Pre-teen Girls Research Articles

Rudolf the Haitian Reindeer and Other Heroes: Helping Children Perform Change

A meta analysis of studies concerning youth violence suggests that when children see themselves and are seen by surrounding adults as positive, prosocial leaders, they are less likely to become involved in bullying either as bullies or as victims (1). MFT’s have recently been encouraged to work more directly with children (2) and to adapt their service delivery methods to the needs of clients (3). The authors worked directly with 122 children in their community settings, involving parents and school officials as an encouraging audience (4) to the children’s new views of themselves. 90% of preteen girls (ages 9 to 11), and 100% of young teens of both genders (ages 12 to 14) saw themselves as more positive leaders after our 8 week program; 89% of their parents and 90% of school officials independently saw positive changes.

‘It’s not about Candy’

This article explores the musical practices of a small group of pre-teen girls in an after school care centre in Adelaide, South Australia. These practices constituted ‘serious play’ as the girls attempted to transform and reconfigure the space through their engagement with popular music. The article illustrates how the girls challenged the power relations of the institutional setting both musically and sexually. It concludes that the music that the young girls listened to and the way they played with such music were ‘not about candy’. Rather, the girls’ musical engagement in after school care was related to constantly shifting fields of power and a struggle over western cultural beliefs regarding asexual childhood.

Overview of female middle childhood in societal context: Implications for research and practice

Preadolescence represents a time of becoming and of change less emphasized in popular and empirical literature than adolescence. Yet it is an important period and a critical time to teach children, while they are still sufficiently adult-dependent and adult-centered, to help that learning to persist. These are formative years during which children experience marked increases in development (physical, cognitive, and psychosocial) and knowledge and an incremental shaping of values, attitudes, and behaviors that they will carry into adulthood. This period of life can also be called the “tween” years, as children during this period are transitioning to adolescence. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the societal context in which preteen girls are developing and provide some suggestions for testing and implementing health promotion strategies that may contribute toward a safe and successful transition for these children through adolescence to adulthood in this fast-paced society. Copyright 2002, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

'Rock on, baby!': Pre-teen girls and popular music

(2001). 'Rock on, baby!': Pre-teen girls and popular music. Continuum: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 359-371.

Carrots, Sticks, and Promises: A Conceptual Framework for the Management of Public Health and Social Issue Behaviors

of these deaths are premature and attributable to lifestyle and environmental factors (UC Berkley Wellness Letter 1997). Advances in biomedical sciences, mass immunization, and sanitation have resulted in a decrease in the incidence of infectious diseases (Matarazzo 1984), so that the health status of the population in economically developed countries now has less to do with acute illness than with lifestyle issues such as excessive drinking, unhealthy diet, or the use of tobacco products (Walsh et al.1993). Influencing lifestyle can do more to increase the health of the population and lower the cost of health care than can treatment of illness. In this article, a conceptual framework is proposed for the management of public health and social issue behaviors. The article relies on education, marketing, and law as its three primary classes of strategic tools. These tools will be considered with respect to specific targets and specific public health or social issues for which the targets may or may not have any motivation, opportunity, and/or ability to cooperate but that nevertheless have been selected for management (e.g. keeping preteen girls from beginning to smoke). The tools are considered with respect to targets who are prone, resistant, or unable to comply with the manager's goals. The relative appropriateness of the use of various Michael L. Rothschild

The End of the Virtual Community

The End of the Virtual Community

SELF-IMAGE AND SELF-ESTEEM IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRETEEN GIRLS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MENTAL HEALTH

Current research suggests that pubertal development is occurring earlier in African-American preteen girls in response to familial contextual factors, which may make them vulnerable to low self-image and self-esteem dissatisfaction. This lowering in self-image and self-esteem may contribute to the early initiation of sexual behaviors, putting these girls at risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. These potential risks place these girls in need of prepubertal health promotion, yet preadolescents are not frequently a focus of nursing care delivery except when summer camp and back-to-school physicals are performed. This article presents an in-depth overview of selected literature on self-esteem, discusses findings on self-image and self-esteem from a pilot study on pubertal influences on accelerated sexual behavior, and proposes health promotion strategies for pre-and peripubertal girls to promote positive mental health outcomes. More focused attention is needed on health promotion targeting the developmental transition health needs of prepubertal girls. Targeted health promotion activities may foster healthier pre-and peripubertal girls' perceptions of the meaning of their pubertal physical changes and stronger self-image and self-esteem. The goal of these health promotion activities should be to foster continuity of positive self-image and self-esteem among preteen girls, which is essential to prevent initiation of premature for-age risk of problem behavior, such as early coitus.

United States Societal Backlash Against Vulvar Examination of Preteen Girl

Background Although a physical examination should include assessment of all major organ systems, inspection of the external genitalia may present unique challenges to patients and doctors. The current nationwide controversy involving a woman pediatrician and 59 sixth-grade schoolgirls from East Stroudsburg, PA. illustrates how a seemingly simple routine medical examination could be regarded by angry opposing viewpoints. Methods The data were collected hy an exhaustive search of newspaper accounts, court records and the computer internet. Results On March 19, 1996, as required by the state public school code, 59 eleven and twelve-year-old girls whose health records had theretofore not been completed by a private physician were examined by a school physician whose job it was to perform “a medical examination and comprehensive appraisal of health.” A genital examination was included. The physician described it as visual inspection and “retract[ion]” of the external genitalia “to see if there were any warts or vaginal lesions.” In the days that followed, parents of some of the girls complained publicly that the genital examination was inappropriate, unindicated, unauthorized, unprecedented, unexpected and emotionally traumatic; characterizing it as “indecency,” “molestation,” and “rape.” The school board and state police found it consistent with health department guidelines. Some private patients, the local hospital and county medical society publicly praised the doctor. Nevertheless, the story of the “Pennsylvania outrage” was carried in newspapers from Oklahoma to Florida, condemned on nationally syndicated talk-radio programs and strongly criticized on at least 7 different internet web sites. The local district attorney was “inundated” with telephone calls of protest from as far away as Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties legal organization from Charlottesville, VA., became involved. Two lawsuits have been filed in federal court alleging, among other things, that in spite of the explicit objections from the girls, “strip searches and body cavity searches” were performed violating their rights under the 4th amendment to the Unite States Constitution. Conclusion Notwithstanding the doctor's good intentions, there was widespread expression of sentiment in opposition to the belief that a routine genital examination served the best health interests of these girls.

The use of focus groups to examine pubertal concerns in pre-teen girls: initial findings and implications for practice and research

The use of focus groups to examine pubertal concerns in pre-teen girls: initial findings and implications for practice and research. Issues in Comprehensive Paediatric Nursing. 1996. 19. 103-120.

Periods, Parody, and Polyphony: Fifty Years of Menstrual Education through Fiction and Film

Periods, Parody, and Polyphony:Fifty Years of Menstrual Education through Fiction and Film Michelle H. Martin (bio) The 1947 commercially sponsored Walt Disney and Kimberly-Clark animated film The Story of Menstruation features the voice of a smooth-sounding adult female who concludes her narrative by recommending year-round fresh air and sunshine.1 She then asserts: The best possible insurance against trouble on those days is healthy living every day. And that's the story. There's nothing strange or mysterious about menstruation. All life is built on cycles, and the menstrual cycle is a normal and natural part of nature's internal plan for passing on the gift of life. Through her sanitized and upbeat representation of menstruation, the narrator ascribes a positive value to a physiological process that has traditionally been stigmatized, while dispelling commonly held myths about menstruation and female hygiene. Forty-five years later, Proctor & Gamble produced a film with the same educational agenda as Kimberly-Clark's The Story of Menstruation, but with a radically different style. Always Changing (1992) features four ethnically diverse girls who face the camera and talk directly to the audience. The Asian-American girl confides, "It's different. I don't know. It doesn't hurt or anything. It just felt . . . damp, like I was leaking a little bit." The European-American girl says, "I started getting some white sticky stuff in my underwear. My mom says it's vaginal discharge. She says that that's a sure sign I'm gonna get my period pretty soon." The Latina complains, "The day I got my first period, my mother made such a big deal out of it. She got all mushy and started going, 'Oh, my baby's becoming a woman. ' It was so embarrassing." And the African-American girl says, "Menstruating. My big sister calls it 'the curse'; I don't want it to happen!" In between the production of these two films, children's authors Louise Fitzhugh and Judy Blume wrote, respectively, The Long Secret (1965) and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), both of which feature menstruation as a theme. Targeting an audience of pre-teen girls more than school boards or parents, these novels thrive on the parodic and the carnivalesque, assigning power to the children within the narratives rather than to adults. Although at least thirteen other novels, twelve other commercially sponsored films, and five other noncommercially sponsored films dealing with menstruation were published between the late 1940s and the mid-1990s, I have chosen these four texts because they have found such a wide audience among American elementary-age children and because they best illustrate the competing and changing ideologies undergirding menstrual education over the past fifty years.2 Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the medieval grotesque, contained in his study of Rabelais, is particularly relevant to the discussion of menstruation because of its emphasis on change and cycles rather than neoclassic completion, and its inclusion of ambivalent elements, which here we might modify to include those we associate specifically with puberty: joy and fear; pleasure and pain; birth and death of life stages and of the ovum; the romanticized or eroticized nude body and the body with effluvia, the body where the world's life, death, and regeneration take place. Through "the mighty thrust downward into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the human body," conversations are brought out of the cerebral and into the realm of the burlesque and the grotesque, in which physicality is privileged. Only here, according to Bakhtin, can humans find "true wealth and abundance" (Rabelais 369-70); since the experiences that all of us share are associated with the body's "depths," when we communicate at this basic level human inequalities are expunged, enabling dialogue and communication to take place. While one might expect that all films designed to educate young women on menstruation and physical changes during puberty would include these grotesque elements and advance a body-affirming ideology, an analysis of The Story of Menstruation and Always Changing reveals that these ideas are not always evident in menstrual films, a circumstance that helps to illuminate the different attitudes toward...

The use of focus groups to examine pubertal concerns in preteen girls: initial findings and implications for practice and research.

This article presents the findings of four focus groups aimed at discovering the concerns a group of 9- to 12-year-old African American and Hispanic girls (N = 38) had about puberty, the transition to adolescence, and growing up. Among the factors these girls liked about growing up were increasing independence from parents, widening social relations with same- and opposite-sex friends, and an increase in decision making regarding clothes and activities. What they reported as not liking about growing up were an increase in peer pressure, high parental expectations, and more responsibility for their actions in home, school, and recreational activities. Health care for this group must include systematic monitoring of pubertal development and concerns in order to aggressively educate preadolescents to negotiate this period smoothly and to avoid high-risk behaviors that could have negative health and social sequelae during adolescence and adulthood.

Attitudes towards body weight and eating in preteen girls

Attitudes towards body weight and eating in preteen girls

Carcinoma of the rectum in a pre-teen girl

Inoperable carcinoma of the rectum was diagnosed in a 12-year-old girl during work-up for “dysentery and fever”. Clinical details, investigations, and the course of the disease are described. The literature on rectal carcinoma in childhood is reviewed.