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The physical dangers of sexual harassment and sexually transmitted diseases--and, for those who start menstruating early as well, pregnancy--are only the most obvious fallout of premature development. Academic pressure, drugs and alcohol in the schools, peer pressure and sexually explicit media are all conspiring to foreshorten childhood, with consequences that are still not well understood. "One of the big shocks during the whole Clinton debacle," says William Damon, director of Stanford's Center on Adolescence, "was that people were trying to filter out phrases like 'oral sex,' when in fact there were no eight-year-olds who didn't already know what that was." One result of these influences is that girls are wearing highly sexualized, adult clothing in middle school and below--even when they don't have adult bodies.
Yet this acceleration of growing up comes precisely at a time when life should be less about Eminem and more about M&M's. Between 8 and 12, explains psychologist Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, a best-selling book on female adolescence, girls are in the so-called latency period, when they turn their backs on boys and bond with their peers--other girls. "Theoretically, it's a time when they're really gathering a lot of strength--they're doing well in sports, they're investigating the world, they're confident learners, and they're confident socially. They're marshaling their forces to be able to go into puberty."
Cultural pressure alone tends to short-circuit the latency period, when a child usually develops a sense of who she is and where she fits in the world. When a girl's body develops early, she is more likely to hook up with a boy--and leave her group of girl friends--before the developmental work of the latency period is done. "That," says Pipher, "has all sorts of harmful social, academic and psychological consequences."
Moreover, says MTV's Pinsky, early development feeds into what's already one of the toughest aspects of being a young person in the U.S. today. "Kids don't feel good about themselves," he says. "There's a pandemic of that. Society says, 'Here's how you feel good: get lots of money, look like Britney Spears, have sex, do drugs, do extreme sports.' And it works--in the moment." Eventually, though, the high wears off, and, he says, kids' self-esteem is lower than ever.
So if worried parents shouldn't medicate their prematurely pubescent daughters, what can they do? "If I had a daughter who had a period at 9," says Pipher, "I'd say, 'This does not mean you're a woman; it means you're a nine-year-old having a period, and we are going to proceed accordingly.'" That means clothing, books and music appropriate to a girl's chronological age, not her physical age. It also means having her hang out with her family, where peer pressure to act sophisticated isn't a problem. "One of the best things for a nine-year-old," says Pipher, "is having her spend a lot of time with grandparents, cousins and so on--people who value her for something besides how sexy and popular she is."