Is sex before marriage a sin? At some point, every youth worker hears a version of that question. Teens and young adults often struggle with issues of mental and physical purity. And when they sin by having premarital sex, they need help dealing with heartbreak and forgiveness.

Read on to consider how you’ll answer kids who ask, “Is sex before marriage a sin?” Plus, ponder how you’ll respond to someone who’s heartbroken after having premarital sex. Read More

During the coronavirus pandemic, pediatric endocrinologists saw a new surge of referrals for girls with early puberty. Recent retrospective studies from Germany and Turkey show that the number of these referrals doubled or even tripled during the lockdown periods of 2020 (this at a time when many families may have been avoiding non-emergency doctor’s visits for fear of covid-19). A paper published in August in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, which analyzed data from South Korea’s national statistics portal, found that the number of children diagnosed with precocious puberty almost doubled between 2016 and 2021, with a sharp post-2020 spike. The rise in early puberty “is a phenomenon that is occurring all over the world,” Frank M. Biro, the former director of the adolescent-medicine division at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told me. (Although there has also been a rise among boys, girls experiencing early puberty still vastly outnumber them.)

in the midst of what is increasingly understood to be a post-covid youth mental-health crisis, the startling new uptick in early puberty is troubling to some physicians and parents. But, because the spike appears to have been triggered within a compressed, well-defined timeframe, it also offers rich terrain for better understanding the condition’s causes and effects. It also provides a chance to rethink puberty: to see it not as a gateway into adulthood but as another stage of childhood—one that is highly variable from kid to kid and need not be cause for alarm.

“We are in a great natural experiment at the moment, and we might not know the results of it for another ten years or more,” Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco, said. “I do wonder if this is going to be a cohort of kids whose puberty was more rapid because they were in a critical window of susceptibility during a time of great social upheaval.” Read More

There is substantial evidence that the pandemic has increased the number of adolescents (and even some pre-adolescents) who are anxious. It’s no wonder, given that Covid lockdowns and distancing robbed teenagers of many of the activities they care about most, disrupted their education, and isolated them from their friends. We’re all hoping that as life returns to something like normal, adolescents will rebound. But anxiety in adolescents was already on the rise before the pandemic. Why? Experts cite increased pressure to succeed in school, a world that feels scarier and the toll social media can take on self-esteem. But nobody really understands it. It’s important to recognize the signs of anxiety, and get kids who are struggling help. Read More