He had a rather highly accelerated pubescence which increased the alienation that teenagers often feel from their peers. Combined with an emotional immaturity (this you will note was is not accelerated as it is learnt rather than grown) lead to some serious difficulties for him and his parents.
Alienation I buy, but it seems unlikely it would be the most important factor.
Emotional maturity (or lack thereof) is what I'd normally attribute it to, but I'm not quite sure how that develops. Is it truly purely a learned trait? If so, I'd agree with you that would be the biggest stumbling block. I thought of it myself, but discounted it.
Have a full read of the article, his actions bear all the hallmarks of emotional immaturity combined with heightened hormone levels. And don't discount alienation, we're social animals and puberty is where this need for strong interaction with peers is initiated and grows to form our adult emotional and social intelligence.
And no emotional maturity/intelligence isn't purely a learnt trait, rather there parts of the brains that function to provide us with a place to learn these behaviours which is why physiological disorders can affect it. There a number of documented cases where a child has been deprived of social stimuli (such as a case where a child was brought up living in with her parents dogs), these children's brains are underdeveloped in the parts of the brain that deal with social skills (and language).
A particularly horrific example of the argument of nature vs nurture.
That's interesting to think about. The natural solution that first pops into my mind is to teach them emotional maturity, or in other words 'make them grow up', at an early age. Responsibility or 'rise to the challenge' type trauma. (of course, it's really not something that can be easily 'taught' in a structured way)
Today, that doesn't happen much, but centuries ago I'm sure it did, which makes me wonder if people like David Farragut were humanity's Alexes of the past.
