Slashdot Mirror
Early Puberty Often More Hazardous
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting that scientists are taking a look at the social ramifications of hitting puberty early. From the article: "'There is something unique about early maturity (relative to one's peers) that opens opportunities for victimization experiences,' the study's authors write. 'It's not puberty that is what ultimately causes kids to get victimized,' study co-author Dr. Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Florida, told Reuters Health. 'Early puberty seems to open up a different set of doors and social experiences to kids,' he said, explaining that early maturing youngsters may start socializing with the opposite sex and with older, bigger, and stronger youth earlier than those who do not experience puberty early."
Then the average Slashdotter must be feeling pretty safe right now.
It seemed like I hit puberty way earlier than my peers. I remember in 4th or 5th grade having a deep voice (has not gotten deeper since...) and being taller than the other kids. Now everybody is about as tall as me. Contrary to the article however, I saw myself as being mature and being able to handle fights, drugs, and relationships. It's mostly just in your mind in my opinion. If you think you're bigger and better than the other kids than that's your problem (or it could be nature's way of dealing with things).
No existe.
Oh look. Another fluff study done almost entirely by statisticians so that they could suck up grant money and waste my tax dollars. Really important research you're doing there, guys. Children entering puberty at an early age MIGHT get into fights or have sex more early? So what? When did our society define the age at which these acts should first occur? I must have missed that.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
So I take its like placing a beta release in a production enviornment.
I thought most of this was pretty obvious. Doesn't take a scientific study to figure these things out.
google.slashdot
Uhm, why is this appearing on a tech media blog?
Read "Diet for a New America" by John Robbins for an interesting view on this (and all sorts of other diet-related issues). He contends that all the hormones we're feeding our dairy cattle as well as meat animals are contributing to earlier puberty (he was citing 8 year-olds developing breasts, etc.).
4 66893-7535803?v=glance&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0915811812/103-4
I wish I still had a copy of the facts sheet used to promote the book. Had all sorts of gems (like the fact that the average American house-cat eats more meat than the average El Salvadorean (IIRC)).
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
This would be especially so for girls, and all that comes along with puberty. Boys have a tendency to deflect physical changes more, because of the "cool" factor... (and the increased physical strength... ;) Of course it is physically hazardous to be a late-bloomer and a boy...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I think this is more a problem with girls, then it is with boys, when I was 9 a female friend of mine began puberty very early, she started developing breasts & began her period, for her the next couple of years were very traumatic as she was victimised by other girls & picked on by boys because of her funny bodily changes, entering high school she was extremly depressed & paranoid about herself.
In early high school, she had problems with her sexuality, related to her depression & self image she didn't care what she did & ended up becoming sexually active more out of lack of care, she had been taught about it but because of her traumatic time of enterting puberty early it had made her self-destructive.
Hitting puberty early can increase the risk of early exposure to sex, but the biggest factor is the lack of education provided to people, my friend had explained what had happened to her & that it was normal but it didn't help that nearly everybody else didn't have puberty explained properly for another few years, it was all a big joke but to my friend it was serious and if everyone had been educated a little earlier she may have not had the problems later in life.
If a girl changes her circle of friends because of her mosquito bites, she's already got problems.
Then the average Slashdotter must be feeling pretty safe right now.
Yeah, I'm sure that'll guard us against the evil that lurks within our mothers' basements!
Hitting puberty early may not be a picnic, but hitting it late is no walk in the park either.
I refer all queries to the outstanding Tv series Freaks and Geeks.
So I take its like placing a beta release in a production enviornment.
Finally. Words the average slashdotter can understand! I mean, it's not like we were going to be able to make sense of this whole "puberty" thing, or this "sex" the article refers to.
Some advantages to being bigger than your peers are easy to document statistically. If you are born in certain months of the year, you are more likely to get into the NHL for instance. Why? The age limits for the childrens' hockey leagues cut off at a certain month. Some kids entering the league are almost a year older and bigger than others. The bigger, older kids perform better and get the breaks. They go on to the next league and the advantage holds all the way up to the professional league. So, if we assume that talent is evenly distributed, we have a case where an early advantage in size/maturity trumps talent.
It isn't uniformly that way. It depends on the nature of the filtering process. A counter example is kids who come into school already reading. Their advantage is gone by grade 4. Why? All kids pass into the next grade so there is no filtering process.
So, is early onset puberty an advantage? It depends (doesn't everything).
Slashdot readers will be indifferent to the dangers of early puberty, especially the guys. In fact, many of us are well in our thirties and don't show any sign of having matured past boyhood. Thib ;-)
I started growing pubic hairs around 14, voice dropped around 18 and didn't really start getting tall or facial hair till around 20.
Being really small, geeky and awkward made me a target. I would have rather been 5'10" 200lbs at 12 with a 5 o-clock shadow than at 20, would have made Jr. High and High school so much easier.
There are all sorts of reasons for early puberty in women. One study found that black girls seemed to be hitting puberty earlier at a much more rapid rate than white girls. Investigation revealed that some of the hair care products commonly used to straighten black girls' hair were responsible, believe it or not. The chemicals in those products, when combined with other environmental factors, would create synthetic estrogens in the girls' bloodstreams, causing them to begin to develop breasts and pubic hair at really young ages (like 5). When the use of the products was discontinued, the breast tissue would disappear and the pubic hair fell out.
Interesting anecdote, however it's actually slightly offtopic. If you check TFA it's actually mostly talking about boys. The victimization in this case is not the rape (or date rape) that you assume. It's about teens getting beaten up, or stabbed in knife fights, etc.
Makes sense, if you think about it. Men, particularly young-ish men, perceive similarly-aged men as rivals, especially where women are present. If you believe a rival is younger than you, you might figure "he's just a little punk" and use your apparent seniority to browbeat him into backing down. If you think he's your same age, on the other hand, you might decide that a more drastic form of "correction" is necessary. At the same time, he might also tend to react less predictably -- being young, he feels like he has more to prove. The whole situation escalates much more rapidly than a confrontation between true peers and quickly turns to violence.
According to TFA though, the main factor that helps early puberty boys avoid this phenomenon is having a lot of female friends.
Breakfast served all day!
So in other words wanting to get laid makes you get rejected earlier.. and makes you do all the things everyone does when they hit puberty..
I know people who act like children even in their 30s and 10 year olds who act like adults. Puberty early wouldn't do anything to the later type, the first type on the other hand still act like children after hitting it.. so no, early puberty doesn't "damage you", being too immature to handle it damages you.
I like muppets.
They're not implying that you might have sex at a younger age but might draw older youths attention and open themselves up to being exploited. Do a search for Justin Berry. HAHA fucking faggot.
They failed to mention that teenagers who reach puberty early are less likely to know Javascript or how to use two cellphones to cook an egg.
I think the main issue is once a person hits puberty, they become different, and as many studies and observations have shown, kids (even adults), like to make fun of people who are different than their own social circle.
Whatever's in the milk/meat - keep consuming it!!
No matter how hot a girl is - some guy somewhere is sick of her shit.
Here's a link to an article about the hair care products. It says the research is not conclusive, but rather suspicious. Apparently about half of all black girls in the United States start developing secondary sex characteristics before age 8 (yikes! didn't know that), while the rate is much lower for black girls in other parts of the world (e.g. Africa).
Breakfast served all day!
~~~
In Soviet Russia, pubery hits you!
/., not a tabloid. We have standards and expectations of our staff of expert editors - not administators, heavens no, this is a very fine and respected company with a reputation of outstanding journalism.
/. I'd have a life. That doesn't mean I don't think it could improve either.
Ow. Man, if the older kids weren't enough, even nature's against you.
Seriously though, this is llllllllaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeee. Not tech, not interesting, obvious to anyone who gives it a moment's though, not conclusive or precise, and pointless money grabbing "research" by staticians instead of docs or shrinks specializing in child development. This is
Okay, that was sarcastic, if I didn't love
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
"...So you're just noticing members of the sex: "Girls girls, ooo". Naturally you want to look your best, and God says "No! You will look the worst you've ever looked in your life!""
Any big or noticable difference is going to cause problems with a bunch of kids. They have a herd mind a lot of the time. This seems like a no brainer: Puberty changes a whole beowulf cluster of things about you, and if you're the first in your peer group, then there's a significant chance that the immaturity and herd-mindedness will cause you problems. It has nothing to do with society or anything else, just peer pressure and the attitude of kids/teens.
Within hours of an abduction, a nation wide "Amber" alert is broadcasted. Even as little 15 years ago, unless you lived in the same or nearby town no one would have known if little Tiff was taken. They report more under-age crimes - in the past if you were underage, you get sent home and your parents would get the fine, or you'd get a slap on the wrist, repeat offender got sent to Juvi or sent away to boarding school. Juvi has been replaced with prison, getting sent home to parents goes un-noticed as they are never home due to their long hour, endless overtime jobs, and boarding school has been replaced with the local IU school system fille with inadequate last pick teachers that are not trained in handling the not so typical teenage highschool child.
Regardless of what it is, what has happened, or where it has happened, we now have global criminal information pounded at us from all directions 24/7 within minutes from it occurring.
So did the frequency increase? Or does it merely appear that way due to the increased accessibility to the information?
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
How do we know when a male hits puberty?
I was probably about 8 years old when I first began fantasizing about sleeping with girls. By 9 I was masturbating and, although those early experiences only produced a little pearl of cum, I was fully ejaculating by age 10. By age 11 I had already explored the massive ejaculation initiated by pressing on my own prostate. With all of this, though, I was probably 14 before I began to grow hair around my pubic areas.
So what gives? Are the researchers deluded by empirical evidence or am I a pre-vert freak?
In 7th grade, some Venezuelan dude had a full beard under his jaw line and talked with a lisp. When the teacher asked him to read aloud from our American history books, I used to imagine him holding that book on stage in a black suit and top hat while addressing the nation. I called him Gaybraham Lincoln.
Some other chick in 8th grade had a full set of juicy tatas at the time, and when she would read from our English texts, I would just imagine her naked while jiggling those mounds of momentum in my face. I really didn't have a name for her.
Nowdays, I look back and wonder why I didn't apply more creative analogies to that girl as I did that Venezuelan dude. I can't help but feel some sense of remorse at applying a different set of standards for her. Is that sexual discrimination on my part?
"The current findings are based on data from nearly 7,000, 11- to 15-year-olds from 132 schools across the country."
Given that in many societies, you became an adult at 13. We can assume this happened because that is historically the age that MOST people have gone through puberty. That being the case, how can you call 11 "early". 8, yes is early, but not unheard of. 11 doesn't even count. The correct way of putting it would be that kids who are first in their peer group to hit puberty..yada..yada..yada. Of course the only two ways to prevent anyone from being first is to either do something that prevents puberty all together, (i.e. kill them first, or severe hormon treatments) or to prevent purberty medically long enought to dose all kids at the last day of the 6th grade, so they all come back in the 7th, having already hit puberty together.
I will kill anyone that tries either one on my kid.
Honestly, most of the problems these kids have (or at least enough to make the statistics show as they do) have to do with parents inability to accept that their child is growing up. It's so much easier to deny that your 11 year old is now an adult when all of the other kids in their class are still children.
Yes, the average age of puberty is lower today than it was centuries ago. But it reached its current level in North America about 40 years ago, before they started pumping cattle full of hormones. The best guess is that earlier maturation isn't due to the hormones in beef, but to the beef itself. With better nutrition children grow taller and mature earlier.
Giving cattle hormones may be a Bad Thing, but not for this reason.
Some of us havn't reached puberty yet! ... you insesitive clod!
Yeah early puberty can be tough. Just ask Eric Cartmen when he got his pubes before the other guys. He became increasingly frustrated in attempt after attempt to get his money back from Scott Tenorman who sold his pubes to Eric under false pretenses. But Eric got his revenge by getting Scott's parents killed, made them into chili, and fed them to Scott.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Clearly such people got nowhere near seeing that the evidence was weakest for whites, for two-parent families and for those who spent more time with girls, which may well bring the count to three out of four for relevance to
And it is also unfortunate for this and many similar studies that we don't have historical data and rarely cross cultural data, so we don't have anything beyond our vivid imaginations to help us decide whether the decline of parenting skills (through loss of tradition and lack of practice as families nucleate ever smaller) or the prevailing paranoia about children's social contacts might be other contributing factors.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Growth hormones in the food...
I was always below average in height relative to my male peers growing up. I got pubes late, I didn't have to shave until I was 17, my voice changed late, women noticed me late, guys picked on me... basically, my testosterone kicked in way later than it might have ideally and it was a real pain in the ass for me, actually. I didn't date until after high school and I didn't have sex until 21. I was surprised when women finally started noticing me because I had gotten to the point where I assumed I would stay mostly invisible.
The only yang to that yin that I can come up with is that I'm now 6'2", the guy who I was always jealous of who got laid at 12 is now 30 with a nice beer gut and half bald (and looks 38), and I have to sort of beat off the women now. I'm 33 and everyone says I look 26. At my 10 year reunion I was like the skinniest guy there. So maybe it's related to an aging-speed thing. Both my sister and I absolutely look younger than our peers now (but some of that might have to do with me living the bachelor life and trying to look good).
But damn, the cost was high. I tried playing sports with neighborhood kids growing up but invariably I would get bloodied up, which then turned me off from team sports completely (I played tennis and rode my bike instead). I'm a really social guy now (and some team sports are OK) but from 7th-10th grade I was so shellshocked that I barely had a friend and spent most of my time indoors hacking away on a computer (Microsoft Basic on a Mac Plus, lol) with my mom yelling at me to go outside (caught between a rock and a hard place).
So perhaps being any kind of outlier is more painful in general.
I returned to my parents' place for a weekend visit one year, and next to my sister... Behold! A 6' 2" real live woman! (I was a 21 year old geek and all too aware that are too few girls my size, this could be good...) So I asked my mother who the babysitter was, and was she single? Replied my dear mum, "Don't get any ideas. Period. You will make no remarks, no comments, nothing. You got it?" Oh why, says I...
"She is 12 years old, is a friend of your sister's and she already has enough trouble."
I saw a beautiful woman. She was no such thing: A 12-year old girl, and had already been the target of multiple, completely inappropriate advances by men and boys. She and my sister remained friends for several years, and by the time she was in college, she had already been hurt in too many ways.
These studies of early puberty are not stupid, they are needed in the context of a society that fails to protect its children.
It is interesting to see how much energy and time modern research (whether that be humanities or sciences) spends on studying symptoms and/or repercussions, without too much concern over the actual cause. Just like the modern medicine which is still predominantly a cut'n'paste job (think: a butcher with a pain-numbing injection), this study focuses on the repercussions of something that may very well be preventable.
Many studies have shown that due to the fact that all the hormones which are fed to the plants and animals to bolster yield, do end-up in the final produce/meat/milk/whatever we consume, children are now entering into puberty a lot earlier. No one as of yet knows the repercussions of this trend, but it sure doesn't sound very healthy...
I guess what I am trying to get at is that we should perhaps begin addressing the core problems rather than treating symptoms. Then again, for pharmaceutical companies the current situation sure does look a lot more profitable...
Maybe this will wake up some parents. A lot of kids these days get too little exercise anyway.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
..."tastes like chicken!" ;-)
Libertas in infinitum
I think underage laws are dumb.
;-)
After all, if it is old enough to bleed, it's old enough to breed.
Libertas in infinitum
Did you read the page you linked to? It is loaded with a ton of data that shows 13 has in fact been the historic avarge for starting menstration in girls. The few examples that showed it as being higher were countered on the same page as being improperly conducted studies. I know that some people really want the age of adulthood to be greater than it is and always has been, but please, if your going to link to data, link to something that supports your theory.
Ah, yes. Middle school. The point where everyone is busy throwing off authority but still has absolutely no idea how to get along with anyone else at all.
The least pleasant years of K-12, definitely.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Been there already. Don't sweat it, the benefits will be there for the rest of your life. The "cool" people from my past are wasted now, or dying from obesity or cigarettes and too much sex too early (with the wrong people.) I can pass for someone 15 years younger than my current 52 and I'm lifting more weight now than I have ever been able to. The hell with team sports; the only competitor worth trying to beat is the one inside you, 'cause he knows your moves and never stops whispering in your ear about how much less it will hurt if you'd just give up. So stay on that bike. Cycling is magic.
And welcome, to a very small and lucky club.
www.journal.naeyc.org/btj/200309/DelayingKEntry.pd f
The studies cited in the above link show that there is no long-term advantage to holding a child back from school for a year. In fact they show several disadvantages. The child does get a short-term advantage from being older and more mature than the other children but that advantage goes away in a couple of years.
The correlation between early reading ability and long term school performance is probably spurious or at least weak. A much stronger correlation is to the child's socio-economic conditions. Once you control for that, the early reader advantage pretty much vanishes.
So what does this mean for us at /. many whom have not reached puberty yet...?
I hate my puberty so much. I was like 10 or 11 when i got my period. I hate periods so much. Ir drive me crazy. I think I will see surgeon sooner. fuck periods.....
So hitting puberty early makes other kids go after you, and hitting it late makes them go after you. Maybe the study should have been entitled "Children Still Being Mean To Anyone Who Is In Any Way Different."
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Stan: But Chef, how old should you be before you're ready for sex?
Chef: Well children, the correct age to start having sex is.... seventeen
Kyle's Mom: Seventeen and in love, right?
Chef: No, just seventeen.
Kyle's Dad: But what if you're not ready at seventeen?
Chef: At seventeen, you're ready.
-Ares
I didn't have to shave until I was 17
:)
If you were having to shave at 17, trust me, you didn't develop late. Many guys are well into their 20s before they have to shave on a regular basis.
Congrats on the rest though, I agree - aging slowly IS a blessing in disguise
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If you're just under or around 14 or 15, you're probably thinking "OMIGOD I'M GONNA GET LAID!"
+++ATH0
Isn't one of the causes of early puberty increased trama and conflict in the household? I think I remember that from my Human Growth and Development psych class freshmen year. Thus, bad childhood == bad adolescence. Not exactly rocket science.
Dude, I don't think those are women.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I've heard it said that some races reach puberty earlier than others in general. If it so happens that these same races are also more prone to being in fights or in fights with knives and guns at an early age, then the link between early puberty and these problems may not exist. The problems may arrise from a social, economic, or pop-cultural phenomena(s) otherwise linked by race.
Then again the converse could be true, that race doesn't determine any of these factors but that early puberty does.
Its very unclear if their sample set was filtered against introducing such influence.
I always percieved this problem being worse for girls that hit puberty first. They go after older guys,and with the physiology that they have, and the sleaziness of some of the teenagers nowdays, they can often get them. I've seen this happen a lot personally (still being a teenager) where skanky girls my age hang out and go out with 18+ year olds. They get involved with drugs/substances that should probably be limited to the older age groups, start sleeping around with 18 year olds, going out late, avoiding school, ruining their life blablabla. Im suprised this study didn't accomodate this. Or they chose the wrong area. Or i didnt RTFA 'nuff.
is the consequences apply to you in this particular situation you are facing. It's one thing to know something intellectually, it's another to be aware of how and when to apply that knowledge. Oddly enough, this appears to require special brain wiring.
If you are a parent (which I will assume for the moment you are not), you should be aware of this. You can teach a child not to, say, talk to strangers for example. You can quiz them all you like and they'll answer perfectly. But they'll still talk to a stranger at the drop of a hat. The only kind of knowledge that sticks is that gained by practicing, e.g. by role plaing. It's never safe to assume a child will act on the logical consequences of their factual knowledge. Even adults often have difficulty with this and for kids its always a problem.
Anatomical studies show that the brain continues to mature well past the point we consider adult. Whether a thirty year old brain is superior to a twenty year old one is a value judgement; its clear that on some tasks it is not (e.g. learning a new language). However it's safe to assume something is going on. Given the complexity of the human brain, it's no wonder it's not finished by the time you're 18. Hypothetically speaking, it's not inconceivable that evolution de-prioritizes the finer aspects of judgement for later, given that it tends to be moderated by the close presence of older individuals.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Early Puberty Often More Hazardous" -- Is it really? Or is that just the case if you live in the US? Personal experience and observation of my peers, doesn't bare this as true (based on observations living in the UK, Germany and Denmark). All early puberty did for me was result in an interesting, varied, active, and adventurous sex life that has lasted since I was 14 and still going strong (currently 28). Early puberty, being gay, and not being somewhere where kids are routinely shot by their peers has it's perks after all!
I think it's more interesting to research into why humans are starting puberty early. People normally point to changes in diet and such things, but I wonder if there isn't a social aspect to this as well. The problem with young children getting pregnant is that they are not yet able to properly care for a child. Per Darwinian evolution (which I know isn't the whole story, but just bare with me) a child whose parent is unable to care for it is more likely to die and fail to carry on the traits that lead to early onset of puberty. Therefore you'd expect that this trait would not proceed to the point where it is harmful.
However, due to the social nature of human beings we tend to care for one another. If a child has a baby and is unable to care for it the the baby's grandparent may, for example, take care of it. Sometimes such babies are also put up for adoption. This means that such non-beneficial traits can get carried forward and become more common over time until the burden of underage parents becomes too heavy for society to bear. We are starting to see such problems now, which is essentially what this article is about: society is not adapting very well to the early puberty of kids. Should the ages where the various stages of sex education are taught be brought earlier? I didn't hear a peep about STDs through school until I was 13, despite the fact that many of my peers were already sexually active by that point. I don't know when they teach this stuff these days, but I'd hope it's earlier than that. Can an increasingly conservative society even cope with the idea of 11-year-old parents? Will schools go downhill with younger children getting themselves into trouble at an earlier age and have to revert to smaller class sizes to retain quality teaching? Is there some way that early-onset puberty can be reduced ethically to avoid some of these problems?
There are so many social impacts to consider including many we haven't even realised are a problem yet; the outcome of this particular research is a little contrived, but I'm glad to see people thinking about these things nonetheless.
Isn't this obvious? I mean everyone knows that early puberty leads to masturbation which causes hairy palms and blindness... :)
1 2 1 2 The Naken Crew
At the same time, I watched everyone else act like idiots when I was a teenager over sex and drugs and made up my mind not to join them. Early puberty doesn't make one have sex at an early age--stupidity and lack of the concept of individual responsibility will.
I love how society likes to blame everything BUT individuals for their problems and for doing stupid things. TV made me do it. Hollywood made me do it. Drugs made me do it. And now, "Puberty made me do it." It's terribly dysfunctional.
Do not disturb. Already disturbed. http://www.teaaddictedgeek.com
>I'm so sick of this pseudo-argument. The consequences of sex (mainly pregnancy and disease) just aren't that hard to grasp, and there's no doubt in my mind that any teenager can understand them. I certainly could at that age.
I don't know how you are or your life's experieinces but I beg to differ.
I *thought* I grapsed the "consequences of pregnancy" at 15 years old. And I *knew* I grapsed the "consequences of pregnancy" at 25 years old.
Then I had my first kid at 35 and the second at age 37.
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing makes you grasp the "consequences of pregnancy" until you have a kid. Period.
It's like saying you understand what it is like to jump out of an airplane becasue you watched in on T.V. Life just doesn't work that way.
To say to 15 year old understands the "consequences of pregnancy" is, frankly, quite stupid.
If you think you're tried of pseudo-arguments now, just wait a few decades and you'll really be tired of them.
Idealism is fine but it often conflicts with experience.
Most kids just don't have the skill set for:
Not getting what you want the second you want it, or in the case of newborns, what you NEED (sleep).
Getting someone else (an infant) what they NEED
Putting up with someone else (esp. toddlers) not getting what they WANT
YMMV, but I think most reasonable 25 year olds that can manage a budget, keep their house/car/PC maintained and take care of themselves (eat right, sleep right, excercise) can handle a child in their lives. Of course, my wife and I had our first kid at 33, so that tells you where I'm at.
I doubt there's a single 15 year old that has the life skills (and a job to pay for it all)to do that.
Looking at myself, even I wouldn't shag me!
No need to wait until 18! UK laws states:
It's illegal for you to give alcohol to children under 5 (unless it's medical)
If you're under 14 you're not allowed in a pub/bar unless it has a suitable licence. This also includes beer gardens and family rooms.
At 14 you can enter a bar or pub but only if the landlord agrees and if you drink soft drinks (this can include low-alcohol beer).
If you're 16 or 17 you can buy or be bought beer or cider with a meal.
If you're under 18 you can't buy alcohol, anywhere, unless it's the above.
I was about 12 1/2 when I got my first period - apparently around average. But girls can generally be pretty mean, especially around middle school age, and it's not hard to imagine some of them making fun of an early developer. So what I wondered was whether the early puberty could cause them to be excluded by some of their same-age peers. If so, would they end up hanging out with older kids on the fringes? I could see a situation like that being risky.
"anti-bullying program"
Wouldn't summary execution work? Or maybe beating the crap out of the kids parents...
Or a more pragmatic suggestion, install surveillance at schools and the school can file assault charges against the youngsters.
An instructor of mine was working on a study that was related to this in a way. The premise was that a combination of diet, health factors, social factors, external stimulus were contributing to children hitting puberty earlier and earlier, with an extended period of adolescence - which made it extremely difficult for anyone to abstain from having sex. It went something like in the 20s, most people were marrying at 17 or 18, but not reaching puberty until 15 or 16. They only had to wait a couple years at most before they could start hitting it and not be a disgrace to their family. As the years progressed, the average age that people married got older, but the age they hit puberty got younger. Now, if I'm recalling correctly, the average age that an American kid begins puberty is 10, but the average age that they get married is in the mid-20s. That's over a decade of abstinence if "saving yourself for marriage" is your bag - compared to your grandparents or greatgrandparents who only had to wait a couple of years to be "respectable".
it's not good or bad, in the long term.
As there is not only early puberty, the trend is also that more and more people divorce. So I wondered how this works out for our evolution. Since the mixing will start more earlier (possible more healtier but weaker persons) while our race is also in a later stage looking for better partners.
Perhaps it's a good thing since we reproduce quit slowly compared for example to insects. On the other hand also our social will change over time. Perhaps in a few hundred years it's normal to have a base offspring, and then later have some specialized offspring (thinking in genetics).
hmm this reminds me to the bonobo apes, the solve every conflict with sex. Perhaps that isn't such a bad thing, compared to the rate in which humans kill each other.
common babe you and me, are like mammels on the discovery channel..(song)
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
The "logical" reaction to this study is to delay puberty by chemical means. That would be consistent with Western civilization's tendency to extend the dependency phase of its offspring. Compulsory schooling was invented in part to extend adolescence. The age of mandatory schooling has risen consistently. The amount of education one needs is hardly relevant. Only the years one must spend in school matter. "Child" labor laws prevent adolescents from gaining economic independence. It's nearly impossible to become self-supporting before the age of 18 in the U. S. There are moves afoot to raise minimum drivers licensing age to 18 in some States, keeping adolescents dependent upon parents for transportation even longer. In Italy, it's customary for sons to live with their parents until they marry, often late in their 20s or early 30s. In the U. S., moving back into the nest after college does not carry the stigma that it used to. The rising cost of living, student loans, tough job market, etc., have extended the period of economic adolescence. Now comes a study showing that it would be in your child's best interests to delay the onset of his puberty. "Although (parents) may have no control over when their child experiences puberty," I'm sure there's a pill for that, or soon will be, and now the thought of searching for it is being planted. Also note that so-called victimization was less common among "those who reported having higher levels of attachment with their parents." A matriarchal bias seems to be at work in this prolonging of dependency, especially male dependency. Most schoolteachers are female, and every one of them is trained to encourage emotional dependence. This study claims that a boy who has mainly female friends is not victimized as often. (I wonder if the researchers examined any of the ways that girls victimize boys?) And most blatant of all, "females are really good for men," Piquero said. "Women seem to help curtail men's bad experiences." I find this research rather sinister.
You mentioned "the slut who had the abortion". why does it feel like you especially enjoyed typing those six salacious words? Are you implying that that anyone, excepting victims of rape and incest, who has ever sufferd through an abortion is a slut? Or perhaps were you just in a big hurry and, now that the tingle has worn off the wood, have come to deeply regret not stepping out of the gutter before voicing your opinion?
>> "the class might encourage young kids to have sex"
The not so funny thing is that it does. More condom availability leads to more sex but doesn't decrease STI nor unwanted pregnancy rates.
Or that's what worldwide studies have shown over countries that educate on the biological factors.
Programmes that include emotional elements and relationship education have more effect.