The Lost Girls and Boys
Children are growing up too quickly, and then not growing up at all
This is from two years ago. I’m sharing again because I think it’s one of the most important things I’ve written — about the early puberty epidemic and kids being forced to grow up too quickly and how this can lead to stunted development.
Since diving more into the beauty industry, I’ve learned many cosmetics and hair products (especially relaxers and perming products) are also likely a driver of early puberty — both use in children and maternal use during pregnancy. Synthetic fibres — especially polyester clothing — may be playing a significant role too (and I’ve noticed it’s increasingly difficult to find clothing in stores that are not partially polyester).
While I mentioned in this that breastfeeding is protective against early puberty, it’s worth adding that stuff like breast implants and postnatal birth control can make it far more difficult to breastfeed.
Prenatal vitamins may also be playing a role, as they can be a major cause of morning sickness, which can adversely affect maternal diet during pregnancy, leading to higher processed food and refined carbohydrate consumption.
The paywall is removed and comments are open; I will put the paywall back in a week.
Thank you for reading,
- Meghan
Coddled Youth?
For a while now, people have been sounding the alarm that young people, like the titular hero in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, do not seem to be growing up. Younger generations are described as “coddled”, stunted, “spoiled”, fragile, unprepared for the workplace, unwilling to learn how to drive, obsessed with children’s movies and toys well beyond childhood, addicted to social media, mentally ill and obsessed with psychiatric diagnoses, less likely to date and marry, less likely to want or have children.
“Childhood has lengthened, with teens treated more like children, less independent and more protected by parents than they once were. The entire developmental trajectory, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, has slowed. Adolescence—the time when teens begin to do things adults do—now happens later. Thirteen-year-olds—and even 18-year-olds—are less likely to act like adults and spend their time like adults. They are more likely, instead, to act like children—not by being immature, necessarily, but by postponing the usual activities of adults.”
— Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us (2017), page 41
I read Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up (2024) shortly after it came out (see my review here). I also read Jonathan Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) a few years ago; Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) is on my to-read list, waiting for me in my Audible account. I’ve followed Jean M. Twenge’s research for about a decade, with both a lot of interest and frustration.
I think these authors, and similar critics, have some good points and observations, however, as Mary Harrington points out in her 2022 essay, “Fragile students just need a hug”, the demand for “coddling” observed by Haidt and Lukianoff and reliance on “affirming” therapists described by Shrier appear to be symptoms of a greater issue.
“[T]he “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.”
In other words, the underlying issue isn’t that young American (and, more broadly, Western) minds are being coddled; it’s that they were neglected, in particular in the first few years of life. This, Harrington claims, is largely because more mothers work full-time than in previous generations and their children are sent to daycare; in the United States, due to lack of maternity leave, “one in four American mothers is back at work within two weeks.”
Childhood emotional neglect is defined as “a form of maltreatment in which caregivers fail to provide the emotional and psychological support, validation, and attention children need during their formative years.”
Jean Twenge was wrong when she claimed that “[t]he entire developmental trajectory, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, has slowed.” Adolescence to adulthood has certainly slowed—and some might argue halted in many cases—but the trajectory from childhood to adolescence hasn’t slowed at all; it’s been sped up.
Children are growing up too quickly, and then not growing up at all.
Kids Are Going Through Puberty Too Early
A few weeks ago, an article by Sai called “Age of puberty in girls: Why it is declining and why that matters” crossed my Substack feed. Her post was in response to one by Walt Bismarck (“Girls are going through puberty too early”).
Bismarck points out that the age of puberty in girls has been dramatically declining for decades, from between 14-17 on average in the 1800s (depending on the country), to around 12-13 today.1 Daughters, on average, are getting their periods around 1.5 years earlier than their mothers.
Bismarck suggests that this phenomenon causes “enormous trauma on a civilizational scale”, “is mostly responsible for the fear and contempt modern women increasingly have for male sexuality”, and may be “the primary cause of the massively inflated rates of transgender identification among adolescent girls.”2
He ends his essay with a plea to female Substackers to write about this topic, pointing out—correctly, I think—that this should be one of the “most important feminist issue[s] of our time.”
In her response, Sai expands on the topic and goes into detail about possible causes.
“[W]e might be in the middle of an unprecedented level of widespread endocrine dysfunction worldwide.”
She discusses factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), nutritional deficiencies (especially of Vitamin D and magnesium), increased consumption of processed foods and refined sugars, and chronic conditions associated with decreased gut microbiome diversity.
Sai also highlights father absence as being “one of the most prominent environmental factors in age of puberty,” arguing that “lower paternal investment might be working as a signal to trigger a faster LH [“Life History”] strategy in adolescent girls and therefore causing the age of menarche to decline.”
There’s also some evidence that a disrupted attachment to mothers is associated with earlier puberty in girls, whereas higher mother-daughter affection is protective.
The age of puberty onset has also been decreasing, to a lesser extent, in boys. In addition, the age of puberty onset differs dramatically between races (at least in the United States), with Black girls undergoing it up to a year earlier than white girls (and Hispanic girls undergoing it slightly earlier than white girls, and Asian girls slightly later).
Black and Hispanic girls are more likely to grow up in lower-income households and thus more likely to be exposed to environmental toxins and poorer nutrition than their white and Asian counterparts, and Black children are significantly more likely to grow up in single-parent (in particular single-mother) households. Asian children are the most likely to grow up in two-parent homes, and Asians are more likely to live in multigenerational homes than white people. Anecdotally, from my observation, Asian families also, on average, eat healthier than white families (this applies across income lines; my husband has observed that, growing up, his friends from lower-income Asian families ate healthier than his friends from affluent white families).
One of the major potential environmental factors, not discussed by Sai, is fluoride. Sai notes that the first major drop in age of puberty onset in girls occurred in the 1950s. This is right around the time that fluoride toothpaste became popular and fluoride was added to drinking water across North America. Fluoride has been shown in studies to accumulate in the pineal gland, which can disrupt production of the hormone melatonin, adversely affecting sleep and speeding up the onset of puberty (at least in girls). In one study, Jennifer Luke found that animals exposed to fluoride showed signs of earlier puberty.
Earlier puberty is linked to higher rates of mental illness, substance abuse, autism spectrum disorder, and ADHD.
My Experience
“Girlhood ends when the world looks at you.”
— zinnia, “A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement”
The first time a boy showed interest in me, I was in grade five and had just turned eleven years old. He was about a year and a half older than me, and in grade seven.
I did not handle it well.
I got my first period a few months before my twelfth birthday, about eight or so months earlier than was average at the time. My breasts were already emerging. I went through a stage where I wore a lot of baggy clothes. Around this time, I developed a mild eating disorder, which, fortunately, I gave up by the end of grade eight. Around ages 10-12, I went through a stage of wishing I were a boy, which was partially influenced by the fact that the cousins and family friends around my age were all male and by one of my close friends in elementary school, a very gender nonconforming kid who would, in adulthood, transition to become a man.3
Boys commented on my breasts, awkwardly flirted with me, and tried to walk home with me. In grade eight I overheard two grade ten boys refer to me as the “hot grade eight” and I wanted to disappear into the sidewalk. In grade nine, at a pool party, a female friend once instructed me to put on my swimsuit and join the other girls in the pool because this would convince the boys at the party to come swimming. The boys did come out shortly afterward, and one of them undid my bikini top. I was fourteen, and already a C cup. I was in my twenties before I stopped contemplating a breast reduction.
My mother was fairly health-conscious and from my perspective did a better job of providing my brother and I with healthy food (and limiting junk) than many other parents, aided by a good budget for grocery shopping and her Southern Italian heritage. She also breastfed both of us for a little longer than average, around nine months, stopping both times because of sports injuries. However, she fell for many of the major food scams of the era, including the war on fat, pro-seed oils propaganda, and using margarine instead of butter, and while she modelled and encouraged minimal use of make-up and skincare products, she still slathered hormone-disrupting sunscreen on us on hot summer days and purchased shampoos and conditioners with phthalates and other EDCs. All in all, I probably had a slightly healthier diet and less EDC exposure than your average Canadian kid.4
Father absence and disrupted attachment were likely the bigger factors for me; my father worked long hours (80+ per week) and travelled frequently, often for stretches of several weeks at a time. Hours after my brother was born, he drove my mom home from the hospital, then left her there alone to go straight to work; he also went to work the day his father died, even though it was a statutory holiday. When my father was home, he was stressed and quick to anger; my mother, brother, and I walked on eggshells around him.
I spent a lot of time alone as a child, especially in the early years, and consequently had a very active imagination. This was particularly true when I stayed with my maternal grandparents, something I did frequently starting shortly after my mother weaned me at nine months. When I was a year old, shortly after surviving a one-storey fall onto my head and having to restart several developmental milestones, my parents went on a two or three-week vacation (depends on which parent I ask) and left me with my grandparents. My grandfather was loving and attentive, but worked most of the day; my grandmother was loving, but did not play with me or hug me and mostly left me to entertain myself.
While I obviously can’t recall how attached I was to my parents before the accident and their vacation, I do know that I had an avoidant attachment style afterward. I was odd and somewhat aware of it.5 I over-identified with the Disney character Dumbo so much I insisted my preschool teachers sign my artwork with Dumbo.
I was parentified and forced to grow up quickly in many ways. I was sleep-trained (the Ferber Method), and not welcome in my parents’ or grandparents’ bedrooms or beds. When I woke up sick at night as a child I’d go to the bathroom to throw up by myself; if my parents heard me, they’d remind me to close the door next time. I was frequently praised for being “easy” to take care of, and mature beyond my years. When I was sixteen and taking a course to become a swim instructor, the course instructor commented that I was awkward around kids and seemed like someone who “never was a child.”
The combination of a poor relationship with my father, growing up in a household with an unhappy marriage, and being ill-prepared for the male attention I began getting around age 11 all contributed to a negative attitude about men throughout my teens and twenties. I was frequently bitchy to boys and men who approached me—some deserved it (looking at you, ass-grabbers!), but most probably didn’t.
I made some unfortunate relationship choices. Others were probably just fine, but I had commitment issues and sucked at talking to guys about things they were doing that bothered me. I was a serial monogamist, often jumping into a new relationship within weeks of breaking up with the last guy. I continued to harbour a lot of resentment to men, stoked by the feminist-literary circles I was involved in in my twenties.
In my late twenties and early thirties, in part because of chronic health problems triggered by antibiotics, I regressed. I’d always been “old” for my age, and suddenly I felt much, much younger than I was. I backslid into a kind of second adolescence. I had been relatively well-behaved during the first one, but this time around I was angrier and more volatile. I had been doing okay, doing pretty well—at least superficially, at least from the outside, at least according to my parents—my whole life and I was tired of being okay, of being “good.” I was tired of trying to make other people happy. I fell into the psychosomatic hell spiral, and I couldn’t pull myself out.
Then, a miracle occurred: I met my husband when I was thirty-two, in the spring of 2020, in the wake of leaving an abusive relationship. We had a psychedelics-fuelled lockdown romance—which pulled us both out of our respective hell spirals, healed a lot of trauma and immaturity, and got us to quit processed foods, refined sugars, and alcohol—and by the end of 2020, we were married and I was pregnant. Now it’s four years later, we’re still very happy, he’s a wonderful husband and father, and we’re expecting our second child soon.
I’m very lucky.
But I’ll admit I found the couple of years of motherhood difficult; my husband and I were successfully giving our daughter a better childhood than either of us had had, and I found myself grappling with one of the ugliest emotions—jealousy. I wanted to be the child sleeping in her loving parents’ bed, being cuddled at night. Who adored her daddy and wasn’t scared of him. I hadn’t gotten the childhood I wanted or needed and now I coveted hers. I didn’t want to be the mommy, I wanted to be the baby.
I suspect I am far from the only parent to be affected by this particularly dark form of Peter Pan Syndrome.
I got over it. My husband was helpful, and I worked through it at plant medicine ceremonies and through conversations with my own parents. I was willing to face my demons and grow up if it meant I could heal and become a “good enough” mother.
“Why can’t you fly now, mother?”
“Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.”
“Why do they forget the way?”
“because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.”
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)
Dissociating to Neverland While We Look The Other Way
I read Peter Pan when I was a preteen, while sick in bed with a flu. A detail in the backstory of the “lost boys” always stuck out to me.
“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way.”
