Growing Up Faster: Divorce and Puberty

    Young girls whose parents divorce are more likely to reach puberty earlier, according to a recently released study designed to determine the relationship between divorce and troubled youngsters.

"We know kids from divorced families are more likely to experience teen-age pregnancy, drop out of school or become delinquent. But we have no idea whether divorce causes that," said Professor Bruce Ellis, who, along with a colleague from New Zealand, studied the the issue and recently published their results in the journal "Developmental Psychology." "This study can show the effects of different exposures to divorce."

About 90 families were involved in the study, including 70 with divorced parents had divorced. "We looked at families in which one daughter might be five and the other 12 when a divorce occurred. So the youngest daughter had seven more years living in a disrupted family without her father, compared to her older sister. Our study showed that more exposure to father absence was linked to earlier puberty," Ellis said.

According to the study results, in families with divorced parents, the girl with the most exposure to the father before the divorce routinely got her period a year earlier than her older sister.

The trend was highest in young girls whose fathers were involved in drug, alcohol or crime before a divorce occurred. "There's nothing more stressful in a kid's life than living with a parent that has a serious problem," Ellis explained. 

"...Girls with very high levels of exposure to stress early in life, who then had that stressor removed, tended to go through quite early puberty. This actually concurs with international adoption studies showing that girls from third-world countries who had a lot of stress in early childhood and were adopted into Western societies tend to have very high rates of early puberty," he said.

The point, according to Ellis, is simple: "It's not enough to simply have a cardboard cut-out of a father sitting on the couch. What the father does is critical."

Ellis has been studing the link between biology and developmental psychology, trying to create a new field of study called evolutionary developmental psychology (Ellis & Bjorklund, 2005). His recent study is interesting because it suggests "that children adjust their development to match the environments in which they live. In the world in which humans evolved, dangerous or unstable home environments meant a shorter lifespan, and going into puberty earlier in this context increased chances of surviving, reproducing and passing on your genes." 

Today, however, girls who reach puberty quicker have higher risk for health problems such as teen-age pregnancy, anxiety and depression, difficulties with alcohol, breast cancer and other issues, Ellis said. He is currently involved in a follow-up study with a larger group of families to determine if there is any link between divorce, puberty and risky sexual behavior.

What should parents take away from his recent study results? "Girls are sensitive to big changes, and divorce is a big change," he said.