UF Study: Early Puberty Girls More Likely To Use Alcohol, Marijuana

June 14, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A jumpstart on puberty increases the likelihood girls will have a fast start with alcohol and marijuana, perhaps leading to a faster life, a new University of Florida study finds.

The large-scale study, the first of its kind to focus on urban minorities, found that middle school girls who entered puberty early experiment with drinking and pot at much higher rates than their peers who start to develop later, said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor who did the study.

The results are important in helping to identify patterns that put women at risk for alcohol and drug abuse, as well as other problems later in life such as lower educational attainment, weaker parenting skills or poorer mental health, Graber said. “Girls who have trouble during adolescence tend to also have trouble during adulthood,” she said.

By eighth grade, girls who said they had matured early were more than twice as likely to have tried alcohol and more than three times as likely to have tried marijuana as girls who perceived themselves as developing late or on time, the study found.

“Because they look older, they start hanging out with friends who look similar but are actually older and may not be doing good things, influencing these girls down the same path of drug use and delinquency,” she said.

“It is also possible that girls who mature earlier don’t have as much time to develop good skills for dealing with the challenges of adolescence, and are less able to make good decisions about drug use and other problems,” she said.

Graber’s study is based on an ongoing survey of 1,225 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade girls in New York City public and parochial schools that was begun five years ago by the Institute for Prevention Research at Cornell University Medical Center. Forty-five percent of the respondents were black, 33 percent were Hispanic, and the remaining 21 percent were white or represented some other ethnic group. Her preliminary research will be presented Saturday at an annual meeting of the Society for Prevention Research in Washington, D.C.

Although past research has focused on whether pubertal timing leads to drug use among white suburban girls, few of the studies have looked at minorities, Graber said. Yet black girls generally mature earlier than whites – beginning puberty between 8 and 9 years compared to between 9 and 10

among whites – and there are some indications that Hispanics also may, she said.

“This study is significant because it is among the first to investigate the role of early perceived pubertal timing on problem behavior in an ethnically diverse sample,” said Elizabeth J. Crockett, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It is critical to examine how developmental issues such as pubertal timing play out in the lives of adolescents from diverse ethnic backgrounds, rather than assuming that the patterns for minority youth are identical to those reported for white, middle-class samples. This study goes a long way towards addressing that need.”

Of 550 girls who identified themselves as having matured early, 30 percent said they had tried alcohol by the sixth or seventh grade, and 46 percent had tried it by the eighth grade, Graber said. Among girls who did not identify themselves as maturing early, 21 percent said they had tried alcohol by the eighth grade.

Twenty percent of the “early maturers” reported they had tried marijuana by the eighth grade, compared with 6 percent of the other girls, she said.

“Part of it may be the perception that to be more mature is to do some of these things,” Graber said. “One of the ways you validate your sense that you look older and feel older is by engaging in these sort of behaviors, such as hanging out with older peers.”

In the sample, early maturers more than other girls reported thinking their friends used alcohol and drugs and engaged in delinquent acts, Graber said. They also were less likely to think their friends would disapprove if they found out they had been drinking, she said.

“When girls perceive their friends as feeling more positive toward these kind of behaviors, it provides them with a peer group where it may be OK to start drinking more regularly or experimenting with drugs,” she said.

The study did not look at whether these friends were boys or girls.

Family still has an influence, however, Graber said. Early maturers from two-parent homes were less likely to have tried drugs and alcohol than those raised by a single parent, perhaps because there are two parents to monitor them, she said.

“Interestingly, if you ask these (early maturing) girls their attitudes about drug use, they don’t tend to differ much from other girls,” she said. “At this age – 11 or 12 – it’s pretty normal to have fairly negative views – you don’t think drugs are good or that they will make you popular.”

Both groups said they were good decision-makers about drugs and alcohol, with neither seeing much benefit to taking them, but early maturers reported they were more likely to take risks, she said.

“By the end of high school, it’s pretty typical for a number of adolescents to have tried alcohol,” she said. “That may not be such a terrible problem as long as they have experimented with alcohol at older ages and have not progressed to binge drinking, drinking regularly or using other drugs.”