Young girls in America go through puberty at an earlier age than before, and while the causes are still in question, some experts fear it could have negative consequences for young women’s health later in life – both mentally and and physically.
The average age of puberty in the United States has dropped from the typical, biologically recognized age of 12 to 10 years for women. Black and Spanish girls in particular go through puberty about a year earlier on average.
Experts tell DailyMail.com that the growing obesity crisis in America may be the main reason, blaming poor diets for increasing puberty. Others believe that this may be caused by a violent childhood, and there is also a theory that it is associated with an imbalance of certain hormones.
There are also negative long-term negatives, such as the link between early puberty and the development of cancer – which remains unexplained for now – and the traumatic experiences caused by a young girl growing up too fast.
The phenomenon was first discovered by Dr. Marsha Herman-Giddens, a public health expert at the University of North Carolina, when she began collecting data on more than 17,000 girls in the mid-1990s.
She found that the average age of puberty decreases, falling to ten years, and some girls develop at six. Her findings stimulate ongoing research on the subject, with experts from many fields investigating what caused this change and what its long-term effects may be.
Both the causes and consequences of premature puberty when a child goes through this process too early are wide-ranging and cannot be explained simply by a simple solution suitable for everyone.
Instead, shifting the age of puberty forward may be the result of various factors. And the consequences it can have on a girl’s life can be far-reaching.
An increasing rate of obesity may be at the root of early puberty in girls
Dr. Paula Newton (pictured), an endocrinologist at the University of Maryland, explains that fat cells secrete hormones that cause puberty, which can help stimulate early development in overweight children.
America is currently experiencing an obesity crisis and the nation’s children are not spared.
According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 20 percent of all Americans between the ages of two and 19 are considered obese.
For ages six to 11, where early puberty is a risk, the obesity rate is also exactly 20 percent.
The degree of obesity corresponds to this increase in premature puberty, and Dr. Paula Newton, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Maryland, told DailyMail.com that this may not be a coincidence.
She explained that fat cells have hormonal properties and that young girls who are overweight or obese will begin to produce the chemicals that cause puberty at an earlier age.
Once these chemicals move into the bloodstream and eventually accumulate in the ovaries, they will produce estrogen.
Estrogen then triggers breast development and other physical changes that outwardly indicate that the young girl is going through a maturation process.
This may also explain why the rate of precocious puberty increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A study published in April in the Italian Journal of Pediatrics found that the rate of precocious puberty jumped 2.5 times in 2020 and 2021 compared to previous years.
Newton said her clinic also saw an increase not only in childhood obesity but also in prediabetes and type 2 diabetes in children during Covid – both weight gain and unhealthy diets.
“As far as we see during this pandemic, it’s more sedentary activity and lack of activity, increased snacks, more junk food, more tidiness,” Newton said, explaining the increased prevalence of these conditions.
Covid has forced many children to spend more time indoors instead of playing outside and doing regular exercises that they would otherwise.
Not being in school, but instead doing virtual education, allows for less structured eating habits, and the child at home can easily eat unhealthily throughout the day – an opportunity they would not get in a school environment.
About one-fifth of children in the United States are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a growing crisis in America (photo file)
But Newton does not entirely blame obesity for the change seen by experts in recent decades, and even believes that change may have less to do with changes in biology – and more with changes in demographics.
The original study, conducted decades ago, was on a group of children who were completely white.
However, this is not a representative sample for the United States, and the proportion of white people in the country is declining every decade.
Research by Giddens and many others on the subject has found that black and Spanish girls go through puberty at a younger age than their white peers.
Why this is so is not yet clear, but it means that a representative sample that is slowly including more and more blacks and Spanish children – as these groups make up the majority of the US population – would naturally shift the average age of puberty upwards by at least a few months over time.
“I wonder if part of what we’re capturing is changes in population demographics.” Newton speculated.
For various systemic reasons, younger children from minorities are also more likely to be obese than their white peers. This means that an increasing part of the studied population has a clear risk factor for premature puberty.
Young girls with traumatic childhood are more likely to go through puberty early – and premature puberty can lead to lifelong mental health problems
Another phenomenon noted by experts is the link between childhood hardships, in particular violent violence and premature puberty.
“The time of puberty is multifactorial – there are many things that contribute to this,” Dr. Megan Gunnar, a prominent professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, told DailyMail.com.
Dr. Megan Gunnar (pictured), an expert on child development at the University of Minnesota, explained that children with violent trauma in childhood are more likely to go through early puberty.
A study published in 2020 found that children who suffered from violence and abuse in their youth were more likely to go through premature puberty.
There is also a long-standing relationship between young girls who suffer from sexual abuse and early puberty.
However, not all children who have a difficult childhood go through puberty early and this seems to be a trend especially for physical or sexual abuse.
If mental illness was the main factor, Gunnar notes, then there are likely to be many foster children who go through puberty early for whom there is none.
This is because abuse seems to affect the body at the cellular level, causing rapid aging and accelerating certain biological processes.
Gunnar also believes that obesity is a key factor, and even more than abuse is in the early development of young girls.
Similarly, trauma at a young age is associated with premature puberty, girls who go through puberty earlier than their peers are at increased risk of depression, anxiety and being affected by severe emotional trauma from their peers.
Dr Stephen Hinshaw, a distinguished professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of California, Berkeley, told DailyMail.com that while early puberty can be beneficial for boys, it can be emotionally devastating for young women.
“For boys who reach physical maturity early… if there is something that can be a slight protective factor against harassment or harassment,” he explained.
“But for girls there is such an association, especially with depression, anxiety, self-harm, self-harm, which is especially pronounced in girls in co-educational secondary education.”
This is because girls who are older and more developed than their peers at an early age become easy targets for bullying, and their larger figures are usually seen as clumsy and even masculine.
Dr Stephen Hinshaw (pictured), a prominent professor at Cal-Berkeley, said young girls were placed in a harmful “triple bond” of society in their teens.
He explained that this phenomenon can be seen in the trends in mental health problems by gender.
At an early age, boys are actually more likely than girls to suffer from anxiety and other problems than their female peers.
At the age of 11, however, the trends are reversed. Girls are more likely than boys to suffer from mental health problems.
For the rest of their lives, women are more likely to suffer from mental health problems than men, Hinshaw said.
This is due to the impact that puberty has on girls and how society views them, he explains.
In 2009, Hinshaw published The Triple Bind, a book discussing the roles and expectations young girls face after puberty, which he said is even more relevant today, more than a decade later.
Young girls have the impossible task of excelling in three separate areas in their adolescence, Hinshaw explains, putting them in this threefold relationship.
First, they are expected to play a role in the home. As a woman, they are expected to care for younger siblings and others in the family and perform other household duties.
There is also pressure from the media – and in recent years social media – to maintain their appearance and be “attractive”, with harmful standards of beauty being imposed on American girls from an early age.
Finally, they are also putting increasing pressure on school for all adolescents, as entering a prestigious university seems like the standard for a successful career in America, and even a poor high school grade can cost a teenager a chance at future success.
This is untenable for many young girls, as it is impossible to look perfect, the perfect hostess and the perfect …
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