Father-Daughter Relationship Is Crucial - effect on age when puberty begins - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 1999

A young girl's relationship with her family, especially with her father, may influence at What age she enters puberty, say researchers at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. The study examined 173 girls and their families from Nashville and Knoxville, Tenn., and Bloomington, Ind., from the time the girls were in pre-kindergarten until they were in the seventh grade.

Those who had close, positive relationships with their parents during the first five years of life tended to experience relatively late puberty, compared to girls who had more distant relationships. More specifically, it was found that the quality of fathers' involvement with daughters was the most important feature of the early family environment in relation to the timing of the daughters' puberty.

Girls who enter puberty later generally had fathers who were active participants in care giving, had fathers who were supportive of the girls' mothers, and had positive relationships with their mothers. The fathers' involvement, rather than the mothers', seems to be paramount to the age of the girls' development. The researchers believe that girls have evolved to experience early socialization, with their "antennae" tuned to the fathers' role in the family (both in terms of father-daughter and father-mother relationships), and that they may unconsciously adjust their timing of puberty based on their fathers' behavior.

Girls who are raised in father-absent homes or dysfunctional father-present homes experienced relatively early pubertal timing. One biological explanation is that girls whose fathers are not present in the home may be exposed to other adult males--stepfathers or their mothers' boyfriends--and that exposure to pheromones (chemical substances that exude an aroma which is a sexual stimulant) produced by unrelated adult males accelerates female pubertal development. The flip side of that theory is that a girl who lives with her biological father in a positive environment is exposed to his pheromones and is inhibited from puberty, perhaps as a natural incest avoidance mechanism. Girls who live with their fathers, but have a cold or distant relationship with them, would not be exposed to their fathers' pheromones as much as those who have more interaction, therefore causing daughters in the distant relationship to reach puberty earlier.

Perhaps most significant, the researchers indicate, is the important role fathers seem to play in their daughters' development, given that the quality of mothering is generally more closely associated with how children turn out than is the quality of fathering.