Experience shapes behavior. And nowhere is that experience more indelibly carried than in the brain of the infant and growing child. What if we stop marketing to teens and put that money into talking to parents and those that take care of children at a very young age, before the brain's hard wiring is in place. Over the past twenty years, there has been a great outpouring of books, magazines, video and audio cassettes on mind and medicine. The mind has become the big kahunna. But the brain it seemed was just the box it lived in. As if in our new age of spirit and consciousness, the brain was an odious reminder of temporal matter, that the body was just a machine.

It is no surprise that we are having so much trouble trying to get teenagers to change behavior, that our well-researched behavior change curriculums about smoking and sex and violence, and our spiffy and expensive advertising campaigns, have such dismal results. Aside from hormones, peer pressure and the media, the circuitry — the channels our learning follows — is, by and large, in place by the age of 14. The story lines for fight or flight are already etched in stone. By targeting teens we are trying to alter thought process built into the brain long ago when serotonin, neurons and synapses were in a frenzied rush to build the superstructure of the brain.

The brain is the ultimate use-it-or-lose-it machine, and experience is its best teacher. Its ability to think, feel, empathize, plan for the future, recognize consequences, exercise caution, even its ability to transcend the material plane and achieve higher realms of consciousness, are dependent on the workout it gets and what it learns from experience from the moment of birth.

The more exercise brain cells get, the more there are of them. The more brain cells, or neurons, the more synapses, the empty spaces across which electro-chemical charges spark. This leap across empty space is how we think. The more synapses, or spaces, the more communication between brain cells, the more thinking.

Though a healthy brain never stops growing, adapting and absorbing new information, and strengthening and improving its connections, there are two critical times, windows of opportunity, when a brain is particularly impressionable.

The first window of opportunity opens at birth and lasts for about three years. Brain cells multiply at this time in a chaotic explosion of growth. Those cells that get used harden into channels of thought and conduct. Those that do not get used die off. Mice raised in environments with toys and playmates have billions of more synapses than mice raised in empty cages. On the other hand, cells designed for carrying visual images that aren't used in the first few years of life will cease to carry visual stimulation to the brain. The eyes of mice, if left covered from birth, will in a few months be forever unable to see.

The same is true for other faculties, like thinking, feeling and eventually language. The more productive the sensory workout at a very young age, the more brain cells, the more synapses, the more shades of grey between black and white, fight or flight, the better able one is to overcome obstacles and succeed. The more a child is allowed to be curious, express their feelings and have those feelings addressed, to listen and watch and touch the world around them, the stronger their empathetic and communication skills will be.

Infants are dependant for this kind of activity on their parents and others who oversee them from day to day. Hugging, touching, playing, listening to music, and hearing sentences are all brain-building exercises. These exercises will determine how a child and eventually an adult communicates and gets along in the world. Twenty-month-old babies of talkative mothers know 150 more words than babies of mothers who don't talk frequently to, or around their babies. A child growing up in the wilderness alone for the first ten years of life will be unable to learn a language or speak after that time.

So it turns out the right kind of stimulation could be the best prevention, because it quite literally teaches the brain to think. What's more interesting, however, is the fact that what applies to learning communication skills, also applies to learning about the geography of our feelings.

And it is in our feelings — about ourselves, our families, our communities and each other — that we have the most leverage with our attitudes and, ultimately, our behaviors.

A youngster's ability to express his or herself, communicate feelings, and anticipate the feelings of others, is crucial to determining behaviors later in life. These are not merely social skills, as we used to call them. In our increasingly crowded world, and especially in our service-oriented economy, these abilities to empathize and communicate are survival skills.

In every advertising agency I have worked, in fact, in every organization where I have played a role — from the Boy Scouts to the PTA — it is not necessarily the smartest who are most valued or rise to leadership positions, but it is the rapport builders, cross-pollinators and bearers of ideas well expressed.

These communicating and empathizing skills are what psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to as emotional intelligence. It is no surprise that children who have not learned to get along in the sandbox are the ones most likely to drop out of high school. Dr. Goleman however has taken this much further. He's found that those most likely to succeed in the professional organizations he's studied were those whose "congeniality put them at the heart of the informal communications networks...the standouts excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion, and the ability to build consensus among people."

According to Goleman's research, "boys who are highly impulsive or disobedient as grade schoolers are three to six times more likely than others to pick fights and turn into teenagers with criminal records. On the other hand, impulsive grade school girls don't get violent. They get pregnant in their teen years — at three times the rate of other girls. And grade school girls who confuse their own feelings — who can't tell the difference between anger, anxiety, boredom and hunger — are most likely to develop an eating disorder in adolescence."

This ability to communicate, the blueprints for which are built at birth, is crucial. These are the abilities that teens call on to express their feelings, control impulsive behavior, explore their creative selves and build networks of positive influence and support. Before reaching their teenage years, somewhere between the ages of four and ten, is when this second developmental window opens wide.

During this time the brain is once again creating, keeping and losing cells at an enormous rate. Building in accordance with its blueprints from infancy, the last part of the brain to fully develop, the prefrontal lobes, now reaches maturity. These upper brain functions are primarily concerned with integrating, empathizing and communicating. Urged on by hormones (likely serotonin and noradrenalin), the brain now learns to mediate between its lower brain impulses and the reasoning functions of the upper brain. Serotonin acts like a brake allowing various impulses to live together peacefully. Researchers, I learned, have found a direct correlation between decreased production of serotonin and low self-esteem. In fact, one reason people drink alcohol and take drugs is that it makes up for what may be a lack of serotonin in the brain. Drinking alcohol increases the production of that hormone, at least initially.

By the age of 14, the architectural superstructure of the brain is largely in place. For those who work to communicate change, this means the best use of our energy, talent and money is during two critical windows of opportunity: from birth to age three and in early adolescence.

If we take these new findings seriously, we would certainly want to spend a lot more time talking to pre-teens and to parents and others who take care of infants. This is where our marketing and outreach dollars should go. If we believe what science tells us, we would want to invest even more in literacy programs, teaching reading and other language skills at an earlier age. We would want to stop treating the age between one and three as developmental wastelands, and see them instead as windows through which we can envision a new generation of teens more resistant to temptation and resilient to the world around them.

And we would spend more time with seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-old kids, teaching them how to build wagons, fix bikes, bake cakes, write, draw, play or listen to music. It does not matter whether we build our new production model organization in the heart of a billion-dollar foundation, or in a county Public Health Office, a Boys Club or the March of Dimes. Any organization of a half-dozen people or more should be re-configured to encourage creativity and leadership large and small. If the organization is concerned with changing attitudes or behaviors, or getting the word out about healthy diets, parenting, drug abuse, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, violence or the environment, it should be built on a frisky and feisty advertising agency model with at least some in-house production capability. It should be able to produce an event or poster campaign or some sort of communication intervention. It should be able to communicate as a respected partner to those in charge of our massive corporate entertainment, marketing and image-making machines. And it should have leaders capable of leading our young people in a creative act of expression.

So many of the problems we face with young people is quite simply the lack of suitable outlets for their natural energy and abilities, and their own impatience with themselves. Of course they experiment on their own bodies and each other, and we provide them with little other material to work with. They might dab at this natural over-production of energy with the slim absorbency of video games, or the narcotics of television, but what really is missing is the opportunity to create.

Programs centered around an activity carve a shortcut across the long, arduous road through attitudes, knowledge, belief, and skills. In the short term, we only learn that way in theory. We really learn by doing, through example, and through lessons taught by experience and the example of others who know themselves and express themselves in their work.

Everything else we do to affect teen behavior is a result our inability to be parents, or our need to satisfy political constituencies, or simply our need to control the outrageous explosion of youthful energy for which we have provided no creative outlet.

Appreciating the sensitivity of an infants brain and the chemistry of an adolescent give us leverage. Social marketers should at least be entertaining this idea at every meeting around every table where people decide how to spend money to bring about change.