I watched the current interview with Richard Reeves on the Daily Show, and very much look forward to reading his book, "Of Boys and Men," in the coming weeks.
As a mother of sons, and a grandmother of 2 young grandsons, I have been consciously aware of and concerned about the issues that boys in our society face, ever since my first child was born. My blog posts since April of '23 have been specific, and I actively avoid other issues in most of my current posts, but something Richard Reeves said during his interview converged with the topic of my current blogs. He said, "On average, boys just grow up a little later, they mature a little bit later." To me, I see it more as girls are sexualized earlier, and this contributes to the perception of precocious maturity they are so often ascribed.
Puberty onset varies scientifically for a wide variety of reasons, but that all is still happening among children at relatively the same time. It is happening among peers. The average age for girls is 8 to 13, and 9 to 14 for boys, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
My stepmother told me I was "so mature." The sda principal often spoke about how girls were "so much more mature than boys." (He once told me I was mature like Mary, from the bible. How god knew teen girls were "mature.") My church saw me as someone so "mature" at 13, they blamed me for the behavior of their 33 yr-old male school administrator. This subtle societal belief that girls "mature" faster than boys was very harmful for me. The way society has used an insignificant average age difference for the onset of puberty to ascribe agency and maturity to girls has been harmful for a lot of children, both girls and boys. (I write more about the way predators misuse these words to excuse their exploitation of children in this post: Trigger warning )
Girls may, on average, hit puberty about a year sooner than boys. But if they were not sexualized and objectified from infancy onward, I think this would actually go a long way toward creating less behaviors that lead to the "girls are more mature" phrasing that has been co-opted by older men like my old sda school principal, or Marc Maron, to excuse their predatory behavior toward teen girls. Girls are not more mature than boys. Children are individual beings. A male child who hears that boys are "not as mature," is being unintentionally saddled with an expectation that could be harmful to that child.
I hope our society can learn to nurture children, without sexualizing or objectifying any of them, or unintentionally saddling them with gendered expectations that may harm them, or can be used by adults to harm them.
