I went to see my son’s class in a school play. I’m shocked ! All the little girls have boobies, not little apple seed things, but real live boobs. And the girls were all wearing little half cut t-shits and low rise jeans. All of these girls looked a lot older then 10 or 11.
I was a fifth grade girl once and I don’t remember anyone having knockers like that.
All of a sudden it became clear to me, I now understand why my son goes through so much laundry and spends so much time in his room.
I had a B-cup in the fifth grade, but I did develop a bit earlier than most of my classmates. I also got my period when I was 11, so I started in the fifth grade.
Since it was 1991, low rise jeans weren’t the style, so I didn’t see girls wearing those, but I did see a fair amount of little tiny shirts (outside of school, though - I went to Catholic schools so we wore uniforms).
Remember back in medieval times that kids 10-13 would already be married and having kids themselves? If you hit the age of thirty that would be considered old.
I think around the fifth or sixth grade I started developing boobs. Not a damn thing my mom could do to stop it either If you are the kid, you aren’t growing up fast enough, if you are the parent, it’s way to fast.
I started in the developing in the spring of fourth grade. I was one of the first in my age group, and normally, I like being the leader, but I got teased a lot.
Jokes on them - the boys who teased me mercilessly are now losing their hair at this point in their lives.
Yep, it has been tied to the way we live now. Diet and societal pressures. I read about it in Time magazine (I think) and have noticed it myself. Periods are starting earlier too.
Hard to mentally balance a ‘woman’ doing a silly play for a family dinner party with friends. Actions: 11 year old, language: 11 year old, emotions: 11 yr old, intelligence: 11 yr old, face: 11 yr old, body: Oh god, I’m going to jail.
From what I understand, children may have been promised or, on the rare occasion, married to someone much older, but I don’t think there was a huge rash of 10 year olds having kids. And generally, 30 was not old at all. Due to disease, most people were lucky to make it to age 3, but if you made it there, you could very possibly hit old age. Having the death rate at such a young age skews the average life span, making it look like 27 year olds were considered elderly when in fact, there were tons of people who 30 and much older.
Oh, and I have a 12 year old sister (just past 7th grade now) and she didn’t start developing until very recently, I think.
Forget about fifth graders – our 6-year-old, MilliCal, was playing at the neighbor’s house yesterday (two boys) in her “princess” dress, and I couldn’t help noticing her protruding proto-breasts against the stretchy, clingy fabric, nipples and aureolae clearly prominent and looking surprisingly adolescent. None of the kids took any notice, but I was feeling a powerful paternal desire to have her Cover Up. Or maybe put on a bra.
Nutrition. And, the hormones in the beef/chicken. And the fat. Even maybe the phthalates in the plastic bottles.
All those are being blamed for the alleged early-puberty “epidemic” (I have my doubts as to whether it’s really THAT big [sorry] or late a thing. I recall some intimidatingly well-developed 6th-graders – 11 y/o – when I was one myself, c. 1972)
As for the “middle-ages” thing: more like 14 (e.g. Juliet), really. IF she made it past infancy, that was the tricky part. interface2x has the rest of the point.
Actually, I’ve been reading somewhere that transition periods from mostly-rural to mostly-urban life, can cause a temporary downward blip in nutrition and fitness – including retardations of development – due to no longer having fresh, wholesome foods (however modest) and outdoor physical activity, as a part of everyday life. So who knows, maybe the expectation that development not start 'til past 12 is an artifact of 100 years of living on processed flour. :dubious: Or we’re just noticing more because of the wearing of lowrider pants and crop tops.
A friend’s daughter started developing at about age 10. And by started, I mean BAM!! exploded these large bags from her poor little frame. By age 12, I kid you not, she must have been a DD. She got all sorts of attention, not all of it good for a preteen.
Now she’s 20 and quite a fetching young woman. She’s planning on breast reduction in the near future.
But, I remember how worried her mom was about every guy in the city hitting on her. And lots of them were. Come on, it had to be the breasts!
No, I don’t remember that, because it never happened. This is one of those “facts” that gets thrown around but that no one ever has a cite for because it’s an example of “common knowledge” that just isn’t true.
It was never common for 10-13 year olds to have kids themselves. Even with modern medical care it’s extremely dangerous for a child that young to give birth. They’re just too small. A woman’s hips don’t usually reach their full childbearing width until she’s in her early twenties. That’s a skeletal thing, so being an “early bloomer” in terms of breasts or menstruation doesn’t matter. Besides which, a fertile 10-year-old is unusual now, and would have been extremely rare in the past.
“In the United States, the average for the onset of menstruation is 12 - 13 years (12.1 for blacks; 12.8 for whites) as opposed to an average age of 14 years back in 1900. This is still sooner than in current hunter-gatherer societies (such as the ¡ Kung of Africa) where the average age for the onset of female reproductive potential is 16 years!”
Historically, I don’t think it’s ever been common in any society for girls to be married off before the age of 14 or 15, and that was more the practice among the upper classes (who had reason to arrange early marriages for financial/political reasons) than ordinary folk. In Ancient Sparta women didn’t marry until age 18, which IIRC was at least partially because the Spartans recognized that younger brides rarely produced healthy babies…or survived childbirth.
To throw out some purely anecdotal information, girls in Japan seem to develop more slowly than their American counterparts. When I first came over to teach I quickly learned that when kids asked me to guess their age (which they love to do for some reason) the only hope I had of coming close was to guess four or five years older than I thought they actually looked. This may be at least partially because the typical Japanese diet is much lower in fat, red meat, and dairy products than the typical American diet.
Something I think a lot of people don’t know is that body fat produces estrogen. This is one reason why women with very low body fat stop menstruating, and why overweight men may develop “man boobs”. If excess body fat can put breasts on a man, then even a little extra fat could help an adolescent girl become busty before her time.
I agree, it’s not just the times. One of my best friends, now 42, got her period at age 11 and was wearing a bra in fourth. Personally I didn’t get my period until age 14 and it’s still an open question whether I need a bra or not.
The alarming information came out a year or so ago that girls were getting their periods earlier, due to what? Hormones in milk? All kinds of reasons. Some of which may be true. But it seems to be when I actually read the article the drop was a matter of months, from an average age of 12.5 years, say to 12.1. Or something like that. I should get a cite.
Well, I have a 14-year-old daughter and she’s very, errrr, well-developed. We went to her eighth-grade graduation ceremony last week and I know for certain that 14-year-olds weren’t built like THAT when I was one. I had to laugh because 14-year-old boys pretty much still look like scarecrows - there wasn’t a girl in the place who couldn’t have wiped the floor with any of the boys.
I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw a class of 5th graders together, but the differences really started around 3rd grade.
It only gets worse. In middle school the girls are all grown up. Make-up, hourglass figures, grown up hair and grown up attitude. The boys, on the other hand, are every stage of development from little skinny children to huge muscular men with mustaches. It’s very weird.
I do remember being in 5 and 6th grade and all the girls starting to need bras.
Isn’t that just how that goes, tho’? I mean, I remember hearing all through elementary and middle school how girls tended to grow up faster than boys, or develop more noticeably, at least.
That said, how would we tell if more girls are growing up with bigger boobs? Or growing up faster? I mean, alot of the animals in the meat we eat are hormone-enhanced, yeah, but does anyone have any sources to cite that might suggest that that affects adolescent development? If so, that sounds like it’d make for some interesting reading.
When I was in 5th grade, there was one girl(out of about 18 in the class) with real boobs and the boys made fun of her all the time. To this day I can’t figure out what we were thinking. ‘Oh, she’s got boobs. That’s gross. Let’s make her feel bad.’
It was only a few years later that I started to realize boobs on a girl looked good!
I’m not here to dispute anything, just to say that I was in Grade 8 in 1969, so all of my classmates were born in the late '50s. There were no girls in my class who had any more boobies than I did (I’m a guy), or we would have noticed! In fact, I remember two girls who got teased by the boys, who referred to them as “raisins on a board”. One was tall and thin, the other short and thin, neither had any boobies. I didn’t start to see any of those until Grade 9.
Now, I have a 14-year-old niece who has had her own adult accoutrements for three years, and there is no kind of way she is an adult yet.
Maybe there is something to hormones in meat contributing to the early onset of puberty nowadays.
Slight problem with the meat-hormone theory - hormone-treated meat has been banned in the EU for over a decade, and there’s no sign of the early-blooming trend fading.
If you are the kid, you aren’t growing up fast enough, if you are the parent, it’s way to fast.
