be an adolescent." So it's a communication between a U.S. Navy ship (CLEARS THROAT) and the coast - off the coast of Newfoundland and Canadian authorities - (blip) "Please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision." Canadian authorities, "No. Divert your course 15 degrees to the south." U.S. Ship, "This is a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert your course." Canadian authorities, "No. Divert your course." U.S. ship, "This is the U.S.S. Coral Sea. (phonetic) We are a large warship of the U.S. Navy. I say again, divert your course or we'll be forced to take counter measures." Canadian authorities, "This is a lighthouse. It's your call." Now I hope wherever you are, you're laughing a little because the story is meant to be somewhat funny. But it's a great metaphor for what we're talking about today in terms of who the kids are when we are trying to send them messages. In terms of gender, we believe they're a lighthouse. The science that we've been accumulating over the last couple of decades - more and more can show us where gender is located in the brain. And if you take a slice of a brain, a real thin piece, put it under a microscope, you will not see race. You will not see ethnicity, what culture somebody was raised in or what language they speak, but there are many, many places you will see gender. So there's some fundamental differences in how we're wired. Does that mean girls or boys are better or less (blip) than the other? No, not at all. What it means is that there are some differences in how we process information based on this wiring that causes us to see things differently, to respond to things somewhat differently. And if we understand those differences, we can better communicate with the kids to help them in the ways that adult leadership is supposed to help kids. Some pats - parts of the brain are very plastic. For instance if you are born in the United States in Maine, you are born to be able to hear the language that you hear spoken around you and that's what you'll grow up learning to speak. If you're born in Texas, you might hear English also, but you might hear it in a slightly different way. (CLEARS THROAT) If you're born in Mexico, if you're born in, um, South Africa, you might hear an entirely different language. Your brain is plastic enough to learn any language that you hear as a child growing up. Children who grow up in families with more than one language, have the plasticity to learn more than one language and we had that plasticity for the first few years of life up until about age 10 when the language window basically closes. For rare, bizarre occasions when children don't hear language up until that age, they never learn to speak. But that's the plasticity of our brains where language is concerned. Gender's not very plastic. The brain wiring that we have when we're born, doesn't really change. Certainly culture affects it and if you take this um metaphor of the lighthouse, the lighthouse is the gender that's there when the child arrives. The ship floating around out in the water getting signals from the lighthouse are the gender roles that we learn. And as I said, you know, Maine, Texas, South Africa, wherever we're born and whatever culture we're raised in will give us a different set of roles. We'll perceive how women and men behave based on the culture of their environment. And so certainly that culture is like an overlay. It's like an onion. The gender in our brain, the gender we're born with is the pearl of the onion and all of the things we learn as we interact with our environment and our culture overlay that. So that there's layers and layers and layers. The culture my grandmother learned as a girl growing up in the early 1900s about her role as a female was certainly different than mine born in the later part of the 1900s and different than my granddaughter who was born two years ago. So as we look at the kids, if we can imagine they're each a lighthouse, they're sending us signals. They're telling us things that are important for us to know and they're telling them to the ships that are floating around with whom they're going to interact and do things. So keep that lighthouse in mind as we talk about gender and the brain. Also keep in mind that that I'm going to do a lot of generalizing when I talk today. I'll be saying, "The male brain tends to...the female brain tends to..." When I talk about those, I may mention, "The female brain tends to do this" and you may think, "Gosh. I know some girls who don't do that at all. Or don't act like that. Or that doesn't fit for me." Fair enough. There are exceptions to every generalization. But if we accept some of the generalizations about kids, especially adolescents because we have such good research now, it can help us as we design programs for the majority of kids. And then we look at how we have to tweak those designs for the kids who may not quite fit that generalization. At the same time we'll try really hard not to stereotype because the stereotype has such a negative connotation based on not fact um that we don't want to do that. So I'll try hard not to do that but I will do some generalizing. So what kind of things do we learn from research that we have and brain research is exciting because it's changing on a daily basis. We're learning more and more and more all the time about the brain. So what kind of things do we know now? And these are things that I hope as you think about working with children who are adolescents especially who are growing into adolescents, these are things they should know. Their brain, when they are mature, is going to weigh about three pounds and it's going to be about the consistency of soft butter which it is all along. And now that's not soft butter if I set it out in the far South on the table and leave it there. It's kind of soft butter as you leave it in the refrigerator. So it has pliability to it. It bangs up against your skull which is not like soft butter. It's hard as rock. And so imagine the kind of things that kids do where they might be banging their head like hitting a soccer ball, playing football, riding a bike without a helmet and taking a spill. Um Falling out of the top bunk onto the hard floor. Children experience a lot of brain injuries that are minor in terms of us not even realizing that may have been what happened, but may have an impact on brain function. And so that's one thing we have to keep in mind and for us to keep in mind. If you're going to take care of your brain, take care of your head. Be really careful. Encourage them to be - participate in activities that won't hurt that brain. Now Daniel Emond (phonetic) who's a neuro-psychiatrist (phonetic) and works with kids a lot says, "Get 'em interested in ping-pong and tennis. Much less chance of a brain injury in those." Your brain also is busy, busy, busy. Has over 30 billion working parts. Has over 100 billion neurons and most of those we have the day we're born. They will grow and get bigger, but they're there. And so if there's a brain injury early in life, if there's trauma to that child early, some of that brain capacity will be lost by injury and we can't get that back. We know that there are some small areas of the brain where we're discovering rejuvenation of cells, but not very many places yet. And and we may discover more, but the bottom line is we have to be very, very careful with our children from the day we get them and then teach them to be careful with themselves so that they're careful with the brain that they're going to need all their life. The impulses in their brain travel very fast. The slide that you see shows the neuron which is an electrical impulse - will go through there. It'll jump to this other neuron by a chemical impulse and then it'll be an electrical impulse again. And those impulses are moving 170 miles an hour on average. And think about 100 billion neurons with all their little dendrites moving 170 miles an hour. That's a lot of messages moving fast and until the brain is completely mature, which doesn't happen until later in life, it's not completely myelenated (phonetic) - which means that all of those little neurons, all of these cells aren't insulated to keep their messages from kind of bumping into each other. This is really important during adolescence. The kids that you're working with in your program - part of the reason they seem sometimes chaotic - um seems like you talk to him about something one day and the next day they don't even remember that conversation? It's because those messages aren't moving as smoothly from point A to point B. They're not getting stored where you'd like them to be but there are so many messages moving at so much speed - and we'll talk about that a little more as we go along. When your child is born or a child is born, the brain they have is about 25 percent of the size it'll be when they're mature. Unlike many mammals in the world, our brain grows pretty slowly in terms of size. By the time we're a year old, it's only 50 percent of the size it will ultimately be when we're an adult. Many animals by this time are considered adults and are capable of doing everything they need to do and obviously our children that age still have a long way to go before that's true. At age 10, the brain will be about 95 percent of the size that it will be when we're adults. Between 10 and 12 or 13, not only is the brain about that size, but for some kids, their physical side begins to look a lot like an adult. Our girls begin to develop some and that's happening at earlier and earlier ages. Our boys begin to physically mature. Their bodies start to change. Sometimes they start to get a little stubble. The girls begin to develop and need to wear a bra. So all of a sudden they're kind of looking like adults. This mistake we make is that we are assuming maybe they are getting to be close to adults and they are not. Their brain in particular isn't even close to adult maturity. Size-wise it's close. Maturity-wise there's a long ways to go and when we're working with kids in programs where we're asking them to contemplate the future, consider consequences of their behaviors, to really use problem solving and deep-seated thinking skills, they're really not there yet. So good adult supervision, good structure is still so important. So what is the difference between these two brains in terms of male and female? Well, let's think of some things. Look at some things. When a baby's conceived, if there's an X chromosome from mom and an X chromosome from dad, the plan is for a girl. That's, that's the schematic for female development. If there's an X from mom and a Y from dad, then we're going to have a boy. From the moment of conception to about six weeks of age, the dif...there won't be a difference in how those fetuses develop. The cell division, the kind of things that are - that are organizing themselves are the same. It's all been differentiated. But at about six weeks, if there's a Y chromosome, some certain differences will begin to become apparent in the little male fetus. One of which will be a message he'll send to his mother's system to say, "Ah! Y chromosome here. This is going to be a boy. We need some shots of testosterone." The testosterone he will get initially, will come from his mother's ovaries. She'll send that testosterone in response to the message from the Y chromosome and that testosterone will trigger the little male system because of the y chromosome to start generating its own testosterone. That testosterone is the architect of the male body and brain. The differences are the male body will begin to um to make calcium in a different way. It'll process calcium differently. It'll build a little bit different bone structure. It'll build a little bit different muscle structure, the way the muscles are designed and some other body differences. The way we process fat will be a little bit different. At the same time it's processing the body differently, it's going to process the brain differently. It's going to make a different diagram for a male brain. And here's what some of those will be. This area on the left hemisphere of the male brain...based on um looking at the working brain, the brain scans that we now have available, we know the male verbal centers tend to be in this area of the brain. This was - this research was looked at when men were having strokes. And when they would have strokes in this area, they'd lose their language. They would tend not to get it back and if they did it was a very long process and generally wouldn't come back as fully as a woman who had a stroke in this same area. So they started looking at the male and female brain doing these different kinds of verbal tasks and then what they discovered was - Ah! The male brain tends to focus in this area with its verbal processing where the female brain has verbal processing centers in a variety of areas on both sides of the brain. Six or seven different areas that tend to focus on verbal processing. So it's no surprise to us that women tend to use more words every day then men do. Um If you were all online, I could probably hear some of you chuckling because this is kind of a known thing to most of us. Now does this mean all women use more words than men? Again, it's that generalization. Of course not. We all know some men and some boys who are very, very verbal from the time that they are old enough to start talking. But in general, women will tend to use more words. In elementary school it can be as much as four and five times as many. Um As we move though adolescence, generally that holds up some. Three-to-one or so. And as we become mature adults, some of that holds up and sometimes it evens out to about two-to-one. You can think about your own relationships, the kids that you work with and adults you know and say, "Oh, does that hold for us?" Maybe so. The other side of the male brain, the right side - while this verbal processing was developing - the right side here was developing spatial processing - mechanical, spatial processing - and this is what the male brain is extremely good at. This is, we believe, based on some history of the kind of past that men in our species have done since the beginning of time. Men were hunters. They needed to be able to process spatial information. How far away was that critter that they needed to run down? How far did they have to throw their spear to intersect with that critter at the right time so they could kill that, drag it back, have meat for their tribe. The spatial processing was really, really important. If you think about the adolescent boys and the men that you know now, they're probably not having to hunt to put food on the table. Although in a few parts of our country, people still do that. But these guys in general are not having to do that. But they are doing things that are very similar. One of the reasons boys really respond more to video games and the research shows us 10- or 12-to-1 they play video games more than girls. Part of it is this spatial mechanical wiring. This brain likes that kind of thing. It responds to it. It wants to be good at it. That's why boys will over and over again play a video game until they get better and better at it and can conquer it, so to speak. Um, the visual environment of the screen it's like hunting in visual space. The other great thing and especially for adolescent boys about playing video games which is responding to the spatialness of their brains is that you can lose and nobody knows. You can do it by yourself. You don't have to spend a lot of time talking to it. You can interact. You can start over if you need to and after three or four times, you can master that piece and move on to the next. When we work with teachers, we ask them, "How many chances do you give boys to pass the test?" If they had three or four chances to try it, they could master the material. But sometimes the grade is going to be based on the first shot which they may not be as good at because it's more verbally based. So it's important to keep in mind. The visual spatial piece is more prominent in the male brain. Do girls have visual spatial processing? Absolutely. Is it their primary way of dealing with things? Not really. In school initially and interaction with people initially, verbal is the first thing we ask for from kids and that's easier for girls because of add - those extra verbal processing areas. These are the kind of things boys do in today world. They play sports. They drive cars. They play video games, building on that spatial awareness. With girls, the verbal awareness that we have, the more peripheral senses that we have, we tend to hear better out of both ears. We tend to see better out of both eyes. We process more sensory information. And again, if we look back at what the men were doing, they were hunting and women were caring for children, caring for the elderly, making sure the fire didn't go out, um, choosing the right berries and roots - were they - is this the right color? Is it ripe? Does it smell correct? Is this the one we're supposed to eat? So we developed the skills we needed to do our part in keeping our tribe alive. Some other parts of the brain that tend to be different in males and female: um Your black arrow is pointing to part of the brain called the corpus colosum (phonetic). The corpus colosum is like the exchange box in the brain. It connects the left and right hemispheres with a mass of neurons. In the female brain that can be up to 20 percent more dense meaning there's, there's more neurons in that area collecting - connecting the left and right sides. Which means the female brain tends to communicate faster between areas in the left and right hemisphere. The male brain tends to be more task-focused and as one researcher has put it, "The male brain sort of lives in boxes. There's a box here for talking. There's a box here for doing. There's a box here for fixing. There's a box for each thing and males like to go to that box and not have it bump up against the other ones." For the female brain, it's more like a ball of yarn. It's kind of all connected together and we sort of bounce back and forth from one to another more quickly. So we multitask. Again, if you think from a developmental standpoint, we were doing more things that we had to do at the same time. If you're cooking the meal or doing something in your environment, you're also listening for children. You're listening for being needed, so you're building those skills better and those are the skills that help you survive and this corpus colosum has a lot to do with that. The limbic (phonetic) system in your brain which is like your feeling center, deep in your brain, and two pieces of that are the amygdala (phonetic) and the hippocampus where the orange and red arrows point. A really important point when you're working with adolescents is that the amygdala is a little almond-shaped organ that is the only part of your brain that is mature the day you're born. What it does is process emotional memories. Fear and anger most especially. So for children who experience trauma, um for children who are abused or neglected, and when bad things happen to children who aren't old enough yet to tell us about them or to be able to remember the incident, they can remember how it felt. And it will tag that memory so that if something happens later in life, we may be apt to respond to that with this tag. Being angry, being fearful. And you know, you work with kids who sometimes - you just look at 'em wrong or say the wrong word and you didn't even know you did and they respond in a really tumultuous way, you say, "Wow. I don't know what button I hit?" You may have hit this amygdale button to some memory that's - that's back there in time which the kids can't explain to you or tell you why they feel the way they do but they respond to it emotionally. And that, and that can happen all through life then. The hippocampus is kind of like your administrative assistant in your brain. When you're administering your program to the kids and say you're doing it over the course of a semester, over the course of a number of weeks, and you're giving them information you really want them to remember, important and you're building one piece of information on the other and they don't seem to remember. Part of it can be because their hippocampus has been overwhelmed. They're in school all day. They're taking in lots and lots of information. They're getting lots and lots of input from the family and from other adults. Then they're getting input from your program. And it's the hippocampus's job to file that information in the appropriate places so the kids can find it when they need it the next time. So you can add on to it as your program progresses. And if the hippocampus gets overwhelmed, it sort of just takes a lunch break and leaves everything sitting there, doesn't get it filed. So the next time you meet with the kids and you'll say, "Okay. Let's talk about what we were discussing last time" and they can't remember? And you're thinking, "Wow. They weren't even listening..." They may well have been listening, but their hippocampus may not have been in a position - their memory-storage system - may not have gotten it from that working memory which was happening as you were discussing it to their prominent memory which is where they'll find it next time when you, when you say, "Okay. What do you remember about this?" And they say, "Oh, yeah. We talked about that and about this and about that." They just can't find it and there are some things we can do to try to promote memory and we'll talk about those later. The cingulate gyrus (phonetic) which your green is pointing to the area where it would be - it's not pointing exactly to it - but that's where it would be is what we might call the instant replay of the brain. Much more active in the female brain and it's the thing that causes girls to hang on to things, to hold grudges, to hold hurt feelings much longer than boys tend to do. Boys can have an argument. They can even come to - to blows. Later, they can forget all about it and go play basketball. Where the girls will be still talking about it at their class reunion ten years later. We just tend to not forget and sometimes the singulate gyrus is the problem. What we would want to talk to the girls about and especially girls in your program is that as they are taking in some negative thoughts, we tell them, "Think of those thoughts as ANTs in your brain. Automatic Negative Thoughts. And how can you get rid of 'em? Because you don't have to believe every thought you have 'cause they're not all true." And we'll talk some more about that later also. The frontal cortex where the blue arrow points - if you put your hand on your forehead, and you were pretending like you were an adolescent, in the throes of brain development and body development and assuming that your brain was completely mature you would touch your forehead and it would feel really hot 'cause that area was done cooking? For adolescents, you'd put your hand there and it would be ice cold. The front lobe of the brain, the frontal cortex part where we make our executive decisions, where we think about the future, where we say, "What will be the consequences of these actions?" Is not yet fully developed during adolescence. Doesn't happen until much later. In girls, the brain's full maturity is believed to happen probably in the early 20s. For boys it can be as late as 30. Now does that mean there are no mature kids who are late adolescents or early in their 20s? Not at all. What it means is our expectations have to be appropriate for the developmental place the kids are in terms of how much we are expecting them to really take in and process in the way of future expectations and consequences. And certainly in the programs that you're working with, the consequences of behavior can be really serious and it's important to know why they need so much external support and good structure for that because it's not going to happen on its own for most kids. There's additional differences in the brain and if our little beaker was...was animated, it would be pouring chemicals into this brain and one of those chemicals would be cortisol. Cortisols are stress hormones. When our stress level goes up, our cortisol level increases and when cortisol increases, it shuts down the pathways to learning. For teachers in the classroom, this means if kids come in really stressed, teaching them biology or teaching them algebra or teaching them Shakespeare is not going to be very effective because those other pathways are closed. The higher the stress, the more they're closed and when stress levels are up, cortisol levels escalated, they can stay up as long as 24 hours or more. Especially if additional stress gets added. So for teenagers especially in today's world, there's a tremendous amount of stress from all directions. So their stress level tends to be elevated even when it's at its baseline. My colleague, Michael, says, "It's just that we have elevated the average stress level so much now that kids are pretty much always stressed." There's a chronic stress syndrome that affects many of our children and when they test on this, they find that children are the largest group of people who are suffering from chronic stress. So we talk to parents and we talk to programs and we talk to teachers about how do we minimize stress to help kids get this cortisol under control and we'll talk about that some more. Another, um, chemical is dopamine. Dopamine's a neural transmitter. It's called the "feel good" neural transmitter. It's what you get a high of when something great happens or something a little bit scary or edgy. When you ride a roller coaster and you come off and you say, "Wow. Let's do that again." Your dopamine has increased and it has found its way into each of those little connections of your neurons and it makes you feel great and you'd like to feel that way again. Teenagers have more of these receptors because their brains during adolescence, during puberty, when all of their hormones are flooding their brain and body? They have huge growth in the brain so they have tremendous amounts of neurotransmitters going into many, many more receptors. So they feel great more than we do as our brain matures. So if they're using drugs, they're more prone to become addicted because they have more places for the drugs to attack. If they use alcohol, they're more prone to become addicted and have alcoholism issues. People don't start drinking until age 21 or later have a significantly decreased prob - probability of ever becoming an alcoholic because they have fewer places for the addiction to take hold. This is important information for kids to have. It isn't just that we don't want you to drink because we're the adults and we make the rules. It's because from a health standpoint and a development standpoint, we know that for the long-term health of your body and your brain, waiting'd be a really good idea. So that's what dopamine does. It gives us that great feeling. For the kids you work with who have resources, whose families can provide them with opportunities - in Colorado our kids go skiing. If you're on the coast, your kids may go surfing or they may get to swim a lot. Um Kids everywhere do some skateboarding. They ride roller coasters. They get to do things that are a little edgy but have a safe component around them. Kids who don't have that? Those resources? Kids that don't have access to those things don't get to do those things and they find their thrill another way because they need this dopamine, too. Serotonin is the opposite. Serotonin is what calms us back down and what we want is for kids to process more serotonin to bring 'em down to an even level. The female brain processes serotonin much more efficiently than males. They - males have more serotonin. They just don't process it as well. So when the boys get up from their dopamine, when they get that rush, it's harder for them to come back down. Oxytosin is a chemical that it's good for girls to know about particularly because it's called the "tend and befriend" hormone. What it does is is it gives us this feeling of being connected and being bonded. Women who are pregnant get increased amounts of oxytosin. When we nurse we get increased amounts of oxytosin which bonds us to our infant in normal circumstances. Male oxytosin levels are significantly lower all the time except when kids have sex or when adults have sex. Oxytosin levels in males and females tend to both escalate when they have sex. So boys'll say, "I love you. I want to take you to the prom." You know. "I'm your boyfriend forever" while his oxytosin is up because this chemical is making him want to bond. But his chemical's going to drop down. Sometimes that de-escalation starts within the hour. For girls, oxytosin levels will remain high because they are higher so she thinks they're bonded and he wants to go play basketball. Doesn't make him a bad guy. It means there's a chemical reaction in the female system that is not as present in the male system. And when young people don't know this, they assume it's all about feelings and it's all about emotions and it's all about the kind of person you are. And when they have this information they can know it's not just about the kind of person you are. It's also about what your biology leads you to do and you can control that if you know about it. So we give kids good information, they can make better decisions. The scans that we have show the male brain at rest and the female brain at rest and this just builds on all that information we have about...the male brain at rest is much less active than the female brain. Goes back to that whole multitasking piece. So this means if you're wanting to engage your boys in content with your program and it's boring - if it's lecture format, if it's not interactive - if they don't perceive it as being really relevant - this brain that you're looking at where it says "Male Brain" - that's how much activity you'll be getting if they get bored. And when they get bored and disengaged and go to a rest state, it's really hard to get 'em back. And in that rest state the information won't get through. The female brain is different because even if the girls are bored, they'll hang with you a lot longer. They'll stick around 'cause maybe you're going to say something. Remember that...that oxytosin drives them to want to...to be taking care of and nurturing their relationships with the adults and with their peers also. So we have some advantage there with the girl's brain being more active even at rest. Means we have to design our programs differently for girls and boys. About 20 percent of males and females are what Michael calls a "bridge brain" meaning that - that they're male or they're female. It's not about that. It's about how does our brain process information and about 20 percent of us fall right in the middle which means that the male who might uh teach kindergarten or first grade who might be more interested in verbal and emotive things - it might be a female who's really interested in math and engineering and science. Women who are lawyers tend to be bridge brain. And what this relates to is the amount of testosterone in our systems which promote that visual spatial as opposed to verbal emotional processing. This is a website you can go to if you want to check where you fall on that. Uh, the Web site's been around a long time. They've done over a million different scans - or different of these tests. If you go to that website and in the search box type "sex ID" - don't go to Google and type "sex ID" because you'll get to a whole different place. But go to this website and type this in. It'll pop up a quiz, a test with four different sections and after it's over, it'll give you the results of that. This is a great thing to use with older adolescents. With younger kids, they're still, you know, kind of in that twilight zone of not knowing who they are so sometimes this is not as effective for them. But for the older kids, it's good for them to see because then they can say, "Wow! I process more verbally. So using verbal processing in my communications will be more helpful to me." Or, "I process more visually and spatially, so that kind of processing - that kind of program will help me more." Give the kids some ideas of what they need. Diet has a big impact on our brain and how healthy it is for both boys and girls. Um Some food constricts blood flow to the brain. Caffeine is one of those. If you're like me, I love my coffee in the morning, but because of this research, I try really hard to limit my coffee. I don't drink it at any other time of the day. I drink a couple cups, occasionally three because what we want - especially for young people when they're in learning mode - we want as much blood flow as possible in their brain. The blood is carrying the nutrients, the proteins, the oxygen they need for the brain to work efficiently. If the kids are stopping on their way to school to get a jolt or a Pepsi with added caffeine or, you know, something from Starbucks, they're really limiting their ability to learn while that caffeine is in their system. It's like any other drug, it has an impact. Too many carbohydrates make the brain groggy. So if kids are eating only toast and cereal for breakfast, that doesn't help either. So what difference does the difference make? Some of the early differences so that we can build on these as we talk later is that at birth, the cortex develops more rapidly in girls so they develop language more quickly. They process serotonin better so they're not quite as active usually - um even in utero. And you can think about that with your own kids or with people you know who have had children. Did their baby boys and girls move as much in the womb? Um, they have better peripheral vision. Again, we talked about that. They hear equally well out of both ears and they have equal visual skills with either eye. The eyes are quite different in males and females and research has shown us that. They're more interested in spaces than things. If you have a mobile over their bed and you come to the side of the crib to talk to the baby, a girl baby will shift her field of vision much more quickly than a male baby will and leave it longer on the face than on the thing. Girls have more finely developed fine motor skills early on. When they start kindergarten at four or five, they're much better prepared based on their fine motor skill development to hold a pencil and write. They prefer soft, cuddly things and that has to do with our, our more - we have about 35 percent more receptors in our skin to feel tactile things. So we just enjoy the feel of things more. And by age three, usually we can understand about 99 percent of speech coming from girls. For boys it comes a little later. The differences for boys are that there's a higher incidence of prenatal and birth complications. The Y chromosome seems to bring with it some fragility that we don't think about when we look at the men in our world and our boys and we think they're tough and rough and tumble and strong. But the Y chromosome really in some ways makes them biologically more fragile. Um Twenty-five percent higher infant mortality rate, especially with preemies. And they're more vigorous in...in utero...move around more. They're more interested in objects than faces. Those boys will look at the mobile. They make peek over to see who that is hanging over the side of the bed, but then they're going to go back to looking at their mobile because again that, that spatial mechanical part of their brain makes them interested in objects moving through space. They have better depth perception. That's that distance that they needed to be able to look and see when they were hunting. We believe that's where that comes from. They're less bothered by loud noises. Girls tend to respond with a more of a startled re-...response to loud noises. They hear better in their right ear in general and their left eye tends to be dominant. Whether they're left- or right- handed doesn't make a difference. They have more developed gross motor skills. While the girls have the fine motor skills for the pencil and learning to write, the boys have the better developed gross motor skills because they have more spinal fluid connecting their brain and body so they tend to move more as they learn. Um, they get more broken bones as children and that's because they take more risks. They climb more trees. They go faster. They're just more willing to - to do risky behaviors so they're more physically active. They speak their first words later than girls and as we said, girls are usually by age three you can understand them. For boys sometimes it takes until about age four, four-and-a-half. So they're at a somewhat different place when they start school in terms of the amount of vocabulary, their ability to write. The boys'll catch up but when they start at different places and we put stress on them to do things like learn to read and write, to sit still and be quiet, it puts the boys at somewhat of a disadvantage for a while. So the unique and bizarre land of adolescence which we'll talk a lot more about in the next, uh, web - webinar. Boys as they hit puberty and generally boys are hitting puberty a year-and-a-half or two later than girls. What our science is showing us now is that girls are hitting puberty some as young as third and fourth grade. Tremendous body changes happen and when you begin to see the outward signs of puberty in the girls and the boys, that's your signal that inward signs of change are also occurring. The brain is beginning to change. The testosterone that boys got in utero that set them up as a male brain will now get added to seven to ten times a day as the testosterone surges through their system, develops their body physically, their - they become more sexually mature. And for the boys, the biological imperative is different than it is for girls during this time. Uh The testosterones imperative for the boys is to go forth and multiply. That's what it is saying to their body. They're ready to reproduce. Now we don't want 'em reproducing at this age and that's one reason programs like yours are important. Because we want them to abstain from that behavior. But they're in conflict with their biology and if you think about the life expectancy that our species used to have - that humans used to have, beginning to reproduce as an early teenager wasn't out of line because you only lived to your mid-twenties. So in order for our - our line to pass on, we were reproducing earlier. Well our average life expectancy now is what? Seventy-seven, seventy-eight? We don't need to be reproducing earlier to make sure we're still here, but our biology evolved at a much slower pace than our society. So our kids need some help because the biology is saying do one thing and their ship out there, their cultural roles, the norms, the things we want them to know about the world and how it works in their best interest is that - No, that's probably not such a good idea. But the boys don't know that. The girl's biology is sending her a different signal. The signal it's sending her is, Find a mate who has the best potential genetic material to create the potential child with the best rate of survival. Because genetically and, and historically that is what we needed was to have the best species to go on. And a lot of times people will say, "Well, why did the girls choose the bad boys?" Well, maybe the bad boys look a bit like strong warriors. They tend to be more aggressive. They tend to be at least acting like they're more sure of themselves. They tend to put themselves in the forefront. They tend to be the heroes. Often times they're our sports leaders and things like that. And girls are drawn to them because it appears that they're strong and might provide the best, um, genetic information for a child. This is all happening to these kids at a time when we do not want them even thinking about this. We want them thinking about school and we want them thinking about their future and we want them thinking about the context within which all this revolves. And their biology is fighting against them. So they're not bad kids. They're just getting mixed messages and without good, solid um cultural foundations, moral foundation, good character development - things like abstinence programs that can really help them understand what's really going on - they need good information. Many times folks'll say, "Well, kids can't make good decisions." And often that's because they don't have good information. Um My experience with our program was that when you start to give the kids information, they might giggle a little at first, but then they would take notes and then they would listen carefully and they would ask good questions. And the better the information they got about making decisions, the better decisions we found they would make. I'm sure you found the same with the kids you work with. Some of the things we need to do is really answer their questions. When they ask us questions, we need to provide them with information because they need that information from adults that they trust, that they respect. Because if they don't find it from adults they trust and respect, they'll find it from each other. And none of them have the right information. Sometimes you can get it out of a book but in general, you can't. You need to get that from...from the adults in your world that have shown you that they can be trusted who will give you honest answers with respect. Because then they'll ask us the questions they really need the answers to. And I believe we have some time for questions. Jon? JON: Thanks, Kathy. That's great and we do so I'll open it up to questions or comments. Remember to ask a question or make a comment you'll need to press star seven to un-mute your line. Once your question has been answered, please press star six to mute your line again. When you ask a question, please identify who you are and where you are from. All right. Who has the first question or comment? PAULENE: Kathy, this is Pauline Ocanamon (phonetic) with First Choice Clinic in Fargo, North Dakota. KATHY: Hi. PAULENE: Thank you for your information. I'm curious to - um, understand what is the cause of young people going into puberty at an earlier age today. KATHY: That's a really good question and we don't know. The answer is we don't know. There are - there's a lot of speculation. Um, some scientists believe that there are some environmental factors affecting it. That it's hormones in our foods and hormones in our milk and - but they don't know that for sure? Um Some think that it's plastics and we seem to think it's plastics a lot of times when we don't know what else it is. There is some belief and there is some research to support that for girls particularly who are being raised in environments where the father figure in the family is not biologically related to them - so if you have like a stepdad, even - a great guy, good stepdad, good role model, but he is not biologically related to the girl, that there is a biological pheromone disconnect that can cause her system to trigger puberty earlier. And there is some research on that. We have several articles. If you're interested and you email me, I'll email you the links for those to take a look at. You know, but the short answer is we really don't know. We think it's probably a number of things. Um, some researchers have said, "Well, it's because our - our food is healthier today. Kids are getting better nutrition. They're getting better healthcare so their bodies are maturing more easily. I - I don't know. I think we'll probably find out more about that as we go along. Um, but it's not necessarily a good thing because kids are entering a physical period that they are not at all psychologically and socially ready for. JON: Great. Next question? DARLA: Hello? KATHY: Hello. You're there... DARLA: Okay. Um, I'm Darla from the um, Christian Care Center in Florida. Um I want to go back to the point you were making about the addiction... KATHY: Uh, hum. DARLA: ...because there's more dopamine? KATHY: Yes. DARLA: And what other things besides um alcohol and drugs could they be addicted to? Could sex be one of the addictions? Or could there be other things? KATHY: um I think sex could easily be one of those addictions. Because what you want to think about is, "How good does that make you feel?" DARLA: Uh, hum. KATHY: And for some people depending on...when - when kids enter puberty and their brain begins this massive growth, some of the research says that we can double the gray matter in our brain - which is the thinking part of our matter - in a year's time. Which means that all of those um neurons for gray matter will have more and more and more dendrites. So it's like instead of having one cable connecting you to something, you might have 150 cables connecting you to something. And all those cables have the capacity to respond to that dopamine and feel good. So if having sexual activity is the thing that gives you that good feeling, what it makes you want is more of that. You might be addicted to video games. I mean we have programs now to help kids get un-addicted to video games. Anything that gives you this dopamine-type of response in your brain - and it could be sex. It could be drugs. It could be alcohol. Could be video games. Um It could be a hobby. I mean you've known kids who were addicted to a game or addicted to an activity. If that - if we get the "dopamine rush" as I call it, from that activity, that makes us want to do that more and more and more. So I think absolutely - sex could be one of those things. And it's a bad time to get addicted to that because the addiction can be so much stronger because of the - the massive brain growth and the massive potential for connection. DARLA: Thank you. KATHY: You're welcome. JON: Kathy, I'd like to throw in there, too - this is Jon - that that would include like pornography and this easy access that kids have to all these different things on the Internet, right? KATHY: Abso- Anything. When you respond to that thing, and if you - if you somehow programmed yourself - or your initial response to anything including pornography, is very pleasurable for you. You're going to get that dopamine kick 'cause your brain doesn't know the difference. It doesn't know the difference between uh, uh, skiing down a really cool mountain and getting a thrill or looking at some pornography and getting a thrill. All it knows is there's a physical reaction within the brain. And whatever you physically react to that way, it will want more of. So the potential with this is that you could actually be addicted to just about anything. JON: That makes it really difficult then for these kids that - I mean, they're not mature and they're - they have to make these decisions when they're, when they're uh, exposed to the Internet and all these things that didn't used to happen... KATHY: Absolutely. JON: ...especially if there's no adult supervision. KATHY: And, and when we do parent programs and we do education sessions for parents, we say, "Your television, your computers, any of those kind of things need to be in a community part of the house that you have easy access to the times when your children are using them. Because how can you monitor what they're doing if they're - pri - you know, doing it in the privacy of their rooms? And parents'll say, "Well, but it's his TV." But it's your house. JON: And he's not mature enough to do that, right? KATHY: He's not mature enough to make all those decisions and you want to keep him safe and that's your job. It's not for him to like you. I mean you'd like him to like you, but you need them to respect you and you need them to trust you. And the thing you have to trust...they have to trust you with is you can keep them safe because that's your job as a parent. And keeping them safe means monitoring their access to things that might not be safe. JON: Makes a lot of sense to me. Next question? Comment? CAROL: Hello? JOHN: Yes. CAROL: This is Carol, uh Adler (phonetic) from Healthy Visions in Cincinnati. You were saying before that your brain had 30 billion working parts. How many neurons did you say they - it had? KATHY: Well, what they - what they think, they actually - the scientists can't agree. CAROL: Okay. KATHY: But the usual number they land on is 100 billion. CAROL: For the neurons... KATHY: For the number of neurons. CAROL: Okay. KATHY: Most of which we have when we're born. CAROL: Okay. KATHY: They grow and get bigger, but we have most of the neurons we'll have, most of the nerve cells in our brain that - when we're born. CAROL: Okay. KATHY: And that's a lot of neurons. CAROL: Okay. KATHY: A lot of potential. CAROL: Okay. So when you were saying before that the dopamine has more places to attach to before the age of 21? I was...I'm a little unclear about the addiction thing... KATHY: Okay. Think about it this way. That up until you hit puberty, your body's going along, developing and you're maturing physically some and your brain's growing but when you hit puberty - puberty is to prepare your body to be an adult. It's to prepare your brain for things it didn't need to do when you were younger. And so part of the growth that happens is you get these huge massive, um, amounts of hormones. In, in boys it's mainly testosterone although they get a little progesterone and estrogen. Girls get 32 or 33 different hormones and a little bit of testosterone. But as we're getting those hormones, it's changing the growth pattern. And in our brain what it's doing is it's causing some massive growth so that really adolescence is the second best time in our life to learn something. When you're dealing with young adolescents and into their puberty period, that's the best time for them to take in new information because each neuron has the potential to grow many, many more dendrites which is an...an extra piece of the neuron - each piece of that neuron is like an information machine to take in information and to connect to other neurons. It's like the brain is going to build roads during puberty. And those are the roads that your brain is going to travel for the rest of your life. To process information, to respond to things, to learn, to access things you have learned. Those roads are really important and during adolescence you have the potential to build many, many, many more roads. Which means alcohol can travel all those extra roads. Toward the end of puberty as the brain starts to calm down and we start to get some balance around our hormones and we fall into our adult cycle of those, what the brain will do is go through and say, "Okay. All of the dendrites, all of those connections we didn't need - that we didn't connect? It will prune away." They die off. So there are few - there's fewer ways to build the roads. So if you start using alcohol later, there's not as many roads for it to travel to parts of your brain for you to become addicted. Does that make sense? CAROL: Okay. KATHY: Does that help? CAROL: Some. Yeah. KATHY: Yeah, and so once that... (BOTH CAROL AND KATHY TALKING AT ONCE) CAROL: ...a day to process this... (LAUGHING) KATHY: Yeah. Well, it is and, and, and - and think of it. If it's hard for us, imagine how hard it is for the kids. But there's some really good resources and we can talk about those next time - some resources that you can use with the kids to help them understand this concept. Because I think once they do understand it and say, "Wow. The potential during this time for me to do great things is so intense that I want to minimize the bad things I do because I want to maximize my potential for doing great things." And maybe the great thing is to learn to drive a car. The great thing is to be a good outside receiver. You know, the great thing is to be a good dancer. We want to really use the things that kids love that they can think about today and tomorrow because they're not thinking about 30 years from now. To show them that taking care of yourself and taking care of your brain and taking care of your body and making good decisions is the way to become successful at those things that right now you believe spell success. And to avoid at all cost those things that could keep you from being successful. Does - is that helpful? CAROL: Uh, hum. Uh, hum. KATHY: Good. CAROL: Uh, hum. Thanks. KATHY: You're welcome. JON: Kathy, I'd like to call your attention to the screen. There's a question on there that you should... KATHY: I saw that... JON: Okay. Great. KATHY: Okay. Is - is this the one you're looking at? The - Is there anything in brain chemistry? JON: Yes. KATHY: For example, decreased fetal testosterone that would result in homosexuality? Um, that is not what the research shows. What the research shows at this point is that there are a number of places in the brain where there's some genetic difference in how the brain is designed. Whether that is the direct result of decreased testosterone or something else - they really don't know yet. But there are some markers that are dissimilar in a gay person's brain. For instance, there are some markers in a gay male brain that are closer to the way a female brain is designed. And vice versa. I am not an expert on this so I can't really speak to it. But what I know is there's a lot of research going on in this area and I think we're going to know more in the next decade. But then we're going to know more about all of our brains in the next decade and how they're wired. And we don't always know what the causation is. We may be able to look at something, um - for instance, we look at where the male verbal center tends to be focused and we say, "Ah. We believe the result of this is that boys use less words, that they're less prepared when they start school and based on what we see in the classroom and our, our quantitative research, we think - from a theoretically standpoint, we believe that's the causation. Are the scientists as ready to sign off on that? Probably not. Because they need more scientific evidence. So we continue to learn and we continue to grow in our knowledge. Um, so that's an area that's really - there's a lot of questions about it still and I don't have the answer to that. JON: That's okay. Thank you very much. Next question. KRISTIN: Hey, Kathy. This is Kristin from the Women's Care Center. I have a question in regards to the "20 percent of the bridge brain"... KATHY: Uh, hum. KRISTIN: ...that you mentioned. KATHY: Right. KRISTIN: Is there a reason why it's 20 percent? Or why that bridge exists? KATHY: Well, I don't know. There's - we know it's about 20 percent because they've done a lot of testing. Um A fellow named Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a book called "The Essential Difference" which you might find really interesting if this area interests you. Um And just based on how they look at the amount of testosterone and the amounts of wiring in terms of spatial and verbal wiring, we know that - for instance, female prosecuting attorneys tend to have the highest testosterone levels of any female. They're still female. It's not a question of are they male or female. They're still female. Because male and female testosterone levels never overlap. Women with the highest testosterone levels are still significantly lower than men with the lowest testosterone levels because testosterone's just - it's a male hormone. But we know that women - female prosecuting attorneys tend to have higher testosterone levels, tend to be more bridge-brained because they do more of that spatial mechanical thinking in the work that they do. And it would make sense if you think that they work in an environment that's very competitive. You know, they're trying to win. They use a lot of coded language which the male brain tends to be more in tune with. Uh, um, there's some really good information on that, particularly in Baron-Cohen's book and some others and I'll make myself a note to have a little more information about that next time for you, too. Do we have time for any more questions, Jon? JON: Yes. Next question or comment? KATHY: Oh! There's a...there's a question on the board. Can we respond to that one? JON: Go ahead. Take that one. KATHY: Comment on the recent news item where 100 college presidents recommended reducing the legal age of drinking from 21 to 18. It's a really, really bad idea. And anybody who looks at this research - and that isn't just us looking at this. This is people everywhere who can look at this research - that we know from a developmental standpoint, it's very dangerous to let kids drink when they're younger. And his - the concerns of these folks is that, "Well, this will stop binge drinking." If kids are drinking now at 18 and it's not legal till 21, then if it's legal at 18, it just probably means we'll have more kids at 15 and 16 drinking because they're trying to scoot around the rules. That's part of what adolescence does for us is it causes us to challenge the rules, to push the limit, to see where we can go. And we just know, we know the research is very clear that if kids don't drink until they're 21, the preponderance of addiction to alcohol is significantly reduced. So from a scientific standpoint, a research-based standpoint, it's a terrible idea. JON: Okay. That's good feedback. There's another question there, too. Do you want to take that one? KATHY: Is this about - uh let's see where - uh is this about the 300 trillion connecting dendrites that must prune down to 100 trillion? Um Tamera is that - Tamera, I don't know. Um, I don't know those exact numbers. I know that the pruning process has to happen. It gets - gets - gets rid of the connections we don't need that we haven't used. I know it has to prune for the brain to become more efficient. Because the energy then that the brain uses goes into those connections that we've made, not wasted on the ones we didn't. Whether those are the exact numbers? No. I do not know. (PAPERS RUSTLING) But I'll make myself a note and see if I can find that out for you next time. JON: Okay. I can answer that other question. The PowerPoint will be accessible on a web, um, site next week probably. Okay? Plus the recording. Um We're able to get them up pretty quickly anymore so it'll probably be some time next week. And also Richard Panzer, um I saw that you started a question. I'm not sure - did you have - I only saw part of it show up on the screen. Do you have a question you'd like to ask? RICHARD: Yeah. I - I - I just had a question about the issue of same-sex attraction. Um, I mean, Kathy commented a little bit about that but...you know, a lot of the schools, this issue is being asked. KATHY: Yeah. Asked in what context? RICHARD: Well, the, I mean we've - we've seen actually some of the schools are saying there's an increase in uh, you know, lesbian girl behavior and uh, I don't know if this even relates directly to brain development. It may just be a cultural soc-...? KATHY: Yeah. It's - I don't know that it really relates directly either to what we're talking about here. Um, but again, if we think about the lighthouse and you think about the ship, culture does have a lot of impact. RICHARD: Right. KATHY: And - and one of the issues we deal with when we're working with adolescents - and in our abstinence program, we work with girls - predominantly girls from 8th through 12th grade. And what we found is those kids are trying on a lot of different things. And particularly girls who are quote-unquote at risk which I think all kids are at some point. But for the kids who are trying out things - to try to get out of that, that dissonance in their life, they may try out a lot of different kind of things. And girls who are oxytosin-driven who are trying to, to establish and maintain relationships often times our relationships with our female friends can be very, very powerful and give us a lot of that feedback that we need because the boys aren't as driven with oxytosin. And, and girls will often, even in relationships with boys, and this goes into adulthood, oxytosin can be the kind of compelling um thing that gets us into bad habits of trying to maintain relationships that aren't even good for us. RICHARD: Uh, hum. KATHY: And we see that in women who are abused and in women who are in one bad relationship after another. Whether or not this has an impact on kids quote-unquote trying out a variety of kinds of relationships during adolescence? It well could. Again, that's not my area of expertise so I don't want to say too much about it but I - I do know that teenagers are in, in a real identity crisis mode often regardless of what their ultimate place they'll land will be. Um, lots of kids are asking lots of questions from that time like "Who am I?" and, "Where do I fit?" And if they don't find a place to fit and if they don't get good answers to their questions, again, they'll struggle with each other to try find the answers. And then it's sort of like the blind leading the blind. RICHARD: Hm. KATHY: I don't know if that's helpful... RICHARD. No. Yeah, it is. Thank you. KATHY: Good. There's a question up here that says, "What does the research say is the best approach to help those in their early 20s who have formed addictions in their teenage years?" Um, there is some good - good therapy available in terms of giving kids - again, giving kids good information. Daniel Amen, who's a neuro-psychiatrist (phonetic) with some clinic in California and Seattle and a couple on the East Coast, works a lot with teenagers and he has this video and I will have this information for you the next time, but the video is called "Which Brain Do You Want?" And he works with kids in their late teens who have been addicted to substances and does brain scans with them and shows them the impact on their brain of the behaviors they've been participating in and that can be pretty powerful. Um It shows the holes in their brains which aren't real holes, but they're processing where the blood's not flowing and not processing the way it would have had they not uh become addicted to substances be it alcohol or drugs. And I think that, again, it can be very powerful to give kids the information because then they say, "Wow. What can I do about this?" Well, first you can stop doing the thing you're doing that's causing the problem. And then use therapy, use groups. Again, have good - adult role models are so significant in helping kids change behavior because they're looking for someone they can trust who can show them how to be safe. And once they can establish those trusting relationships, that person can have a powerful impact. The peer group can help or hinder depending upon the peer group they get into. But it's a lot harder to cure an addiction than it is to try to avoid one. So in my mind, we're better off giving kids information as early - and just saying "No" isn't the information they need because then that just sets up another opportunity for them to say, "Well, the big guy said 'No' so let's see how we can get around that." But to say to them, "Part of the reason you don't want to do this is because look what it will do to your brain and it will keep you from doing the thing it is you want to do. And so how can you avoid that?" Amen also has a really good curriculum that can be used in high school - with high school students and I've used it with middle school students um called "Making a Good Brain Great" which is a 12-week curriculum that can be blended with other curriculums. You might be able to build pieces of it into your program, which gives kids some of the information we've talked about today and shows them how to by diet, by exercise, by changing their thinking patterns, by evaluating relationships that they can make changes for themselves that will make them healthier. Now the thing you can't do - please don't go back to the kids you're working with and say, "Well, now things will be better when your brain is mature." Because the last thing you want to say to a teenager who's idealistic and is looking for respret (SIC) - respect is, "Well, you're not mature in your brain yet." What you want to say to them is, "You have this marvelous brain that is growing and learning and it's going to be something great one of these days. And everything that you're doing is moving it in the direction of being as great as it's possible for it to be." So just be careful how you share the information. Share it in a way that's respectful and - and takes into account who these kids are and how fragile they can be sometimes in their - their whole area of self-esteem and self-image. MAN'S VOICE: What is the full name of that uh, that person who gave that... KATHY: Daniel Amen - A-M-E-N. And he has a website that's Amen Clinics A-M-E-Nclinics.com. He does a lot of work with kids who suffer from ADHD. Uh, from brain injury, from trauma and from substance abuse. MAN'S VOICE: Thank you. KATHY: You're welcome. JOHN: Okay. Next question...or comment. KATHY: Well, we've got another question on the board here. "How often is it important for teens to hear this information in order for it to stick? The health educator - we're allowed in the school system about six days a year. Other than that, they never hear about this." Well, general research says to us, "You have to hear something seven different times, seven different ways before you really get it." And if you're only there six days (LAUGHS) that'd be pretty tough to do. Um, kids need to be hearing at school from a health educator, at home from their parents, from other adults in their lives. They need to be hearing it enough that they're talking about it among themselves. Because none of us are ever going to have enough exposure to them to give it to them as many times as they need. But if they're getting good information that they can then share and, and you're including the parents in what you're trying to do - and I know how hard that is. The kids in our program often times only had one parent. That one parent was working a couple of jobs. Um, not that they didn't care. Often times they just were exhausted. And so getting the parents involved is hard but it's really crucial because many of these parents have made the same mistakes you're trying to help the kids avoid, particularly around the areas of abstinence and teen pregnancy. And so they can be wonderful advocates once they have good information. But, um you know, six days a year, that's not very much. JON: Good point. Um, another question... (PAUSE) Kathy, one of the things that you had mentioned - this is Jon again... KATHY: Okay... JON: ...is cortisol. How it affects stress and the - the importance of reducing stress and I was just wondering as far as - especially with sex education and some of the topics that are addressed um with abstinence education - with - how beneficial it is to like gender-split classes for different topics for things? If that would - helps reduce stress or that, that improves or increases learning? KATHY: It absolutely helps reduce stress and it absolutely increases learning. Um, having gender-specific groups so that kids can ask questions they would not ask in front of the opposite sex especially during adolescence. Keep in mind that during adolescence when kids are in puberty and, and again - they're starting early and it goes on for several years - that what girls are trying to do is look appealing to boys. And what boys are trying to do is impress girls. And asking questions that may imply you don't know something or that you need information about something that may be a sensitive area is sometimes very, very difficult. So when you get the kids in single-sex groups, they will ask questions they'd never ask in a co-ed group. And especially with young adolescents, it's a really good model to use. We always did this with our groups and, and the boys - I mean, the boys can't ask questions about how their body operates in front of girls without being mortified at this age. One issue: Boys get 7 to 10 spikes a day in during puberty - when puberty's just really going - 7 to 10 times a day they'll get these huge rushes of testosterone which will bathe their brain and their body in testosterone. One of the things that causes you to do is have an erection and sometimes it can cause you to do that at a time when it's really inconvenient - when people are watching. Um, we had a seventh grade teacher who said I asked this guy to come up to the board and do a problem, to complete a math problem. And he said, "I'd rather not." And she said, "Well, I'd rather you did and if you don't, you'll get a zero." He said, "Fine. Give me a zero." And this kid at least had a close enough relationship with his teacher that he went to her later and tried to, you know, kind of explain and she finally got it and said, "Oh, my gosh. It never occurred to me these could be issues boys could be dealing with in ways that we never thought of." And that's sort of an extreme example, but that's the kind of thing that boys won't talk about in front of girls. But it's something they need to talk about and frankly, they need adult males then to help them kind of work through. "Okay, what do you do? "What do you do when your body sort of betrays you at times and how do you handle these things. And if there are things I'm not supposed to do, what do I do instead? You know, what - how am I supposed to handle this?" And so I think it's really crucial for you to think about if you're not offering single-sex opportunities, um, that you think about that as part of your program plan. That's a great question, Jon. JON: Great. Thanks. Great um point. There's another question on the - uh, or a comment on the board. KATHY: Okay. Let me see if I'm back yet...okay. Let me get to that one. "Is particular research on learning for boys and girls of teenage parents?" Well, what we know is, and as you know from the research, that kids who are raised in environments where they had teenage parents tend to have teenage parents. The propensity is higher. All I can say is, "If you're a parent at 16 or 17 or 18, you may be a good person, but you're not mature. Your brain's not mature. Your body's not finishing being mature. You won't have those high-level, problem-solving capacities that you need in order to make good decisions as a parent. So you won't - you'll not only now not be making good decisions for yourself, but not making good decisions for your children. And most people want to be good parents. Even teenagers who have babies most of them - they want to be good parents. So we have to help them understand, if you want to be a good parent the best thing to do is not become a parent when you're not ready to do it. Wait until you've developed those skills, that maturity, so that you can be the best parent that we know you want to be. That's another really good reason to wait. I think there's another question under there, too. "I've always..." Oh. "I always have a box that index cards are dropped in at the end of class and that always seems to help with questions." Absolutely. 'Cause there are some questions even in a single-sex group a guy might not want to ask and in a co-ed group nobody would want to ask. And if the kids can trust you that the questions will be anonymous so that you can couch them in such a way that nobody really knows who asked, that's a great way. And if nobody asks a question you really want to answer? You can always lace the boxes with a few questions of your own. JON: Great point. There's another question or comment? KATHY: On the board? JON: No... KATHY: Oh, okay. JON: No, I'm just asking if there's somebody else now that has one. That's a great question. KATHY: Excellent question. JON: We'll wait a few more seconds. Anybody has one? KATHY: There's - um while you're waiting, I'm going to reference another book. Um, it's a really good book and I can't remember the author off the top of my head because once you're post-menopausal, you forget these things. But the name of the book is, "How Can We Talk About That?" and I'll have that reference for you next time. Um...it's an excellent book to help parents learn to deal with questions of sex and sexuality with children from - from the time they get them. You know, "How do we teach kids about good body consciousness." In addition to "How do we answer questions when they get old enough to start asking us about sex?" It's an excellent, excellent book. The woman who wrote it, I've spoken with her. Um I think she did a very nice job and it would be a good resource for you to take a look at. You know, some things in there might fit for you and some might not, but there's excellent information and good information to pass along to parents. (TRANSCRIPTION NOTE: "HOW CAN WE TALK ABOUT THAT? OVEROCMING PERSONAL HANGUPS SO WE CAN TEACH KIDS THE RIGHT STUFF ABOUT SEX AND MORALITY by Jane DiVita Woody) JON: Great. That's always nice to have additional resources. So is there any more questions or comments before we close this? (PAUSE) Okay. If not, this concludes today's web cast. I would like to thank Kathy Stephens. We sincerely appreciate your work with the Gurion Institute and expertise and knowledge you shared today and we'll look forward to part two. We will be announcing the date for that in the near future. We will also appreciate everyone that - that we will - we also appreciate everyone that's participated in this call, especially those who joined in the discussion, sent questions. Um That's always very helpful. Um, I'd like to take a minute to announce a few of our upcoming events. We have two more grantee showcase web casts coming up. On September 10th, Dr. Nancy Copolla from Healthy Respect will present about their organization's innovative methods for communicating health data and statistics to teens. And the name of that is "The Truth about your Reproductive Health." And on September 18th, Vanessa Allen, educational coordinator for Worth the Wait, will share about her organization's innovative ideas for working with Hispanic girls and their families. The webcast title is "The Quincanera Celebration for Preserving the Right of Passage." Please visit our website for more information and to register for these and other events listed there also. The part two of this will probably end up being early October um so it'll probably be about a month before we follow up with part two on this. So we look forward to seeing you then. And um lastly, please remember that as technical assistance advisors, we've available to answer any questions um and if we don't know the answers, we'll try to find out who does. And email us at abstinence@Pal-Tech.com h.com>. Thanks for joining us for today's Webcast and have a great rest of the day.