Puberty is changing. We should talk about it.

If you were born before the 1990s, your first conversations about puberty (if you had them) might have begun around age 11. That’s because, for decades, puberty was believed to begin at around 11 for girls, and 11 and-a-half for boys.
Increasingly, though, that’s no longer the case. Studies in the last 15 years or so show that the process of reproductive maturity is starting much sooner for a growing number of boys and girls, with some girls entering puberty close to 6 or 7 years old. That’s not all that’s changed: According to Vanessa Kroll Bennett, who co-wrote the book This is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained with Dr. Cara Natterson, puberty now lasts longer than it used to — for some kids, almost a decade.
In an interview with Today, Explained’s Noel King, Bennett and Natterson explain what might be causing that change, and how we should respond to it. In particular, Bennett cautions, while modern puberty might make some kids appear more mature, they still need accurate, age-appropriate conversations with the trusted adults in their lives.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Vanessa, I have never heard anyone talk about early puberty as if it is a good thing. Is hitting puberty earlier inherently a bad thing?
We don’t want to demonize it, because there are tens of millions of children in this country who have or will be entering puberty earlier than generations past. And so whatever it is currently, we want to approach it in as constructive and empowering a way as possible. So that’s number one. Number two, there is data and research that connects earlier puberty in girls to higher risks for substance abuse, for anxiety and depression, for lower body image, and also for risks of earlier sexual behavior. Now, I want to be super clear here that the research is not saying one causes the other. This is correlative and it’s correlative because when a kid looks older, the world treats that child as older. And that treatment, that exposure, those invitations, those advances to participate in certain things, that’s what puts a kid at risk.
Many of us associate puberty with becoming an adult — at the very least, the early stages of adulthood. There are lots of cultural traditions that go back many, many, many hundreds, even thousands of years that kind of tie puberty and adulthood together. Should we stop doing that?
It’s so funny Noel, and my best response is a haiku that was written about bar mitzvahs. And it was something like, “Today I am a man. Tomorrow I return to the seventh grade.”
Aww. I’m tearing up. I like that.
I love it because it’s a perfect reframing of where kids are in this stage. I mean, perhaps we want to rethink some of the language we use around these coming-of-age experiences. And you know, they may be anachronistic in some ways or they may put pressure on kids to feel older or more mature. Here’s what I will say. Kids this age, tweens and teens, are so awesome. They are so fun and so smart and so insightful. And they are evolving on a day-to-day basis.
And I think if our traditions and rituals and markers of these moments can make space for that almost perpetual evolution of these kids — it’s actually really celebratory of what this experience is really about, which is you are a work in progress. Your body is a work in progress, your brain is a work in progress. And we love you and we believe in you no matter what. It’s not about their survival out in the wild trying to capture beasts. It’s not about being left on a mountaintop for most cultures these days. But it is about independence. It is about self-awareness. It is about taking on more and more responsibility. And those are amazing things that we don’t want to eliminate from our experiences and conversations with kids.
What should conversations between parents and kids sound like?
First of all, and I so appreciate, Noel, that “conversations” was plural in your question, because it’s many, many, many, many conversations over a decade. So knowing that it’s many conversations, we hope that takes the stress off of adults’ backs to do it right and to do it perfectly. And we like to say that when you mess up, take the do-over. Say to the kid, “You know what? I totally blew it the other day. You asked me what a blow job is and I freaked out and avoided it. And I want another chance to be in conversation with you.”
I wonder, Vanessa, if you can walk us through the stages and the ages. So based on what you were both telling us earlier, it sounds like the door to conversation may open around the age of 7?
We think of the conversations that happen at puberty or with teenagers as actually sitting on the building blocks of earlier conversations with kids. And those conversations can start — and some people may find this surprising and some people may totally be on board — with babies on the changing table or toddlers in the bath or kindergartners standing in line at recess. And those are conversations that are about teaching kids the correct anatomical language for all of their body parts, including their genitals. And there’s tons of research that shows that helps keep kids safer from sexual predation. It promotes bodily autonomy and self-awareness. It allows them to tell a doctor what hurts or what doesn’t feel good. So that can happen with little, little kids.
Understanding the names of their body parts and understanding consent gives kids a foundation when you start to talk about changing bodies, right? When you start to talk about a growing penis or growing testicles, the words penis and testicles are not bad words in your house. They’re not foreign words in your house. They are just everyday ho-hum words that get uttered at various parts. Hopefully not in the aisles of the supermarket, but definitely at bedtime or bath time.
We like to think that by the average age for the onset of puberty, right, if we figure the average age for girls is 8 and the average age for boys is 9, so by third grade, you are having conversations with kids, not about sex, but about taking care of their bodies, about changing bodies. And then as they grow older, the conversations spiral up and they become more and more sophisticated as a kid is developmentally able, psychologically able to understand the complexity of taking care of a body, of respecting other people’s bodies, of understanding their bodies in relationship to other people. And then, as they may or may not choose to become sexual, what that looks like in sexual relationships.
You talked earlier about the problem of young people who look older than they are. They’ve gone through puberty or they’re going through puberty, and you have a 10-year-old who maybe looks 15. What is the best advice for parents who see it happening? What is the best advice for the young person who also probably sees it happening but doesn’t really know what to do? And then, and I understand that this is a very sensitive question, what is your advice to everyone else? It seems to me there is care that needs to be taken here, not just by parents and kids.
For the parents and caregivers, it’s our jobs in our own homes to treat that 10-year-old as a 10-year-old and to make sure that the world around them does the same. So their teachers, their coaches, their extended families who may look at them and be super confused because the 10-year-old looks 15, to reinforce to those trusted adults that the 10-year-old is still a 10-year-old with the decision-making capabilities, the executive functioning, the brain development, the romantic inclinations of a kid that age.
With the kids, it’s important to acknowledge to them that this is a phenomenon that they may be in the world and people may treat them older than they actually are, and to begin to role-play with them and be in conversation about what can they say and do to remind people that they are the age they are. So, for example, one well-meaning adult may try to strike up a conversation with a kid who looks older and is actually younger and may say something like, “Hey, you got any boyfriends lately?” To which a kid can say, “Actually, I’m only 10. Do you want to talk about the books I’m reading?” And to give them the language, to brainstorm with them, to role-play with them, how they can respond, because it’s kind of a shocking and uncomfortable thing to have that. And then when we think about the adults in the world, it’s not only the kids who look older than they actually are. It’s also the kids who look much younger than they actually are.
A sixth-grade classroom can have kids who look 8 and have kids who look 16. And all of those kids are struggling with that reality. And so one piece of advice we love to tell adults is please don’t guess a kid’s age. Because if you guess that a 10-year-old is 15, that’s going to be pretty uncomfortable. And if you guess that a 10-year-old is 7, that’s going to be pretty uncomfortable. So that’s number one. And number two, we really, really, really beg of all adults out there: Please don’t make comments about kids’ bodies. Don’t make comments about their physical development, about their height, about their weight. Ask them about their interests, the movies they watch, the music they listen to, the books they read, any of that stuff. But try to keep the conversation away from their growing and changing bodies no matter what stage they’re at in their development.