Cultural Effect on Sexual Maturation [f/ abstinence-only]

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The following has been split from here.
--Savonarola, Science moderator

Sexual maturity has been moving back over the last 100 years. When my mother was young, the average for a girl to hit puberty was 14-15 (athletic builds 16-17), boys a few years later. When I was young it was 12. Now the average is barely 11, and girls are having periods as early as 8. There's not been much investigation as to why - my bet is the growth hormones given to our food animals (how do you think you get a chicken from 6 ounces to 6 pounds (live weight) in less than 6 weeks?), but I doubt the research will be done, much less publicized under our current political environment. Boys of 15 who didn't think girls were "icky" were rare in my youth (something seemed to happen to them about their 16th birthday when I was a kid). It's our incredibly sick society that makes sexual experiments and attitudes so bad. You can't have a society that preaches sex is a sin, but sells everything by how sexy it supposedly makes you, without creating a severe psychological disconnect.

Part of the problem with earlier puberty is the rest of the body is playing catch up. In my mother's day, a girl's body was adult enough (not only musculoskeletally, but internal organs and the rest of it) to safely have a baby 3-4 years after puberty. The body still isn't fully adult until 18 or so, but puberty is about 11 - that's a 6-year "wait" until pregnancy is a safe idea (never mind whether or not it's a good idea). Ain't gonna happen. As for "abstinance only" teaching - "the more forbid, the sweeter tastes the pie".

Edited by Savonarola 20070425 1646: added reference link

[ChristianLoeschel]

A theory both my parents shared through their observations in both their practices (my dads a gynaecologist, my mom was a GP) was that

a) lower class kids reached puberty considerably earlier than those of middle/upper class families

b) the earlier kids were exposed to sexually explicit material, the earlier they geneally hit puberty.

Now, admittedly, this is a small sample size from 2 medium size practices in a town of 20,000 but there might be something to this.

[Doug]

...b) the earlier kids were exposed to sexually explicit material, the earlier they geneally hit puberty.

DOUG
If this is so, due to the Internet, the next generation is going to hit puberty very early.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

I don't think the sexually explicit material can have anything to do with the age of puberty - sexual experimentation, yes, but the start of periods in females (for example) is unlikely to be triggered by that. As to the lower income kids hitting puberty sooner, some ethnicities - the "wrong side of the tracks" groups - seem to hit puberty earlier than others, but the research I've seen (and that's a decade or so old, so there's hopefully something better now) wasn't clear as to whether that was an ethic issue or a poverty issue. Since, in the natural course of things, puberty hits earlier in a population that gets a bare sufficiency of food for the energy expended getting it, poverty is a logical factor.