Having Conversations with Your Kids about Puberty | Goop

It’s important for parents to realize that their kids are going through puberty earlier. It’s especially helpful to know this is happening because the hormones in charge of transforming the body—estrogen and testosterone—don’t circulate just below the neck. They circulate up in the brain as well. And they have profound effects on the way kids think and feel. If we don’t recognize that these hormones are circulating through their bodies, essentially acting as drugs, and that the way kids feel and think is shifting, then we can’t parent them as effectively.

One of the amazing features of early puberty is that you start to see that a child is grappling with a new hormone. We call it a mood swing, but a mood swing is really a kid acclimating to a shift in hormone level. They’re trying to figure out why they feel that way—and they’re riding their feelings. I always use classic girl mood swings as the most obvious example. During early puberty, many girls will start giggling hysterically or crying dramatically, sometimes even inappropriately. Parents see this in their eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old girls and they don’t understand what’s happening. Yet when pediatricians ask girls that age if they’ve felt these kinds of mood swings, the girls often say yes, and when they are asked if they like how this feels, almost every one of them says, “No, because it feels a little bit out of control.” That’s the girl’s experience of learning how to modulate these new chemicals floating through her body and the brain.

Boys go through it, too. The classic emotions that we associate with testosterone surges are rage and aggression, but boys becoming quiet is probably dictated by testosterone swings, too. There are no studies proving the connection, but when boys enter puberty, they tend to go quiet and often retreat from the world. Kids appreciate when you explain that there are these new drugs essentially floating around their bodies, and it’s okay and they’re healthy, but their brain is going to need some time to get used to the surges of these chemicals.

With early puberty, though, it’s important for parents to remember not to treat their kids as if they are older just because their bodies are changing sooner. There exists a humongous dyssynchrony between brain and body development: Kids are entering puberty at increasingly young ages, but their ability to make smart, consequential decisions has not sped up.