Source: Telegraph >> Read full article and comment
Girls reaching puberty younger is a physiological phenomenon with important emotional implications, says Cassandra Jardine.
By Cassandra Jardine
Published: 7:00AM BST 15 Jun 2010
When I was 12, my pottery teacher invited me to a party. For a year or more – nothing to do with school – I had been learning to throw pots at his studio and I was flattered to be treated as a grown-up. Rather to my annoyance, my elder sister decided to chaperone me – rightly so, for the party turned out to be an orgy. Swiftly backing me out through the door, she asked the host why on earth he had invited someone so young. “I thought she was 18,” he replied.
It was an understandable mistake. In the late Sixties, not many girls reached their full height before they left primary school, as I did, or had other misleadingly adult paraphernalia. Many more of them were like my tiny Japanese best friend who still shopped for children’s shoes and looked a decade younger than me…Continue reading
