The Relationship Among Girls' Pubertal Timing, Peer Risk Behaviors, and Lifetime Educational Attainment

Purpose: Girls with early pubertal timing demonstrate elevated risk for deleterious outcomes in adolescence, including psychopathology, substance use, conduct disorders, and lower educational attainment.  Researchers posit this is a result of acceptance from and associating with older, more deviant peers in adolescence; however, few studies have explored if friends’ risk behaviors in adolescence mediate the relationships between girls’ pubertal timing and their health behaviors and outcomes.  Further, there is a dearth of research examining the impact of early pubertal timing on girls’ health behaviors and outcomes beyond adolescence to discern if pubertal timing has lasting effects across the life course.   The current study aims to address these gaps by investigating whether perceptions of peer substance use and sexual behavior mediate the relationship between girls’ pubertal timing and lifetime educational attainment.

Methods:  We used data from Wave 1 (ages 14 – 17) through Wave 14 (all participants reached 25 years of age) of the ethnically-diverse National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 female cohort (N=3,882).  Controlling for participants’ age, race/ethnicity, maternal education, and father absence in youth, we performed a path analysis in MPlus 7.1 to examine if the relationship between early menarche (menarche before age 12, 21.2% of participants) and lifetime educational attainment (in years, M=13.9, S.D.=2.9) was mediated by perceptions of peer behavior (participant report of percentage of friends at Wave 1 who smoke, get drunk at least once a month, or ever had sex).

Results:  Adolescents with early menarche reported a higher proportion of friends engaging in all three peer risk behaviors.  In turn, reporting a higher percentage of friends smoking and having ever had sex was related to lower educational attainment.  Conversely, reporting a higher percentage of friends getting drunk at least once a month was associated with higher educational attainment.  Each indirect path from early menarche to lifetime educational attainment via peer risk behaviors was significant (p<.05), suggesting that perceptions of peer risk behaviors mediated the relationship between early menarche and educational attainment.  The final model accounted for 24% of the total variance in lifetime educational attainment.

Conclusions: Findings support the hypothesis that peer behaviors mediate the relationship between pubertal timing and educational attainment among girls. As we cannot systematically alter girls’ pubertal timing, our findings suggest the peer context should be considered when developing interventions aimed at reducing early developing girls’ risk for deleterious outcomes, including lower educational attainment.