Barbara Strauch's The Primal Teenage

Understanding and accepting the teenage brain takes substantial persuasion and a remarkable memory of one’s own adolescent years. Knowing about teenagers is one concept, but synthesizing your experiences with theirs and perceiving the logic behind their actions is another. Teenagers are a subculture with their ideas and actions alone. In The Primal Teen, Barbara Strauch makes her point valid by appealing to the audience about a familiar, and often unanswered topic, by using rhetorical connections and proven statistics. Although the teen brain differs from children and adults dramatically, Barbara Strauch makes the difficult times of the lives of everyone involved simpler and brings it to a more positive light. Barbara Strauch has two teenagers and like other parents, she did not focus on the neurological reasons her teenagers were becoming very different people than they were (p. xi). She faced the trails and errors
when raising them, and only thought that the infamous stage of adolescence was because of emotional and physical reasons. She realized that other parents of teenagers needed reassurance and needed to know that they were not going to read a book by someone with no experience with teenagers or statistical and factual proof of their behaviors. The subject of the book is important to her because she knows and understands that there is a dramatic change from childhood to adolescence, and many fail to understand why that is. She is an omniscient character to the situation many people experience. Because the book title is The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids, it is obvious that it appeals and speaks to parents of teenagers.
Her primary audience is people who once thought that their teenagers were manipulating and disrespecting them because of a trend. Strauch appeals to her audience’s logos by giving real life situations of other parents of teenagers, and several quotes from them also. She gives them logic by not only providing quotes from parents, but also provides quotes from teenagers and gets their mind frame of the current situation. Her ideas are also heavily supported by scientific evidence. She puts several facts about the human brain and how it changes and functions during adolescent years, stating how several parts of the brain are directly correlated to behavior and thinking in teens. She informs her readers that her information is credible, since she is a science editor, she receives several articles from neurologists about new information and discoveries about the teenage
brain. Not only does she provide credible information and knowledge of the subject, she appeals to the most important part of the reader: their emotions. She knows and understands that readers will be more open to what she has to say if she can appeal to their situation and let them know that she understands it fully. She provides quotes from other parents with their horrific experiences with their teenagers, and appeals to their pathos by using words like “insane” to vividly describe how they might feel about their kids (p. 13). She also gives examples from other parents, such as “she stomped upstairs, flinging over her shoulder the battle cry of a teenage warrior goddess, circa 2003: ‘You suck!’” (p. 5). She knows that several parents can relate to experiences where they think they teenagers have “baffled the best of our thinkers” (p.5). However, she also appeals to the teenagers. She has very non-biased opinions and examples in this book, and adds several quotes from teenagers about what they were feeling at that moment in time. The author is very knowledgeable about the subject and proves it with credible information from doctors and neurologists across the country, with several proven experiments and observations. She directly states how there are several chemicals (and she names them) impact teenage behavior with experiments discovering them. During adolescence, the brain’s functions change as it is rapidly growing, causing a change in behavior. Some parts of the brain develop faster than others, causing mood swings and impulse, as she explains. She does not simply add theories in the book, but rather proven facts and observations. Essentially, Barbara Strauch has an extremely balanced array of rhetoric that she uses to captivate her readers. She appeals and understands viewpoints of readers, while informing them of generally assumed and false impressions they once had.