If it seems like your teenager doesn’t hear you, Mom, you may be right. But it’s not their fault. And actually, it’s a good thing.

A Stanford School of Medicine study has found that teen brains no longer register their mother’s voice like they did in their childhood years: “Around age 13, kids’ brains no longer find their moms’ voices uniquely rewarding, and they tune into unfamiliar voices more.”

The research, published in the 28 April 2022 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, used MRI scans to study how teens begin to separate from their parents on a neurobiological level.

Up until adolescence, a 2016 Stanford study showed, children are uniquely attuned to their mother’s voice. “The mother’s voice is the sound source that teaches young kids all about the social-emotional world and language development,” said Percy Mistry, Ph.D., co-lead author and a research scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. In adolescence, the importance of the mother’s voice begins to wane: “Fetuses in utero can recognize their mother’s voice before they’re born, yet with adolescents — even though they’ve spent even more time with this sound source than babies have — their brains are tuning away from it in favor of voices they’ve never even heard.”

The lead study author Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, put it this way: “Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices.” Teens aren’t consciously prioritizing friends and classmates, but their minds are “increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

Researchers noted that this brain shift toward new voices is healthy and normal, part of the process of maturation. What the study uncovered is the biological signal that accompanies independence, says the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This is a signal that helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”

So don’t take it personally if your teen seems to tune you out. “When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents,” Menon adds, “it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home.”

To learn more about children and teen’s neurobiological development, and how brain research is conducted, read the full article here.

Or read the Journal of Neuroscience article for yourself.