Adolescents can experience many concerns or worries about growth and puberty. Puberty is the one to three-year process of hormonal and physical change that causes the young person to reach sexual maturity, girls usually entering it about a year earlier than boys. 

Puberty – one of the most difficult phases in the life of every human being. The term “puberty” (derives from the Latin word “puberty” = sexual maturity) and refers to the period of transition from childhood to sexual maturity; the transformation into adulthood. This transition is characterized by many changes in life.

It is not really surprising that almost every child faces problems during this transition. Some of these are normal and disappear on their own. However, others require professional help because the young person can no longer cope with the changes and challenges.

Furthermore, children during adolescence tend to engage in power struggles with their parents to challenge their authority. In addition to the bad mood, typical for this age, due to the almost uncontrollable emotional chaos, the child faces an explosive mixture of feelings, a ticking bomb so to speak.

It is not uncommon for depressed moods or even depression to develop during puberty, particularly in girls. The parents should be very vigilant. If the situation is extreme or does not correct itself, professional help should be sought. It is particularly uncomfortable for the parents that those problems often go hand in hand with a plunge in their academic achievements.

Among other changes wrought by puberty, there are growth spurts that create bigger bodies to manage. For girls hips broaden, breasts swell, menstruation begins, and they can produce eggs. For boys muscles enlarge, voice drops, ejaculation begins, and they can produce sperm. For both male and female there is more hair around sex organs, more body odor, and more active skin glands that can create acne.

Now young people, as young as ten to fourteen are capable of participating in sexual reproduction, which doesn’t mean that they immediately want to fulfill that potentiality. What it does mean, however, is that parents do need to start educating their son or daughter about socially managing sexual maturity and delaying sexual activity in a popular culture that glamorizes looking and acting sexual in every way.

This is no time for a young person to be uninformed about what is going on in their bodies because in ignorance they will believe they are unique and wonder what is wrong with them, when nothing is. This is a time for parents to explain the process of puberty that unfolds for everyone and what changes to expect.

An easy way to do this is for parents to search online for sites explaining puberty, find one that they like, young person may have. Normalize the process so the young person doesn’t ‘abnormalize’ themselves.

Adolescence does not depend on puberty to start. In fact, in most cases adolescence begins first. Parents notice the negative attitude (more criticism and complaining), the passive and then read the information with their son or daughter, more delay and arguments and the testing of limits (more seeing what can be gotten away with) that are the hallmarks of early adolescent change. But when puberty does begin, the adolescent transformation becomes emotionally intensified and more complex.

Puberty now creates two problems in one. First, it creates a process problem: how to manage the physical changes that are besetting their bodies. This is the problem of self-consciousness. And second, it creates an outcome problem: how to act young manly or young womanly. This is the problem of sex role definition.

Start with the problem of self-consciousness. For most young people, puberty catches them at a bad time – during the early adolescent years (around ages 9 – 13) when they are separating from the shelter of childhood and begin striving for social belonging and place among their society of peers. Already feeling adrift from family and at sea in this brave new world of more social independence, puberty demonstrates how they are also out of control of their body. At this juncture, parents can help their son or daughter escape the pressure of these dehumanizing sex role definitions by explaining a more healthy way to grow.