Concern after teen sex revelations

Half of 16-year-old Kiwis say they have been in love and more than a third have already had sex, a new study reveals.

Results from the New Zealand Council of Educational Research (NZCER) longitudinal study of 500 young people have led to calls for better sex education in schools and more parenting programmes.

The new study also reveals 84 per cent of 16-year-olds had drunk alcohol in the previous year and 51 per cent had done something they regretted while drunk.

"Sixteen is still young," Family Planning Association chief executive Jackie Edmond said. "This shows how important it is for parents to talk to their children around sexual health and sexuality."

Family Planning had "huge concerns" about sexual education in New Zealand schools and homes.

"The reality is that sexuality education and sexual health education in New Zealand is incredibly inconsistently applied across schools," Edmond said.

"We feel strongly that young people need the information so that they can make the decisions and there is no research that supports that telling young people more means that they will have sex earlier; in fact, it does seem to be the opposite."

The new results from the NZCER study, which started following the 500 young people from the greater Wellington region in 1993, also showed a fifth of the study's participants had got into trouble with the police.

Half said they had got into trouble at school and 30 per cent said they had been involved in a physical fight.

Almost all of the young people (92 per cent) had family rules about drug use, and 85 per cent had rules about alcohol use.

"You wonder why this isn't 100 per cent when these issues to do with engagement in risky behaviour is something that is worthy of discussion and parental input," said Professor of Parenting Studies and Family Psychology at the University of Auckland, Matt Sanders.

There were far too few parenting programmes available for the parents of teenagers, he said.

"There is no other human activity that is as important as parenting, but we provide far too little training and support for people to be able to do this and this is particularly true of parents with teenagers," Sanders said.

A government parenting education scheme, the Incredible Years, is expanding to include 15,000 more families.

The 12 to 20-week group courses, which include homework assignments on how to play with children, are targeted at the parents of three to eight-year-olds thought to have chronic behavioural problems.

However, Sanders said such schemes needed to cover teenage parenting and be more widely available.

"If you normalise it, de-stigmatise it and then give the public what they're looking for ... it will become just like a healthy, normal rite of passage," Sanders said.

Peer influence often overwhelmed parental influence on sexual exploration, he said.