Oh, what an unmitigated horror puberty was. For girls, there was the inevitable first menstruation that came right in the middle of gym class: the bloody shorts, the panic--no one had told you you’d bleed that much--and the conviction that you were about to die of either embarrassment or hemorrhage. Training bras, pubic hair, acne; there were no end of disquieting changes.
For boys, there was the first wet dream, inevitably occurring at sleep-away camp--sneaking off to the woods to bury your disgusting soiled pajamas--the visible erection with a mind of its own in the swimming trunks, the voice that cracked whenever you spoke to someone of the opposite sex. Humiliation, agonies, pimply insecurities; you wondered if life would ever return to normal, and the answer, you knew, was no.
Most of all, there was the heartfelt prayer of every pubescent child: “Please, please, if I have to go through this, don’t let it happen to me one minute before or after it happens to everyone else. Please don’t let me be different.”
For the peer-pressured adolescent, the timing of puberty is everything. Indeed, for all mammals going about the business of being fit enough to survive and reproduce, the timing of puberty is pretty important. But some mammals do something about it. As social or environmental conditions shift--when there’s a change in the availability of food, for example, or in the number of animals competing for mates--many animals find that it sometimes pays to reach puberty at an earlier age, and it’s sometimes better to delay the process.
Now there’s evidence that humans, too, manipulate the timing of puberty’s onset. In a controversial paper published last fall, a team of researchers proposed that girls reach puberty at an earlier age if they are raised in homes filled with parental strife or where the father is absent because of divorce or abandonment.
