Girlology: A Girl's Guide to Stuff that Matters

Take care of this new body you are growing. It has to serve you for a long, long, long, long time. Some of these changes are hard to accept, but remember that being a girl is a gift, and this new body is part of it!!!!!

Since We’re Talking about Girls,

We Gotta Talk about BRAINS!!

Finally, we can’t leave out the most important part of your entire body . . . your brain! Your body’s girl parts are not the only part of you getting a makeover once you start puberty. Inside that head of yours, there’s a major construction zone! Your brain hasn’t been this busy growing since you were a toddler! Can you feel all the electricity, the power, the buzzing and whirling that’s happening in there?

Thoughts, emotions, feelings, knowledge are all inside that head of yours. It is a busy place!

Believe it or not, your brain is largest around age eleven or twelve (and if you have a 12-year-old brother or sister, we’re sure you’ll have a hard time believing us!). But for brains, size doesn’t matter much—it’s the wiring that matters the most!

After age eleven or twelve, your brain starts to “delete” some of its unused parts and begin construction on some of the more grownup parts. It takes a lot of time, and what you do, think and feel helps decide what parts to delete. It’s kind of like deleting old files on your computer. Your brain is your computer, and if you leave some “files” unused for a long time, it starts to clean up and put away that old and outdated stuff.

At the same time it’s cleaning out old files, your brain is also figuring out how to do more complicated jobs. Scientists have given these jobs big words like “advanced reasoning,” “abstract thinking” and “meta-cognition.” (You can impress any adult with those words!) What that means is that your brain is becoming more and more able to think about things that you can’t really see, like beliefs, trust and love. You become able to understand what it means to have choices and consequences. And your brain gets smarter every day!

You can also think about “thinking.” That sounds weird, but when you were a little kid, you couldn’t sit down and think about your own thoughts, analyze your feelings or think about how things affected you. Now you are beginning to do just that.

That’s why friendships are meaning more to you—you understand the feelings and emotional part of friends. Friends are not just someone to “play” with anymore. They are people who matter to you because they make you feel good about who you are. Try explaining that to a seven-year-old, and you’ll get a look or a grunt that says, “Huh?” instead of, “Oh yeah, I totally get it.” But young teens do totally get it because their brains are growing just like they’re supposed to. Get it?

These changes in your brain are also giving you some thoughts, ideas and emotions that are very common among teenagers. You may feel like you have people watching you sometimes, even though you know you really don’t, like an imaginary audience. We don’t mean you are crazy, hearing voices or feeling paranoid; you just feel like you are performing for others sometimes. It’s okay. That’s helping you monitor your behaviors and think about how you act or want to act.

Sometimes it’s good to “pretend” your parent or best friend is watching. It might keep you from doing something you really don’t mean to do or shouldn’t do.

You may also have the [wrong] idea that bad things only happen to other people and that you are invincible (that’s a good vocabulary word—it means “it won’t happen to me,” “I can’t be beat or hurt”). Think about, for example, getting seriously hurt on your bike. Most adolescents think, “I don’t need to wear a goofy helmet because I’ll never fall and hurt my head.” But every year, hundreds of adolescents are killed or suffer permanent brain damage from falling off their bikes and hitting their heads. And what about pregnancy? Many teens have the idea that “it won’t happen to me,” so having sex without birth control is no big deal. That kind of thinking is why almost a MILLION teenage girls get pregnant every year in the United States, and one in four teen girls who has sex will get a sexually transmitted infection. That’s right, one out of every four every year. Even though you may have feelings of being invincible—remember that bad things can happen, especially if you aren’t being safe!