It's Not My Fault! My Frontal Lobes Weren't Fully Developed

Teens are getting an out for their less than perfect behavior these days based on research that suggests that the brain's frontal lobes aren't fully developed until well into the 20's. The frontal

lobe plays a pivotal role in impulse control and judgement. I'm guessing my frontal lobe was still underdeveloped during my college years because, although I managed (by some miracle) to get a degree (and a good GPA), those years would surely be characterized more by a whole lot of FUN than by good judgement and sound decision making.

My dear friend Jamie and I would have made perfect test subjects for this type of study. While in college, we happily demonstrated our poor judgement and terrible lack of impulse control on pretty much a daily basis. One such display involves an evening excursion to our high school town. The reasons for this particular lark have become fuzzy with time, but I'm sure we were up to no good and my guess is that it involved a boy.

Jamie and I back in the days of poor impulse control and lack of judgement

While there, we had this wonderful inspiration... to steal street signs. Stolen street signs of various types were a pretty common dorm room decoration, and we thought we'd join the crowd. We had already taken a couple of signs and were busily working on another when I saw a busybody neighbor peeking out of the blinds from a house across the street. We hurriedly threw the sign and our collection of tools into the trunk of the car, climbed in and sped away from the scene of our misdeed. We thought we had gotten safely away, and were surprised to see the nosy neighbor climbing into a car and driving after us. Folks, this was a real live CAR CHASE, and it was happening to US! This car followed us through town, in and out of lanes of traffic frantically waving at us to pull over. I was as scared as I had ever been. Who was this vigalante, out for 'street sign justice', and what was he going to do or say to us if we did pull over.

Our first inclination was to head home, but we didn't have enough gas in the car to make the hour and a half drive back, and we didn't know how far this lunatic was going to try and follow us. We were unsuccessful in our attempts at evasion, and ended up pulling into a parking lot behind a pizza place, hoping to lose him. It didn't work. He got out of his car and... he wasn't lunatic or a busybody. He was a COP... an off duty cop, but a cop all the same. I can safely say 'Murphy's (my maiden name) Law' was working against us that evening. We chose the sign in front of a cop's house to steal. What are the odds???

You think we were freaking out during the chase?? This turn of events put us in a full blown pants messing panic because he was calling in his buddies in the black and whites and we were convinced that we are going to the big house. We have visions of pat downs, strip searches and showers with inmates flying through our underdeveloped brains. Oh and that little detail of calling our folks to bail us out of JAIL! OMG!

Well, it turns out we had some of the nice guys, and they didn't even arrest us. Can you imagine our relief? They did charge us with misdemeanor LARSENY, though. We had to appear in court before a judge (who also turned out to be one of the nice guys). The judge said that he understood that it was a teenage prank, and gave us a little smackdown about how unsafe it was for the motorists who come to an intersection where some punks (us) have taken the stop sign down. Imagine the consequences? We were really very remorseful, and he explained that this little lapse in judgement would be erased from our record if we managed to keep our noses clean for the next year. Don't you love a happy ending?!

It's a funny story now... one that my family (particularly a certain older brother) loves to recount. My parents actually laughed when I called to tell them about the incident. They did not find anything funny about my illegal activity, but they did see some humor in the fact that I got caught and (the whole car chase/off duty COP thing is kinda funny when it's not you it happened to!). When Jamie told her parents, her dad told her that he already knew she had been up to something that night, because a co-worker had told him that he had heard her name on the police scanner. It's hard to break the law in your small home town, and not have someone rat you out (I appreciate this fact so much more now that I am a parent).

So back to school we went to continue our studies and work on developing those frontal lobes. I am happy to tell you that we have both grown into responsible (law abiding) citizens. These days we both use great judgement, and control our impulses extremely well (most of the time anyway). We just had to give those brains time to mature.