The Impact of Early Puberty- abridged article

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-puberty21jan21,0,892400.story?coll=la-home-middleright
From the Los Angeles Times
Girl, you'll be a woman sooner than expected
Puberty is arriving ever younger in American females -- 8 is no longer considered abnormal.
By Susan Brink
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 21, 2008

AT 8 or 9 years old, the typical American schoolgirl is perfecting her cursive handwriting style. She's picking out nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in sentences, memorizing multiplication tables and learning to read a thermometer.

She's a little girl with a lot to learn.

And yet, in increasing numbers, when girls this age run across the playground in T-shirts, there is undeniable evidence that their bodies are blossoming. The first visible sign of puberty, breast budding, is arriving ever earlier in American girls.

Some parents and activists suspect environmental chemicals. Most pediatricians and endocrinologists say that, though they have suspicions about the environment, the only scientific evidence points to the obesity epidemic. What's clear, however, is that the elements of female maturity increasingly are spacing themselves out over months, even years -- and no one quite knows why.......

The new "8" -- the medically suggested definition for abnormally early breast development -- is, the society says, 7 for white girls and 6 for African American girls.

The lack of adequate explanation has some experts worried. "Over the course of a few decades, the childhoods of U.S. girls have been significantly shortened," Steingraber says.

Redefining 'average'

The new average age of puberty, some fear, may be like the new average weight -- typical, but terrible.

Time for a talk

What's clear is that physical appearance is getting ahead of other aspects of girls' maturity. They might be perceived as far older than they are, even when they're still rummaging through their mothers' closets to clomp around in oversized high heels.

"My daughter started developing breasts maybe around age 8," says Rhonda Sykes of Inglewood. "She was still into her doll phase and dressing up to play." So Sykes began having frank mother-daughter conversations about curves and changing bodies a bit earlier than she expected.

"Whatever they look like, they know nothing," says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families. "Eight- and 9-year olds are learning to make change for a dollar. These are children who are learning the most fundamental facts in school. Imagine trying to teach that child the fundamentals of sex. They're not even playing Monopoly yet. They're still playing Candyland."

The medical community calls earlier puberty normal, the trend goes hand in hand with the obesity epidemic, and science has not yet pinpointed the reasons. And yet, when girls who are still children in the minds of their parents start developing breasts, many of their mothers remember that it happened later in their own lives -- and wonder why.

susan.brink@latimes.com

Parents and Colleges

Study: Colleges shouldn't fret over hands-on parents

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
More bad news for college officials who say too many parents are micromanaging their children's lives: Most college-bound kids seem to welcome the involvement.
About three-quarters of this year's college freshmen reported that their parents were involved the "right amount" in a variety of activities related to choosing and enrolling in college, a survey released today says. The rest, meanwhile, were more likely to say their parents were involved too little than too much.

REPORTER'S BLOG: How to tell if you're a helicopter parent
The survey, completed last fall by more than 272,000 entering freshmen on 356 four-year campuses nationwide, did not ask students to quantify the level of their parents' involvement. Nor did it measure whether that level has increased.

But college administrators have been wringing their hands in recent years over what to do about "helicopter parents," so dubbed because they hover over their children's lives. Last week, EducationDynamics, a company that works with colleges to retain students, noted a "dramatic increase" in helicopter parenting at the start of the second semester. "Parents are feeling hopeless, distraught, worried and frustrated, stemming from an apparent loss of control," says Chrissy Coley, who recently left her position as assistant vice provost at the University of South Carolina to join EducationDynamics.

The concern, college officials argue, is that if parents always intervene on their child's behalf, students will never learn to make decisions or solve problems for themselves.

Those concerns prompted researchers at UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, which conducted the survey, to wonder how students felt.

"For the most part, (they) think that level (of parental involvement) is right on," says survey director John Pryor.

Still, researchers found significant differences among students of different racial backgrounds.

More than 43% of Latinos, for example, said their parents were involved too little in choosing college courses, compared with 37% of Asian students, 33% of black students, 29% of American Indian students and 19% of white students.

Overall, the results complement other research.

A report in November by the National Survey of Student Engagement found that college students who reported high levels of contact with their parents or guardian, and whose parents frequently intervened on their behalf, were more satisfied with their education and reported deeper learning activities than students with less-involved parents. This and other studies suggest that colleges may need to tread lightly.

"In many ways it's good that students want to stay in close contact with their parents, that they respect their parents' opinions," Coley says. But, she says, once a student enters college, "that relationship needs to loosen up." For colleges, she says, the question is how to optimize good parent-student relations without hurting students as they grow into independent adults.

Some, though, suspect that the image of overly intrusive parents is overblown.

Says James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, based in Arlington, Va.: "The vast majority of parents just (want to be) better consumers and support their child's education."

Are Twentysomethings Self Absorbed?

This article from The New York Times debates whether today's generation of twentysomethings are self-absorbed.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/17/fashion/17narc190.1.jpg

January 17, 2008
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Generation Me vs. You Revisited

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
IN each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:

a) “I have a natural talent for influencing people”

b) “I am not good at influencing people”

a) “I can read people like a book”

b) “People are sometimes hard to understand”

a) “I am going to be a great person”

b) “I hope I am going to be successful”

These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with “Which Superhero Are You?” but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)

Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.

“Anything we do that’s political always falls flat,” said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. “It doesn’t seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents’ generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they’re more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them.”

Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.

Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”) Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.

“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press).

Ms. Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the ’70s. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” she said in an interview. “Well, that never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s, when people thought about ‘What do we need to teach young people?’ ” She points to cultural sayings as well — “believe in yourself and anything is possible” and “do what’s right for you.” “All of them are narcissistic,” she said.

“Generation Me” inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like “It’s all about me,” “Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic” and “Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids.”

Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called “The Narcissism Epidemic.”

However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.

“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.

Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”

Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.

Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)

Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”

Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said.

Ms. Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it “the boyfriend test.”) “There’s a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what’s important is what they predict,” she said.

Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.

“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”


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