The Hijacked Brain - What Screens, Social Pressure, and Peer Culture Are Really Doing to Your Teenager — and How Sport Can Help #998437

Your teenager's brain is being hijacked — not by laziness, not by attitude, but by systems engineered specifically to make self-regulation neurologically impossible.
The Hijacked Brain draws on 144 peer-reviewed studies, conducted across dozens of countries and involving tens of thousands of adolescents. It explains precisely what social media algorithms do to the developing reward system, why peer pressure literally rewires teenagers' beliefs, what social comparison does to the brain's pain circuitry — and why the solution most adults reach for first is the least effective one available.
This is not a book about confiscating phones. It is a book about understanding what you are actually dealing with — and about the one consistent finding that emerges from every study in it: the quality of your relationship with your teenager predicts their outcomes more reliably than any intervention, programme, or strategy ever studied.
You will finish this book knowing exactly what to do about screen time, peer influence, social comparison, bullying, substance pressure, self-harm risk, and the specific conditions under which sport is one of the most powerful interventions available to any caring adult. With the biology attached, so the strategies actually make sense.
The research is more specific — and more hopeful — than most parents expect. Read it. Then use it.