John Roughan: Top minds work on teen issues

In Tauranga, these Drug Arm volunteers try to steer other young people away from risky activities. Photo / APN

I find it suspicious that social "scientists" are almost never surprised by their results.They say the first rule of leadership is to surround yourself with good people. When John Key made Sir Peter Gluckman his personal science advisor I thought he was looking for reliable objective updates on subjects such as climate change.

But not long after his appointment the nation's high priest of pure science was sent into the deeply political world of social science to answer to one of the saddest and most puzzling questions for New Zealand: Why, in this green and pleasant land, do so many young people kill themselves?

That is not how he or Key have phrased his mission. Gluckman calls the report he has just produced, "Improving the Transition: reducing social and psychological morbidity during adolescence".

It covers not only suicide but teenage stress, depression and risk-taking in all its forms: heavy drinking, speeding, sex, drugs and crime. Sixteen-year-old James Webster's death by drinking occurred six months into the study.

Gluckman, too, surrounded himself with good people such as Professor Harlene Hayne, an Otago University specialist in developmental psychology. She co-chaired their hand-picked taskforce of academics and researchers who have produced work that doesn't carry the usual undertone of a political agenda.

Social science normally leaves me cold. I find it suspicious that social "scientists" are almost never surprised by their results. When they use the word surprise it is for data that exceeds their expectations.

The way they phrase a question can easily produce the answer they expect. And they tend to present their conclusions with purse-lipped contempt for heinous things like personal finance, economics, individualism, freedom and fun.

Gluckman and Hayne were wary of this breed. Gluckman observes that it is "easy to insert bias" into social research and that too many programmes have been "started on a basis of advocacy rather than evidence".

Their co-authored report describes social and behavioural sciences as "a domain where there is considerable risk of relying on perception, anecdote or values-based discourse".

They have relied instead on the evidence emerging from neuroscience and the study at Otago University that has been monitoring the lives of real people for a long while now.

That study has discovered, among many other things, that the way a teenager handles the opportunities opening to them - access to alcohol, cash machines, cheap cars, internet porn, social networks - closely reflects the degree of self control the person displayed as an infant.

In fact, measures of self-control are turning out to be a good prediction of health, wealth and relationship decisions much later in life too.

The report makes a case for putting more effort in helping infants acquire the capacity to delay gratification, control impulses, get along with others, foresee consequences and the like.

It is in the early years of childcare that we might find the solutions to one of the highest rates of teenage drinking and pregnancy in the developed world, and the highest rate of youth suicide.

Gluckman and Hayne report that neuroscience now reckons human brain development is not complete until people are well into their 20s. And the last brain functions to mature, they say, are those that control impulses and judgment of risks.

While a child begins to develop these faculties in infancy, it is not until puberty that judgment and impulse control begins to be seriously tested by new hormones that act on the brain function encouraging risk taking and impulsive behaviour.

And thanks to modern healthcare, the age of puberty is falling. For many girls, they report, it is now beginning as young as 8 and about half are biologically mature by the age of 13. For boys it starts one or two years later and takes a little longer.

They conclude that earlier puberty and the later adult roles (longer education, later family formation, I suppose) mean the adolescent, risk-taking phase of life is longer than it used to be.

Another interesting social change, they note, is that while children's lives are more supervised than they used to be (both parents at work, paid childcare, fear of traffic and crime), teenage life is now much less restricted (no parent at home, mobile phones, internet, ATMs ...).

You can sense where this is going for the liquor law reform still before Parliament and the rights of young people generally.

But that is not the report's purpose. It warns that biological age is not a reliable measure of emotional maturity.

It estimates that 20 per cent of New Zealand adolescents behave or suffer in a way that damages the rest of their lives, which means 80 per cent must be coping with modern life fairly well.

But one in five is a high rate of damage. If the solution lies in early childcare, at least we have an energetic new industry that could take up the task.