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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The recent media alert about sex-crazed "tweens" is mostly a lot of hoo-ha with naught behind it.
Oct 22, 1999 | Last week, in what has become a rite that recurs every decade, Newsweek magazine sounded the alarm. "Tweens: Are They Growing Up Too Fast?" asked the cover. Yes! shouted the copy inside. The age of puberty in this country is plummeting! Ours is a nation of sexually sophisticated kiddies!
"They are a generation stuck in fast-forward, children in a fearsome hurry to grow up," said the authors. "The girls wear sexy lingerie and provocative makeup created just for tweens in order to complete what some parents call the Lolita look." Precocious, strangely seductive young girls in 1999 are "8 going on 25," Newsweek warns, and they "becoming sexually active at an alarmingly early age."
Newsweek is just the latest publication to join the chorus of media decrying a new phenomenon of early blooming, sexually precocious "tweens" -- a marketing term for children between 8 and 12. The Des Moines Register, the Plain Dealer, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Washington Post and the New York Times have weighed in on the topic with headlines like "A Woman Too Soon: The Dangerous Trend Towards Early Puberty" and "Too Young to Be Women."
As the end of the millennium nears, girls "are facing teenage hormones before they've learned to multiply or write their names in cursive," Redbook announces, fretting that these child-women will spark demand for "Disney deodorant and Baby Bop bras."
Taken as a whole, the stories have a telling subtext. Barely hidden is the terror that reporters and editors seem to feel as their daughters and their friends' daughters -- daughters everywhere -- evolve into sexual beings.
Obviously missing are the boys, good, bad or indifferent. They mature later and become interested in sex earlier, but this, apparently, is of no concern. Instead, each story contains a gender-specific warning label hundreds of words long: Remain alert and vigilant, parents of girls! They will bloom before they (read: you) are ready and disastrous consequences will ensue! Freud would be amused by the undercurrent of hysteria: Clearly, Daddy is struggling mightily with the fact that his girl may be attractive to other men cuz -- yikes! -- she's even looking kinda sexy to him. Hands off, she's mine!
In each dread-filled tome, "scientific evidence" is used to show that girls are maturing earlier these days. And each of the articles assumes, in a knee-jerk reaction born of parental anxiety, that early puberty means one thing: early sex.
Both lines of reasoning are flawed. The onset of puberty appears to have stabilized 50 years ago. The age of first intercourse leveled off 10 years ago. More than half U.S. teenagers remain virgins until age 17. But interestingly, the science hasn't gotten in the way of a good story.
Nearly all the stories originate with a 1997 report in Pediatrics magazine. Benignly titled "Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Menses in Young Girls Seen in Office Practice," the 1997 study analyzes physical attributes of 17,000 girls seen in pediatricians' offices across the country. Newsweek used a later report published in this month's Pediatrics, "Reexamination of the Age Limit for Defining When Puberty Is Precocious in Girls in the United States: Implications for Evaluation and Treatment," that reaches similar conclusions.
According to the 1997 study's principal author, Dr. Marcia Herman-Giddens, the age of the onset of puberty (i.e., first signs of pubic hair and breasts) is much younger than previously believed. While medical textbooks had put the age of puberty onset at between 11 and 12, the study found that the average age for white girls is actually closer to 10. For African-American girls, the study reported, puberty usually starts just under age 9.
News of this decline set off alarms and mutated, in the popular press, into a story about teen sex, where early puberty became early sex and led inevitably to early pregnancy. Doctors, nurses and teachers who had noticed such things, like girls with breasts in the second grade, were quoted and the study was heralded as proof positive that the age of puberty was free-falling ever downward.
But was it?
"The truth is that the old data is inaccurate and the textbooks were wrong -- for a long time," says professor Dr. Robert Blum, director of the University of Minnesota Pediatric Department's adolescent health program. The Herman-Giddens report may be accurate, he says, but it simply states what has been true for decades. "We simply are not seeing this rapid decline in the age of puberty," he insists. "Short of doing tests of hormonal levels in girls, the most concrete specific measure we have is menarche (the onset of menstruation). And when you look at the age of menarche, you don't see any decline that has occurred recently."
Speculating that the old medical textbook charts were based on scant study of the subject, he says that menstruation is a more reliable marker of puberty and the age that girls get their periods -- 12 and a half -- hasn't changed since the 1950s. Even Herman-Giddens herself acknowledges that the old textbooks, with figures describing puberty's onset at 11 or 12, might have been wrong in the first place.
Though she declined to be interviewed by Salon Mothers Who Think, Herman-Giddens told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel last year that "the onset [of puberty] does seem to be occurring earlier, but the problem is there is no good data with which to make a comparison so that we can say with absolute certainty that this is so."
