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Boys are racing towards puberty earlier and earlier
Early puberty isn’t just for girls anymore. A new study shows that boys have been reaching adolescence earlier as well.
People have been raising concerns about girls’ increasingly early development for years. As Jezebel points out, Kotex has even started marketing maxi pads for kids as young as 8. Because there’s a market for that.
In boys, the onset of puberty can be a little harder to spot. There’s no menarche. They don’t wake up one day with a spot of blood on their undies and join the demographic of pubescent kids. It’s more like a gradual process.
So how can you tell if that process is starting earlier? One researcher is doing it by looking at death rates.
Who knows about boys better than dad?
As young girls grow older and enter adolescence, fathers often begin to feel a little left out. Suddenly, daddy’s little girl isn’t so little anymore. She’s likely to be less interested in toys and games and more interested in bodies, boys and other big girl stuff.
But while many dads are happy to step aside and let mom take over during this important stage of a young girl’s life, a recent study from New York University suggests that it might be better if they didn’t. Continue reading »
Talk about Puberty
My Strollerderby colleague, psychotherapist and science writer Heather Turgeon recently wrote an excellent story about why 7- and 8-year-old girls are entering puberty.
As Turgeon points out, there have recently been a slew of studies detailing possible reasons for early onset puberty — the obesity epidemic seems largely to blame.
But various studies have suggested that other factors include: absent fathers, divorce, a high-meat diet, family stress, and exposure to bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates.
Turgeon concludes that “the most likely culprit of precocious puberty is the obesity epidemic.” She cites the fact that overweight girls are 50 percent more likely to enter puberty early. Obese girls have an 80 percent chance of developing breasts before they turn nine.
So what can parents do to prevent early puberty?
In a post on Girlology (from the authors of Girlology: There’s Something New About You), Melisa writes that there are many things we can do to help our daughters. Here are just 5 of Melisa’s suggestions:
1. Avoid cosmetic products with chemicals in them.
2. Battle obesity through healthy eating and exercise.
3. Serve hormone-free, antibiotic free food whenever possible.
4. Limit exposure to media – especially highly sexualized content.
5. Help your daughter understand puberty (whenever it begins) and create an open line of communication.
Are you concerned about early puberty in girls?
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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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Photo: flickr.com/Pink Sherbet Photography
Scientists think they have unlocked the chemical triggers that cause puberty: a reaction in the KISS-1 gene. That awkward period of intense growth and change has long been a mystery. We know what happens, but we don’t know what triggers it to begin.
Now researchers have found a chemical reaction in the brain that they believe starts that period of growth spurts, pimples and mood swings.
This could be great news for parents worried about the increasingly early onset of puberty. Knowing what triggers these changes in the body could be a first step towards finding out why it’s happening earlier. Hopefully, that will lead to finding ways to slow it down again. No one wants to take their 7-year-old bra shopping.
China’s Ministry of Health has announced that Synutra International infant formula is not the cause of the extremely high hormone levels found in three girls, ranging in age from 15 months to four years, who had been fed the formula.
The LA Times reports, “After testing 73 samples of formula from Synutra and other international and domestic brands, the ministry concluded that the milk powder displayed normal levels of the hormones that might have caused the early development.”
The hormones in question – estradiol and prolactin – “stimulate the production of breast milk,” and likely seeped into the formula because of milk used from cows who had been treated with them. The babies allegedly affected by the formula had grown breasts and one even experienced vaginal discharge, according to her outraged father, 28-year-old Wang Gang, who refuses to believe the ministry’s assessment is accurate. Continue reading »
The AFP reported today that baby formula manufactured in China by Synutra International has led babies to “prematurely develop breasts,” as a result of hormones found in the milk powder. Not young girls – babies. Chinese state media confirmed that in babies who were fed the formula, “the levels of hormones in three girls, ranging in age from 15 months to four years, exceeded those of the average adult woman.” So far there is no word as to how the formula has affected baby boys.
To say that this sickens me is a gross understatement.
We all know about how many Chinese-made children’s products have been recalled in the US, but the citizens of China don’t have the same kind of protections we do here. Doctors have suggested that the powder be analysed to discover why it’s causing infants to experience puberty symptoms (hello?!), but local food safety authorities refused. Worse yet, the formula is still being sold, and at discount prices to boot, meaning (as usual) that the poorest people are more likely to suffer the most negative health affects.
Synutra insists its products are safe, saying, “No man-made ‘hormones’ or any illegal substances were added during production” of the formula. There are no regulations against using hormones in Chinese livestock, so it’s likely that estradiol and prolactin (the hormones found in the systems of the girls who were tested), “entered the food chain when farmers reared the cattle,” according to the former chairman of the dairy association in Guangdong province.
AFP notes that, “Chinese dairy products were recalled worldwide in 2008 after it was revealed that melamine, a toxic chemical used to make plastics, was widely and illegally added to the products to give the appearance of higher protein.” Synutra has since recovered financially from what they’ve so glibly dubbed “the melamine incident.” If you’d like a reason to feel enraged, take a look at this chart from their investor relations packet: Continue reading »
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