Peter Gluckman

Wellington, May 18 NZPA - The Government has started researching potential wide-ranging changes to childcare, family support, health, education and justice to allow for so-called precocious puberty in children.

Prime Minister John Key said his chief scientific advisor had already started on new research into understanding adolescent development and behaviour "and those social issues".

He said when Professor Sir Peter Gluckman became his advisor, the expert in the evolution of adolescent development raised some of the nation's problems with youth.

Sir Peter said today that "risky and inappropriate behaviour by young people" could lead to tragedies that had an enormous impact on families and communities.

He spoke in the wake of the deaths of two boys in the past week at the exclusive King's College at Otahuhu -- James Webster 16, who binged on vodka, and Michael Treffers, 15, who fell from an overbridge onto the Southern Motorway.

"My office has a major project underway to assemble evidence, from both New Zealand and overseas, on what actions could be taken," he said.

There would be no quick fix, but he would report in the next few months. And increased rate of sexual maturation, a slow rate of brain maturation, and an increasingly complex social networks "have the potential to produce a powder keg during adolescence", said Sir Peter.

Acting-out behaviours such as binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sex and criminal offending "are increasingly likely to occur".

Sir Peter warned five years ago at Auckland University's Liggins Institute, that some children aged 10 and 11 are sexually mature before either they or society are prepared for the implications.

Modern girls arrive at their first menstruation between seven and 13 years, and were hitting puberty up to two years earlier than in the 1960s.

Modern hygiene, nutrition and medicine had allowed the mensuration age to fall, but the complexity of modern society meant there was a mismatch between bodies and brains.

Young people were becoming sexually mature before they were psychologically equipped to function as adults.

According to Sir Peter, it was not effective to just keep telling young people with raging hormones to keep their legs crossed.

"All our systems...our school structure, customs and mores, need a fundamental rethink," he said in 2005.

Teenagers of both sexes show signs of frustration, with high violence, crime and car accident statistics for young males, and more adolescent women showing up more in violent crime, bullying and binge-drinking statistics.

Solutions to these problems would require a much greater understanding of brain maturation and how it was affected by societal pressures, and of how social structures could be engineered to ease the transition from child to adult, he said today.

The new biological reality was that puberty in boys was starting between eight and 11 years of age and taking up to five years to complete, and starting earlier in girls and completing between the ages of 11 and 14.

But the human brain was not fully mature until sometime between the ages of 20 and 30 -- and the areas of the brain involved in impulse control and judgement were the last areas of the brain to mature.

"Our ability to think and behave like fully-fledged adults may not occur until well into the second decade of life," said Sir Peter. "Urgent research is needed to understand what strategies might be best in terms of child rearing."