Sunday 15th August, 2010
Q+A’s Guyon Espiner Interviews The Prime Minister’s Science Adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman
Points of interest:
- Gluckman wants government funding focused on early childhood – “If you could invest more in the earlier years your
expenditure in later years will be less”
- “It may be that there appears to be an expense, but the economists tell us the rate of return is worth it”
- Government needs to take a more integrated approach, invest more in high quality preschool and early school education
- “We’ve changed the way we rear our children” – in previous generations pre-teens were “less controlled” and the teen
years more structured. “That’s reversed”.
- New and social media “enormously” influential on changing behaviour – the brain struggles to cope with broad social
networks
- Teen suicide just “the tip” of the complex problems facing young New Zealanders
- International evidence suggests lowering the alcohol purchase age “is a factor in an increase in acting out and
risk-taking behaviours”.
The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A
can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news
Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.
PROFESSOR SIR PETER GLUCKMAN interviewed by GUYON ESPINER
PAUL Every week it seems we hear tragic stories involving young people and their families. James Webster died in May
drinking that bottle of Vodka he acquired. News came this week that 71 New Zealanders aged 19 or under killed themselves
in the year 08/09. The Prime Minister's asked his Chief Science Adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman to get to the
bottom of what's going on with young people and families, to offer evidence and advice. Sir Peter is nearing the
conclusion of his work and he says young people face a powder keg of issues. Guyon Espiner now talks with Sir Peter
about what's to be done.
GUYON Well Sir Peter thanks very much for joining us, we appreciate your time. Let's start with youth suicide, those
appalling statistics that were seeing, 15 to 19 year olds have the highest rate in the developed world and are taking
their own lives at something like double the rate of developed countries, double the average. This is obviously a
complex area, but what are the main factors driving that problem?
SIR PETER GLUCKMAN – Chief Science Adviser Well I think it's only the tip, a reflection of the total problem of the complexity of the world in which young people
live. The fact that in New Zealand we have looked at it in a compartmentalised way, rather than looking at it in an
integrated way, and we've ended up with a group of young people for whom depression is a significant issue. The capacity
to resist peer pressures and risk taking behaviours is a particularly severe issue, and it's reflected sadly in suicide,
but it just is the most extreme demonstration of the fact that this country's not doing well.
GUYON I want to talk about depression, which you note as a significant driver, but if I could just raise one of the issues
that was raised on the panel before, and that is the media reporting of this. Essentially the media faces heavy
restrictions on reporting of suicide. Do you think we need to be more open in the media and in society about talking
about suicide in New Zealand?
SIR PETER I think we have to confront the issue that our young people are not doing well, and this is reflected in suicide. I
think there is a lot of evidence however that leads us to caution, that if we go into details about youth suicide in the
practical sense, there's a high risk of copycat suicide. There is good evidence of clustering youth suicide.
GUYON Because you could argue that what we're doing now, which isn't talking about it, isn't working?
SIR PETER Well that’s the point, we haven't talked about the whole problem, of the fact that our young people are not doing well.
And of course that’s why one of the first things the Prime Minister asked me to do was think about it. I think in
thinking about it, the first thing to realise, for everybody to realise, is there's no single magic bullet.
GUYON No but in terms of talking about it, and the media conversation about it, that is not a part of the solution, being
more open is not part of the solution?
SIR PETER Of course it is. I mean exactly, the whole point in my interim report is to raise the questions. If you don’t know what
the questions are, you can't seek the answers. But I think as one of your panellists said, we need to distinguish
between talking about the issue of youth depression, the problems of youth, and elevating the risk of clustering effects
of youth suicide and severe risk-taking behaviour. There's a lot of literature to suggest this is a real risk.
GUYON You talk about depression in youth, and in fact you mentioned that about 20% of people are affected by depression
before the age of 18. Yet only about one in four get treatment, 75% of these people aren't getting any treatment at all.
Is that due to the dearth of services in that area?
SIR PETER Also the dearth of recognition that young people do get depression, that the blues sometimes do need support. And I
think one of the points we also make in our interim report is that parents do not necessarily have the skill set for
today's world that our parents had for our world when we were young, because the world has changed so much. And so
parents don’t know how to handle it, and so what is actually sometimes quite severe problems are not recognised either
by parents or teachers or anybody until it manifests with some tragedy. I think that if you're talking about sheltered
depression, you’ve gotta realise that the problem doesn’t start in adolescence, and you have Dame Lesley on the
programme, she and I would both agree as would our panel that problems start much earlier in life. And therefore if
we're going to address these issues, just to focus on the adolescent, rather than focusing on the whole of life
approach, will fail.
GUYON I want to pick up on some of those points a little bit later, but if I can turn to alcohol, because alcohol and drugs
is obviously another significant problem, and alcohol itself would probably be the largest of those problems among the
drug and alcohol sort of range. How significant was the reduction of the drinking age to 18 as a factor, back in 1999. I
mean is that still a driving force of a lot of these problems?
SIR PETER Well the OECD just released a report on the state of the world's children late last year. And the evidence summarised
in that report is quite clear, that the greater accessibility of young people to alcohol, associated with changed
drinking ages, is a real fact, and the evidence is clear, that it is a factor in an increase in acting out and
risk-taking behaviours.
GUYON So we hear that the reduction to the age of 18 sort of produced a de facto age of 15 or 16. Is there any evidence to
suggest that that is the case in New Zealand?
SIR PETER I'm sure that is the case, but you asked me that I need to speak to the evidence, and I'm not aware of the specific
scientist evidence supporting that from this country. But clearly the international evidence is clear that when you
lower the drinking age you extend the accessibility to even younger people, because of the way in which kids access
alcohol.
GUYON So will you be recommending to the government that the drinking age is raised back up to 20? Is that your view?
SIR PETER Well the Prime Minister knows my view personally is that, but I think I've gotta be very careful. The role of a Science
Adviser is diminished if he enters recommendations on policy. The role of a Science Adviser is to put the summary of the
best evidence on the table for all those involved in policy formation, and let them reach them reach their conclusions.
GUYON But the evidence essentially is that the greater availability of alcohol helps exacerbate these problems.
SIR PETER Absolutely.
GUYON How much of this is new though? I mean 25 years ago when I was in high school, 14, 15, 16 year olds were going to pubs,
going to liquor stores and drinking.
SIR PETER But not in the way they do now.
GUYON What's changed? What's different?
SIR PETER Big change in the fundamental nature of society. We've changed the way we rear our children. Teenage years are much
less structured than they were. The role of parents and teachers as the sources of authority, have been displaced far
more by peer pressure than they were. The impact of the media is greater. The role model situation of celebrities and so
forth, is very different and against that background the range of alcohols is different. Alcopops etc etc, the access to
drugs alongside alcohol. All of this combined in a very different way. The fundamental sociology of young people has
changed. Now we can add some biological aspects to it as well.
GUYON Let's break that down. So are you essentially saying that the break down of the family, the move away perhaps from the
traditional two parent family has been a big cause of this?
SIR PETER No, no, I'm not saying the break down of the family… In fact there's quite a lot of evidence that the – we've gotta
distinguish here between major effects and minor effects. While our knee-jerk reaction might be that different family
structures do matter, in fact the OECD evidence would be that the effect of a single parent family in the right context
is relatively small. What has changed is the sources of authority for young people. Whereas parents and teachers were
the major sources of authority 25 years ago, now the role of the peer and the peer group, is far greater than it was.
GUYON But is that different? I mean in the 60s and 70s young people idolised rock stars who smashed up hotel rooms and took
heroin.
SIR PETER Yeah but the kids didn’t have access to it that they do now.
GUYON So it's the pervasiveness?
SIR PETER There's a fundamental change in which young people have been reared. And I think for Anglophone countries it's a
particular issue, and one of the things in your intro was the fact that there are different effects across different
countries, and the Anglophone countries seem to have a particular challenge. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United
States, Britain... My own bias, and this is where we're trying to accumulate the evidence, is that the big change has
been 25 years ago, children up to the age of 10 or so, were less controlled in the sense that they could engage in more
autonomous decision-making and if you like minor risk-taking behaviour, climbing trees and playing in playgrounds. And
the teenage years were relatively more structured, because there were less options at school etc etc. That’s reversed.
We now have our pre-teen years as very rigorously controlled, and we have much less control over what adolescents do
with Facebook, internet, etc etc. They have more access to lots of ways of doing things in their lives.
GUYON How influential is that new media, that social media, the texting, the Face Book and things?
SIR PETER Oh enormously, enormously.
GUYON Is it? In what ways?
SIR PETER Well, in multiple dimensions. But if we take two, one is in the social dimension. It changes the whole way in which
young people interact with each other, which drives a difference. Text bullying is a very different phenomenon from
bullying by a single individual in the playground, which can be dealt with. Secondly, there's good biological evidence
that brains can cope with a relatively small network of people very well. But what we now have is young people having to
cope with a much broader network of people and a lot of it involving non-verbal, non-body language communication, which
is very different.
GUYON So what should parents – I know it's not technically your role to advise them either – but what should they do? Is it
bad for children to have Facebook accounts before they're 16 or 17? Should we have more controls on this?
SIR PETER I think we're focusing on the wrong point in the life cycle. I would be focusing much earlier in life, and giving
children in the first six years of life a lot more skills so that they're more resilient to cope with these issues,
which are inevitable later in life. All the evidence – and it's compelling evidence, absolutely compelling – is that if
we want to create children who are more resilient to going through the later stages of life, developing those skills of
how to make judgements, how to act more responsibly, and think about consequential influences of what they do, is
determined before six years of age.
GUYON So what do we do about that? Because you can't be in everyone's home. I mean what do governments do, and what do public
policy people do?
SIR PETER Well there's three things. Well we have to get beyond party politics. We have to get beyond silo-ridden discussions
between health, education, social welfare. This requires integrated learning approach of evaluating programmes as we
trial them. But fundamentally, we need to think about the fact that the ability to learn these skills of how to cope in
society, requires high quality preschool and early school education. And it requires for vulnerable families, which are
reasonably easy to identify in macro terms, a willingness to target your resources heavily. All the literature says no
society can cope with giving everybody what might be theoretically ideal. But targeting is the way to go, because there
are so many families for whom this is not a particular issue.
GUYON If you look at social spending, it peaks in the teenage years. That’s where it's mainly focused isn't it? Are you
saying we should shift those resources to the earlier...?
SIR PETER Well the evidence is overwhelming. If you could invest more in the earlier years your expenditure in later years will
be less. For example, some of the best programmes overseas, which have been well evaluated, are reporting 40% reductions
in crime rate, massive increases in earning capacity of young people, greater entry into employment. Economists
including Nobel laureates have done the calculations, to show quite significant rates of return on proper high intensity
investment in vulnerable families early in life. The trouble is we all silo it and think about minor adjustments to it
as being the way to address the issue. So for example the OECD raises questions about the macro report, raises questions
about the domestic purposes benefit. A politically touchy area, but they would point out that the same resources after
the children at a certain age, invested into those families in a different way to ensure high intensity education, is
likely to produce better benefits for both mother, child, and society. We need to be open, get away from – look at the
evidence, and then as a nation say our children are our most important asset for the future, let's get into a situation
being prepared to invest for the long-term. That’s why the Prime Minister's asked me to look at the question.
GUYON Just finally, I want to look at some of the science around the development of the brain, because there's emerging body
of evidence which suggests that the brain in terms of its executive functions of judgement and impulse control, just
simply isn't developed until the third decade of life, and maybe into your early- and even mid-20s. Do you concur with
that?
SIR PETER Well I was one of the ones who raised this evidence as an academic, and so do I confer? The evidence is overwhelming.
The issue is, is this a new thing or an old thing that has always been there, and we didn’t recognise it. That’s an
unanswered question. But I think the evidence is quite clear that we can do better in providing these, in technical
terms, non cognitive capabilities, by investment in the first few years of life. Now different programmes will work
better in different contexts. That’s why we've got to be prepared to be open, self evaluative and look at how we do best
for the different parts of our community, be them Pasifika, Maori, people of low socio economic status, people where
there's histories of drug abuse, alcohol abuse in families, because those intergenerational influences are real. I
should add one last comment in this. There is actually good evidence that the brain chemistry is changed by events like
child abuse and maltreatment in early life, in the very way that leads to these adverse behaviours later in life. So
this is not just about subtle changes in brain maturation. There are fundamental changes in the way brain cells talk to
each other, induced by these events in early life.
GUYON Final quick question. You have the unenviable task in many ways of recommending solutions to all this. How fundamental
and how expensive to administer are your recommendations going to be?
SIR PETER Well number one is, the steps in this process are one, let's have a national conversation about what the problem is.
That’s what we've started doing. Number two, let's admit that we need to have a more integrated approach than what we
have now, which is step number two. And I think the national conversation is moving in that direction. Number three is,
let's encourage our policy makers to look at whether we have the balance where the investment is right. I don’t think
we're talking high – in the narrow sense yes, it may be that there appears to be an expense, but the economists tell us
the rate of return is worth it.
GUYON Alright, we'll have to leave it there, but thank you very much for your time, we appreciate it.
ENDS