By Dan Satherley
Programmes aimed at helping young New Zealanders navigate their troubled adolescent years need to be based in fact, not ideology, according to a report released today by the Prime Minister's chief science advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman.
In it, he notes that New Zealand adolescents take too many risks – such as smoking, heavy drinking, and sexual activity – and policies aimed at reducing these behaviours are often ineffective and in some cases, harmful.
"By international standards, risk-taking among New Zealand adolescents is high," says Sir Peter, in the 318-page report, Improving the Transition (click to read - PDF, 3MB).
"It is clear that an evidential approach is not being systematically used in deciding what programmes to offer and which to maintain. Too many programmes appear to have been started on the basis of advocacy rather than evidence."
Prime Minister John Key commissioned the report in 2009. In it, Sir Peter's hand-picked taskforce argue that targeted intervention, particularly in early childhood, is the key to preventing, or at least minimising, adolescent troubles such as teen pregnancy, suicide mental health issues.
"It is now clear that early childhood is the critical period in which executive functions such as the fundamentals of self-control are established. Children who do not adequately develop these executive functions in early life are more likely to make poor decisions during adolescence, given the inevitable exposures to risk in the teenage years…
"Remediation in adolescence is not likely to be as effective as prevention," continues the report. "Although there are some remediation programmes that are partially effective, others clearly are not."
Examples of schemes that had limited effectiveness, or were even found to be harmful, include boot camps and military-style training, short-term mentoring programmes and 'Scared Straight' programmes, where troubled youths meet convicts who attempt to scare them away from a life of crime.
"Our research suggests that many programmes have been introduced, albeit with good intent, that are unlikely to succeed as they are not supported by the evidence base, whereas other approaches likely to be effective have not been implemented," says Sir Peter.
"Just because an intervention appears promising in the short term, or is promoted by anecdote, does not mean that it is effective over the long term."
Instead, the report said future schemes should be based on what has proven to work in the past, and will need to stay consistent over multiple electoral cycles.
New Zealand's youth suicide rate has halved in the past decade, but is still double that of Australia. Removing the taboo over media coverage of suicides has been mooted as one way to lower it further, but the taskforce says the evidence is it will actually do more harm than good.
"There is no evidence at all to support this theory, and much evidence that it would actually do harm," says Keren Scegg of the Dept of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago.
Specific courses of action on how to minimise adolescent troubles weren't listed, but the taskforce strongly noted that targeted early intervention reaped long-term rewards that far outweighed the short-term costs.
"Targeted investment in evidence-based education, prevention and treatment programmes directed towards at-risk children and their families is particularly cost-effective… Although all children gain from quality early childhood education, society benefits most from the investment in children from low-income or disadvantaged homes… There is substantive documented evidence to suggest that we can do much better for them.
"However, to do so will require a prolonged effort over several electoral cycles and cannot be held hostage to adversarial politics."
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