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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."
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.
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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.).
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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)).
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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...
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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.
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.
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).
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!
"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.
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.
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Posting as anonymous for a reason.
I disagree with you. Even though this is just humour, I feel compelled to tell you how I feel.
I am a male teen. Age of 17 and damn proud of my youth. I believe I hit puberty fairly early age. I believe it was around 11 yeas of age.
As I began to develop, I found myself in more of a "hide in the shadows" state of mind. I took a keen interest in computers, and more importantly, the internet and its luxuries[HTML, JavaScript, etc.]
I also have had 4 sexual partners. All of which have been atleast 1 year older than I was at the time. They have never been a "one night stand" or anything, as I find myself more interested in feeling that connection with a female via a close relationship.
I've been living on my own since ~3 months after I turned 16. I have been living with my current girlfriend since last October. I know it may not be the 100% absolute for sure thing, as I am still young. But I find that because I matured earlier, that I am able to handle situations much more efficiently and in a more mature mannour than anyone else in my age group that I grew up with.
I have also been a web developer since I was 11 years of age. I use it to make a living now, and I feel I am doing damn good.
*thumbs up*
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 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.