Comments should be open.
As I’ve written before, each semester in my women’s history course we spend some time looking at Joan Brumberg’s wonderful Body Project. Brumberg talks about the four to five year drop in the onset of puberty between the late nineteenth century and the present. The best medical evidence we have from 1900 put the average age of menarche at 16; today, it is just over 11. And of course, with earlier menarche comes earlier development of other secondary sex characteristics. The same is true with boys, though males lack the single defining demarcation line of the onset of menstruation to mark an entry into adolescence.
It’s a women’s studies class, so we spend much more time focusing on the impact of earlier puberty on girls than on boys. We refute some of the common myths (like the long-standing notion that the Virgin Mary was fourteen, and thus menarche must have happened for her before she was to be wed). We talk about the role of changing diet, particularly meat consumption, in driving adolescent growth. I quote from PCRM’s summary of a Harvard study:
Some studies suggest that the growth of vegetarian children is more gradual than that of non-vegetarians—in other words, vegetarian children grow a bit more slowly at first, but they catch up later on. Final heights and weights for vegetarian children are comparable to those of meat-eating children. Interestingly, breast-fed babies also grow more slowly than bottle-fed babies. Somewhat less rapid growth during the early years is thought to decrease disease risk later in life.
On the other hand, diets rich in animal protein, found in meat, eggs, and dairy products, appear to reduce the age of puberty, as shown in a 2000 study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier. Nature may well have designed the human body to grow up more gradually, to reach puberty later, and to last longer than most people raised on omnivorous diets experience.
Bold mine. The full study is here. I never hide the fact that I’m a vegan, and so I’m quite clear about my bias: if future parents want to make sure that their children “don’t grow up too fast”, raising them with a minimum meat intake (or as vegans) is the best way to go. Take Harvard’s word for it — there’s a lot to be said for delaying physical puberty by 24-36 months, to give the mind time to keep pace with the body developmentally. MTV can’t make your daughter menstruate earlier than you did; McDonalds can.
But please believe that I don’t just use the palpable anxiety my students feel about the “vanishing of physical childhood” to push my vegan agenda. Yeah, I do that – but there’s more as well. We also spend a great deal of time exploring the historical, psychological, and cultural implications of a much earlier adolescence. Those students who are comfortable doing so are invited to open up dialogue with older female relatives (this is not required); many in my classes, filled as they are with first-generation Americans, have grandmothers who are a foot shorter than they are — and who report “starting” substantially later.
In journal assignments, many of my students write about their own worries about their younger sisters or daughters. (I have many single parents, mostly moms, in my courses). A great many talk about rethinking the diets that they will offer their future children. But interestingly, none of them express any anxiety about early puberty in boys. When the subject comes up — which it has — in my men and masculinity courses, I never hear a student say “Gosh, I want to make sure I raise my son vegetarian so he can stay in a boy’s body longer.” In my women’s history courses, I constantly hear “I want to do everything I can to delay my daughter’s development”.
We project our cultural anxieties about sex on to girls’ bodies, not boys’. The lamentable and indefensible double standard that leads many parents to guard jealously their daughter’s virginity while expressing incestuous pride at their son’s sexual exploits is at play in how many parents respond to their children’s development. Imagine a typical modern parent, if there is such a thing, saying “My little girl is growing up” as a beloved daughter shows signs of physical puberty. What tone do you imagine in the mother’s — or father’s — voice? My bet is wistfulness and worry more than pride. But when little Jimmy comes running in, looking not so little anymore, and Mom or Dad says “My, look how big you’re getting!”, it’s pretty darned likely that there is nary a hint of anxiety in the air!
It is a rare parent indeed who will approach the family physician saying “My Jimmy is the tallest and strongest boy in the fifth grade. Don’t you think he’s growing up too fast?” But ask any pediatrician, and he or she will tell you of legions of parents who come in, worrying that their eleven year-old Jenny is already developing breasts and hips. (One of my pediatrician friends regularly gets asks if there’s a “shot” that can delay the onset of puberty. He’s only asked that by the parents of girls. The parents of boys ask him for a referral to an endocrinologist, so that they can get growth hormones for their undersized laddies.)
Kids aren’t dumb. Children, even (perhaps especially) adolescent children, are particularly attuned to nuances of approval, disapproval, and fear. Girls get the message that their growth is scaring their parents; worse, many fathers famously reduce their physical affection towards their daughters as the girls begin to hit puberty. Though one hears anecdotally about mothers eagerly awaiting their daughter’s menarche so that they can “bond as women”, those stories seem fairly rare. Boys suffer too — but the boys who have the hardest time are those who are the last to begin to grow. Too often, the most worried parents on the block are the parents of the girl who “developed first” and the parents of the smallest boy in his class. These are two very different sets of anxieties, and kids pick up on them very easily. The message is clear: boys are “supposed” to be strong and powerful (and in some sense, physically sexual); girls are “supposed” to be “little” as long as possible.
Walk on to the campus of any American middle or junior-high school, and look at the seventh-graders. If you’re over thirty (or fifty), your first thought (especially if you’re not often around adolescents) is how big and how developed the kids appear compared to what you remember about your peers at that age. Puberty still happens along a spectrum, and at any given age, some kids will always be farther along than others. But the age at which many kids start traveling down that spectrum is much earlier than it was a century — or even just twenty-five years –ago. Some of that is due to better overall health, much of it due to increased meat consumption — but regardless, it is a significant shift. And because we live in a culture that objectifies adolescent girls at the same time that it denies them sexual agency, and because we live in a culture with absurd and unattainable standards of what “real men” are supposed to be, we respond radically differently to the onset of puberty in our sons and our daughters.
Leaving aside veganism as a panacea for all ills (though I am often inclined to think that it is), what we need is some more honest conversation about our fears and our hopes for our young people. We need to make sure that we are involving teens (and yes, older pre-teens) in that discussion, and that we are actively listening to their anxieties and hopes rather than merely projecting our own on to them. And we need to see that our sons can be vulnerable at any size, and our girls can find the first glimmers of power and agency even in junior high school. In other words, we need to recognize boys and girls as complete human beings, adults in formation, with potential that ought not be shaped or limited by the sex of their rapidly changing bodies.