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Early Puberty for Girls of Working Moms
Is it really your job that's making her grow up so fast?
Working moms, here’s another side effect of your selfish, career-focused ways: Your daughters will go through puberty much earlier than their peers raised by stay-at-home moms!
A controversial researcher, one who claimed long hours of daycare made babies feel less loved, claims in his latest work that a girl’s march toward puberty starts in the sling. The more securely attached a girl is to her mother, the more time she’ll take going through puberty. But weak or insecure attachment means the hormones will kick in significantly sooner.
Jay Besky of Birbeck University London and researchers from Duke say that once-insecurely attached baby girls may account for the alarmingly young age an increasing number of girls is going through puberty. Does that make you want to quit your job? Well, let’s first try to make sense of some of their assumptions.
A recent study in the journal Pediatrics, among other articles, claims girls are undergoing puberty at a far earlier age than just a generation ago. Some claim better nutrition — even obesity — or hormone-mimicking chemicals account for this. Besky and his fellow researchers are saying the mother-child bond influences this.
But the whole business of determining the onset of puberty is very subjective. Researchers have typically said puberty starts when breasts begin to develop. But when does a girl’s chest start developing? There’s hardly a scientific standard. Other problems with how we’re determining at what age individuals in a population have undergone puberty are wonderfully outlined here. And the lack of diversity in the data used in the most recent panic trigger is here (Hint: Only white girls’ data was counted).
An even worse problem for Besky’s study is the set of assumptions made about how an attached child behaves (or, more poignantly, how an emotionally distant child behaves), and what, for crying out loud, “attached” means.
His description of an emotionally distant child reads exactly like the behavior of my first child, who was so inseparably attached to me that anytime I left her — with her grandmother, for instance — she would look away and ignore me when I returned (after 10 minutes, people!). What I’m saying is that determining the attached-ness of a child to his mother is just as subjective as eyeballing chest tissue and deciding whether or not it’s breast tissue.
The Los Angeles Times tries to succinctly summarize these findings — a secure bond with your baby is good for emotional AND physical health. But don’t quit your day job if you don’t want to. Secure and happy bonds come in all shapes and sizes, just like little girls, their pituitary glands and the internal clocks that operate them.
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[...] Are Working Moms to Blame for Early Puberty in Girls? [...]
Breaking Dawn Childbirth Scene | Strollerderby commented on Sep 06 10 at 11:04 am[...] Early Puberty for Girls of Working Moms [...]
Gender Roles, Neuroscience, Why Girls Play with Dolls | Strollerderby commented on Sep 06 10 at 1:22 pm[...] talk a lot about early puberty here at Strollerderby. We report the latest findings that suggest working mothers, childhood obesity and high-meat diets might all be the cause of it. As parents, we devour this [...]
Early Puberty and Other Mothers | Strollerderby commented on Sep 13 10 at 6:01 pm[...] early puberty in girls, researchers come up with yet another one. In addition to high-meat diets, working moms and childhood obesity, we can now blame [...]
Puberty, Divorce and Middle Class Girls | Strollerderby commented on Sep 17 10 at 3:01 pmlaura commented on Sep 03 10 at 4:01 pmTo be fair, the working mom research and this puberty research are separate. I read the piece and didn’t see ANYTHING about working or daycare causing early puberty. It was how the baby reacted when the mom came back after leaving (a standard test of infant attachement). A stay at home mom can have a insecure baby and a working mom can have a secure baby, and this research didn’t seem to dispute that.
Julia commented on Sep 03 10 at 5:24 pmJust one more thing to make working Mom’s feel guilty. I am a SAHM and found this article to be total B.S. Laura, I so agree with you, you can have an insecure baby with a working Mom. I have seen other SAHMs that are always on their cell phones, etc…and not paying attention to their children at all. I can’t even see the correlation between early puberty and Mom’s working, lame article!
Gretchen Powers commented on Sep 03 10 at 8:01 pmcorrelation does not equal causation, anyway, could be a coincidence, could be that other factors are common among households where the moms work, besides, don’t most moms go back to work by the time their kids are hitting puberty?
Donna commented on Sep 04 10 at 1:28 pmDetermining a child’s attachment is actually not “as subjective as eyeballing chest tissue.” The strange situation is how they determine attachment and it has a great deal of support for it and it predicts a great deal of psychological constructs. Furthermore, just because this researcher is the same that published other research which was unpopular doesn’t mean that he is saying the same thing here. This post is very misleading.
Donna commented on Sep 04 10 at 1:32 pmPS where did you get the info about it being related to working moms? The LA Times articles said nothing about working moms-just about attachment styles predicting early puberty. I’m so disturbed at how the author completely misrepresents the research. It is scary how someone could read this and completely get the wrong idea.
Mary commented on Sep 07 10 at 10:37 pmThis is completely delusional. My mom worked full time my whole childhood and I didn’t get my period till 15.5. Which was exactly in line with the genetics in my family. I wish people would stop trying to punish women for working. Some of us have to. So go find someone else to pick on.
Betsy commented on Sep 10 10 at 8:02 pmWhat a horrible article.
Anonymoous commented on Sep 11 10 at 6:42 pmI just LOVE how y’all drink in every word when the science “agrees” with your feminist dogma, but you reject it when it *gasp* disagrees with feminist brainwashing. And yes, other than truly extraordinary circumstances, it IS selfish to abandon your children to some over worked, underpaid, barely out of college brat, I mean, teacher.
STACY commented on Sep 15 10 at 2:55 amSELFISH???!!!!R u kiddin????we single moms work because we have to not choice how dare u sit in judgement of me!!!!Ya,it has nothing to do with all the stuff they put on or in our food!!!I cant believe u would say that!!!!! My mom was a single mom and while my friends that had a stay at home mom and a dad that worked was having babies at 14 rs old, I was working and going to school and was the last of my friends to have a child!!!I am still a single, working mother and my child is doing just fine! Why don’t u look into all the stuff in food nowadays before u put it on us single harwoking mothers!!! Get all ur facts and then comment! It would be nice if instead of tearing eachother down we built eachother up!!!!!
laura commented on Sep 17 10 at 3:14 pmI was just checking to see if the author responded to the criticism that this article misrepresented the actual research. Instead, I just saw the comment by Anonymoous and threw up in my mouth a little bit. Dear Anon: there was no science v feminism here. And you want to know what is really selfish? Being so violently ignorant.
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