When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored.
A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola’s brain was already producing hormones that had kickstarted puberty. Lola had also been struggling emotionally. “She would have panic attacks every day at school,” says Elise, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and asked that her surname and Lola’s real name be omitted.
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Studies suggest that girls who enter puberty earlier than most of their peers are also at heightened risk of a variety of mental-health and behavioural conditions, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance misuse. That could be the result of reproductive hormones acting early on key emotional and cognitive centres in the brain.
But a growing body of literature suggests that the link has more to do with children’s changing bodies. People respond to and interact differently with girls who are taller, and have signs of puberty, such as developing breasts, says Rona Carter, a psychologist who studies pubertal development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Girls might feel pressured to act more mature and independent, and miss out on some of the nurturing that childhood provides. And because Black girls develop earliest, they are often the first to feel the impact. Adults view them as “a little bit older, less innocent, not needing support”, Carter says.
Read the complete article in Nature
