No, you’re not imagining it — your teenagers really do tune out your voice, study says

We’ve known for ages that teenagers have a tendency to not listen to their parents.

But a new study from Stanford University was able to prove it — the teen brain is wired to shift away from listening to Mom and Dad and to focus more on unfamiliar voices.

In other words, teens aren’t tuning their parents out to antagonize them — at least, not always. They’re doing it because their brains are wired to.

“Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices,” Daniel Abrams, lead study author and clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a news release from Stanford Medicine.

Researchers evaluated brain imaging of human voice processing in children between 7 and 16 years old. Before age 13 or so, children show increased brain activity when they hear their mothers’ voices, implying that they pay more attention to them than they do to unfamiliar voices. But after that age, the opposite happens.

“As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this,” Abrams said. “You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

According to the study published April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience, the findings substantiate a well-known truth about the changes that humans go through during adolescence: As children become teens, they also become more independent. Teenagers focus more on “nonfamilial social partners,” like their friends or new people they meet, because they’re relying less on their parents for guidance and figuring out how to interact with the world outside of the family bubble.

“A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be precipitated by an underlying biological signal,” Vinod Menon, the study’s senior author and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in the news release. “That’s what we’ve uncovered: This is a signal that helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”

Researchers found no difference between teen boys and teen girls — all teens went through this shift between the ages of 13 and 14, the release said.

The study also found that teenagers tend to hear all voices better than young children do. The brain’s response to voices is so strongly correlated with age that researchers could tell how old someone was by looking at voice-response information in their brain scan, the release said.

The findings not only offer insight into why the teen years can be a rough time for parents and children but also give researchers a greater understanding of how humans process voices overall.

“The fact that the brain is so attuned to voices makes intuitive sense,” the release said. “Just ask anyone who has ever felt an emotional jolt at hearing a friend’s or family member’s voice after a long time.”