What To Tell Your Daughter

By Eugenie Allen

The anxiety begins when the girls are about eight years old. "Did you notice so-and-so is developing?" one mom whispers to another as they scan their daughters' classmates for signs of breast buds--and reassurance that their own girls are perfectly normal. Maybe it's time for Judy Blume to write a sequel to her 1970 classic about training bras and first periods. She could call it Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret's Mother.

If you're concerned about the hormonal changes your daughter is going through, you should know that you're in good company. If you're truly alarmed, you should consult your child's pediatrician, but the fact is, most early bloomers are perfectly healthy. Instead of medical attention, they need plenty of age-appropriate information and loving support. Happily, the trend toward earlier puberty has spawned a wealth of resources for 8-to-12-year-old girls and their parents. And because girls this age still tend to listen to their parents, you're just the person to prepare your daughter for what lies ahead.

But not too far ahead. "You don't want to overwhelm girls," says Mavis Jukes, author of Growing Up: It's a Girl Thing. While blossoming third-graders need frank talk about how to handle unwelcome sexual attention, she says, they don't need explicit information on birth control and STDs or windy speeches about sperm and Fallopian tubes. So instead of preparing the Big Talk, it's best to start a series of casual conversations about your daughter's more immediate concerns, which may surprise you. According to Lynda Madaras, co-author of My Body, My Self for Girls and a puberty educator for 25 years, your daughter, like you, wonders whether she's normal. But while you're already getting set to resent her future boyfriends, she just wants to know why her right nipple is inverted.

Discussing such things isn't easy, but, as Madaras points out, "embarrassment doesn't last forever." Indeed it doesn't. One Minnesota grandmother could barely say the word bra when her daughter was growing up in the '60s. Yet when her 12-year-old granddaughter recently saw "the period video" in school, the grandmother mustered enough sangfroid to admire the sanitary supplies little Katie brought home.

Today's books about puberty, which are leavened with humor (see the bathing-suit story in It's a Girl Thing), can help parents get started. Screen them first, share them with your daughter, then get in the car and start driving. That way, you won't have to look at each other when it's time to talk about pubic hair.

According to Jessica Gillooly, author of Before She Gets Her Period, young girls want their mothers to be their main source of information about puberty. They appreciate mothers' stories about their own experiences, and they need to hear the same information again and again. But parents should lose the line about "now you're a woman." A 10-year-old who's wearing a bra and a maxi pad needs to know just the opposite: she's still a child.

For many girls, physical activity--dancing, playing sports, even playing a musical instrument--is a way of gaining some control over their changing bodies. Says Judy Woodburn of American Girl magazine: "What we hope we can do for girls is emphasize not what their bodies look like but what they can do."

As for all those girls who are now old enough to be Margaret's mother, Blume says she didn't give the poor woman much thought when she wrote the book. Thankfully for that generation of girls--and now their daughters--Blume's main concern was Margaret.

--By Eugenie Allen