Long figured as a disturbing and upsetting process for individuals and families, puberty is today widely described as itself in crisis, reportedly occurring earlier and earlier as each decade passes. Early onset or ‘precocious’ pubertal development now heralds new forms of temporal trouble in which sexuality, sex/gender and reproduction are all at stake. Children, it is claimed, are growing up too fast and becoming sexual too early. This out-of-time development indicates both that their futures are at risk and that we are all living in a new era of environmental and social perturbation. Something, experts, parents and journalists urge, must be done to stop this precocity.

This book describes and analyses a diverse set of discourses articulating early onset puberty as crisis, tracking their movements across a range of sites. Engaging with and (re)telling stories of sexual development, I both take seriously the scale and potential significance of the changes described and direct a critical feminist gaze to the allegiances, omissions, emotional registers and logics therein. Reading accounts of early onset puberty as entangled with broader historical and contemporary stories of sexual development, my argument challenges normative assumptions about sex/gender, sexuality and reproduction whilst paying careful attention to matters of physical and psycho-social health.

Stories of a crisis in pubertal timing started to appear in the late 1990s, with the publication of an epidemiological study by Marcia Herman-Giddens and colleagues (1997) which found that, although in the 1960s only 1 per cent of American girls started pubertal development before they turned 8, in the 1990s 48 per cent of girls in some sub-populations had this experience. The heated scientific debate around this study generated news media articles in high-circulation journals, including a cover story in Time magazine in October 2000. In this article, entitled ‘Teens before their Time’, journalist Michael Lemonick and colleagues informed readers that amidst a cloud of scientific and cultural confusion ‘all anyone knows for certain is that the signs of sexual development in girls are appearing at ever younger ages’ (Lemonick et al. 2000: 2).