American Girls: Growing Up Too Fast?

A decade ago, if you were an 8 year-old girl who started to sprout breasts, you'd be rushed to the endocrinologist. But a study published last April in the journal Pediatrics "found that among 17,000 girls in North Carolina, almost half of African Americans and 15% of whites had begun breast development by age 8," as the Los Angeles Times reports.So some pediatricians are declaring that age 7's the "new abnormal" for white girls, age 6 for African American girls. And though many people suspect that hormones in our food and pollutants in our environment may be factors in this ever-earlier onset of puberty, "the only scientific evidence points to the obesity epidemic," according to the Times."Precocious" puberty is known to jeopardize a girl's mental and physical well-being, putting her at greater risk for breast cancer, depression, and anxiety. She's also more likely to engage in all kinds of risky behaviors or become a victim of violence, according to ecologist Sandra Steingraber, whose study, " The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," was excerpted on Grist.Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and author of the Pediatrics study, worries that premature puberty will, like obesity, become so common that no one wonders why our girls are having their childhood cut short:"My fear is that medical groups could take the data and say 'This is normal. We don't have to worry about it.' My feeling is that it is not normal. It's a response to an abnormal environment."Learn more about precocious puberty at the magicfoundation.org's website.