NARRATOR: The sun is up. And inside the O'Donnells' house, they to get Charlie up.
PAM O'DONNELL, Charlie's Mother: Charles! Charles?
CHARLIE: What!
NARRATOR: Pam tries.
PAM O'DONNELL: Come on!
CHARLIE: No!
NARRATOR: And then Charles, senior.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr., Charlie's Father: Charles, time to get up.
CHARLIE: No! Leave me alone!
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: All right. Well-
CHARLIE: Get out! I want to sleep!
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: All right. Well, time to get up. I'll give you 10 minutes.
PAM O'DONNELL: By the time he in the morning to the time he the door, there's a matter of, like, 11 minutes maximum. So he's a procrastinator. You know, he'll just stay in bed.
NARRATOR: They happen to live in East Providence, Rhode Island, but parents everywhere will recognize the look and the pacing. It's a school day, and there's a teenager to get out of bed.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: We have to remind him, "Do your hair. Get your books. Take your backpack. Have your key for the house." It's a normal routine type of thing.
PAM O'DONNELL:
CHARLIE: No.
PAM O'DONNELL: Practice.
CHARLIE: The bacon is a little burned.
PAM O'DONNELL: Yeah. I'm sorry about that.
Well, he's a very friendly person. He's very outgoing. He's very well-liked outside the house. It's almost like he's a different kid than he is at home because they the attitude we get.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: Well, two more days, you're all done. School's out.
CHARLIE: Uh-huh. One more.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: How come you go to school on Friday?
CHARLIE: Because that's when the unofficial report cards are distributed.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: Well, maybe it'd be a good idea for you to go into school.
CHARLIE: No! [?] Why bother going in and getting out at 10:30? I go in.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: We'll see.
Pam and I to make sure that Charlie does well in high school so that he unknowingly some doors on himself for future opportunities.
It was nice of your mother to cook breakfast for you this morning. Did you say thank you?
CHARLIE: Yes I did, Dad.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: That's good.
CHARLIE: Did I? No?
PAM O'DONNELL: No, you didn't. You're welcome.
CHARLIE: Can I have another drink of orange juice?
NARRATOR: If parents often wonder what on inside the teenage brain, tonight some answers, perhaps more than most parents expect.
Here at the University of Minnesota, this $2 million dollar machine the secrets of another 15-year-old boy to his father. While Colin Nelson lies calmly, a scanning machine - a magnetic resonance imager - will open a window into his brain.
The details are there, but what this picture about mood, learning, memory?
Dr. CHARLES NELSON, University of Minnesota: So he has a good hippocampus. How come he to take out the garbage in the morning?
I wonder if he's awake? The first time we scanned him, when he was about 9, he- with all that noise, he fell asleep.
NARRATOR: Charles Nelson is a neuroscientist and child psychologist at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. CHARLES NELSON: Teenagers have- particularly when first teenagers, have every reason to believe and to feel that no one them, that they themselves are sometimes surprised at what out of their mouth. And a personal example is when my son was 12, he one day just blurted something out and then grinned. And he thought- he thought out loud, "Where did that come from?"
NARRATOR: His father to answer this question. Slowly, a picture of the brain of a boy- not yet an adult, not quite a child.
Dr. CHARLES NELSON: So we can correlate it with real life. And if we show activation in the hippocampus, the question would be, why is it that in this particular case of Colin, why he to bring his books home from school?
I think the problem parents have is, they- no matter how well they think they know their kid, once their kid becomes a teenager, for a brief period of time it's as though they've been invaded by another body or another brain. And suddenly, they quite that kid anymore, and they get thrown off balance.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: [?]. It's a give-and-take situation.
CHARLIE: Well, still- like, they're only about like that. [gesturing] They still got, like, that much more to go.
PAM O'DONNELL: It a lot to let go.
CHARLIE: Not for me. You got to be cool.
PAM O'DONNELL: Well, for me it does.
CHARLIE: You got to be relaxed!
PAM O'DONNELL: I am cool. There's nobody cooler than me, let me tell you. It just a lot, you know? I've- we've raised you to the best of our ability. You may think that we're paranoid or we're uncool or we're too strict-
CHARLIE: All of the above.
PAM O'DONNELL: Well, that's what for us, we feel.
CHARLIE: But you're not the kid! You abide by your own rules. You-
PAM O'DONNELL: I abide by his rules.
NARRATOR: In an artist's studio in Cincinnati, Jim Borgman the flashpoints of life with teens. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Borgman developed the popular Zits cartoon with artist Jerry Scott. Now syndicated in 900 newspapers, Jeremy and his comic strip family are familiar to parents everywhere.
JIM BORGMAN, Cartoonist: Ninety percent of the letters we fall into one wonderful category, which are, "You must have a camera in our house," or you know, "This is my son exactly. I can't believe it. How you this?" Jeremy is 15 years old. He can't drive. He's still stuck within the orbit of his parents' rules, and they are still a much bigger factor in his life than he would like. And so there's that moment before he can get out of the house and drive off on his own when there is the maximum tension in the house.
Dr. CHARLES NELSON: Many parents are thrown for a loop when their kids get to be an adolescent, in some respects. And what I think they need to do is recognize that this is just another phase of child development, and even though their children may be shouting more and talking back more and kicking and- and throwing temper tantrums, it's just a temper tantrum in a 5-foot-tall body instead of an 18-inch-long body.
NARRATOR: And Nelson knows. He's an expert on little babies. This one, Natalie Aune, can already recognize her mother's voice, and she's just a week old. By measuring small brain waves, researchers at Nelson's lab at the University of Minnesota can show how babies quickly, taking in data from the vivid world around them. That period of dramatic growth in Natalie's brain will happen once again just before she a teenager.
Dr. CHARLES NELSON: I think the transition into puberty is analogous to the transition to being a baby, in many respects, that a child suddenly is undergoing fairly substantial changes in their brain development at a very, very rapid pace. And that period of time often, that only a year or two, is a time where we really need to pay very close attention to to our kids.
NARRATOR: But paying attention to a teenager brings a different set of challenges.
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: We have rules that you have to follow while you're in the house, like it or not.
CHARLIE: Did you like your father's rules?
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: Probably not.
CHARLIE: You it? "Probably"?
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: I still a good relationship with my father, Charlie.
CHARLIE: Yeah, but did you like his rules?
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: I would assume he had rules that I didn't care for. But while I was living in the house, I had to abide by the rules. And I feel, you know-
CHARLIE: Did you want to move out of there as soon as possible because of those rules?
CHARLES O'DONNELL, Sr.: No.
CHARLIE: They to learn how to relate to being a kid. I they forgot. Stuff like that. Let us make our own mistakes.
NARRATOR: Fifteen years old, a teenager with wheels that are too small, with ambitions to drive, to fly in a larger world.