Two of my six grandsons are visiting for the next three weeks. They are 12 and 14. And they live on a different planet. A couple of years ago we all lived together in harmony, sharing board games and Popsicles and TV-for-kids.

Now we whirl in separate orbits, with the boys playing games on smartphones and demanding chocolate-coated nut-encrusted ice cream cones while they watch I'm-almost-afraid-to-look TV in their rooms at 2 a.m. What's fascinating is not that the change has happened, but that it happens a year or two sooner with every generation.

I had to be 15 when I first realized my parents were completely out of sync with the real world. I think my own kids were a year or two younger when they realized what idiots their parents were.

But these kids? Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, described the teenage mind of today for The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

"Adolescence has always been troubled," she writes, "but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. ...What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness." Now, by weirdness, I am not referring to the remark about me by the eldest of these two boys.

"Grandma," he said, "is elderly and rich." That's ridiculous. On both counts. At least, I'm certainly not rich. (And far, far, far from elderly.)

Gopnik says she can track changes in puberty and adolescence going back 200 years with acceleration in the past generation.

So what are we talking about? Emotion and motivation, Gopnik says. According to recent studies at Cornell University, adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards. Or they find those rewards more rewarding than adults do. Like your first love whom you never forget. That's emotion.

Motivation? Moving away from parents and starting to make your own place in a world of your peers. As you gain experience - first love followed by second and third and so forth – you hopefully also gain motivation. The point is to get both these intense natural drives in sync.

So what does all of this have to do to with my grandsons? It forces us to stay in this puberty phase for too long, dog-paddling, if you will, through months of Disneyland before they move on to a more meaningful phase in life.

Sum it up with this phrase: Get a job! It's a task we rarely set upon kids anymore. They're encouraged to do community service. They are overloaded with classroom tasks and underfed with reality, like working at baby sitting or dog walking.

My visiting kids are challenged in school by curriculums that far exceed topics I learned in high school. Yes, learning is critical, but without experiences, learning can shrivel. Experience shapes the brain, says Gopnik. Our social and our cultural lives shape our biology.

Still, she adds, instead of just shaping the brain, kids need to learn how to apply the knowledge in a day-to-day setting. Maybe if my grandsons had a job, they would know the difference between how to spend money and how to earn it.

Of course, I already know the difference, but that doesn't stop me from spending more than I should. Which is why I'm not rich. And, believe me, a long way from being "elderly."

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Contact the writer: jghaas@cox.net (c)2012 The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.) Visit The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.) at www.ocregister.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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