The current uproar over early puberty strikes a personal nerve because I remember that I felt happy rather than traumatized when I was told that my breasts were beginning to develop. I wasn't in the first grade, like some of the girls described in a recent New York Times Magazine piece by Lisa Belkin, "The Making of an Eight Year Old Woman. " I was 8, still reading storybooks about imaginary pre-sexual children -- but I was quietly excited to hear that I was on my way to becoming a woman. And I continued to enjoy those books -- "The Secret Garden," "What Katy Did" -- while waiting for my breasts to grow large enough for a training bra.

Unlike some women who remember early puberty as traumatic, I welcomed these changes. I remember hoping I would eventually be well-proportioned enough to grace the pages of Playboy magazine. Flat-chested and curious, I tried to understand the formula for womanly beauty by studying the exact measurements of Playboy models.

Researchers like Marcia Herman-Giddens, who began compiling her data at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina more than a decade ago, have asserted that the average age for onset of puberty is lower today than "nature intended." Researchers and reporters seem to believe that the little girl who is first in her class to grow breasts or menstruate is traumatized, unready, made to feel like a freak. Do adults really believe this is always the case? Where are the individuals behind these stories of a biological crisis in girlhood? And why do the alarmist reports ignore -- to an Orwellian degree -- the pride a young girl feels when she realizes she is not going to be a child forever?

My friend Cynthia, the oldest of five siblings, recalls "being somewhat pleased, and feeling rather smug as I traipsed down into the kitchen and asked as casually as I could where the sanitary supplies were. And I did get envious looks from younger children. I guess it is analogous to a little boy shaving for the first time." If 12 and a half is really the normal age to begin menstruating, she was "early" -- somewhere between 9 and 11.

By the time I was 10, I was frequently being told, "Oh, I thought you were 13." I didn't feel pretty, as I had at 5 and 6. I felt unusual and awkward, and I was beginning to have some adolescent skin problems. But a year later I assessed myself and took genuine pleasure in the appearance of my more developed breasts, deciding that I no longer looked quite so immature and boxlike. And I had outgrown my simplistic "Playboy philosophy" -- my flat-chested faith in body measurements and perfect proportions. I could see that life was going to be subtler than that.

I began to make friends with girls who were chronologically older than I was. The 12-year-old girl next door was womanly, Roman Catholic and blessed with a face that looked perpetually turned on. When her strict Calabrian parents weren't on her case, she was very free with her opinions and queries. She was surprised to learn that I was so young. When she asked whether I had yet begun to develop pubic hair, I acted reticent. Her curiosity seemed childish -- but so was the pleasure I took in telling her that I had. We discussed the trials and tribulations of early womanhood -- periods, pads and what happens to the innocent skin on your eyelids the first time you wear eye shadow. We belonged to an exclusive club from which "real" children were now barred.

It's hard to watch the news these days or read articles about "what causes early puberty" without feeling that there is some sort of backlash against puberty itself. I sense a culturewide panic brought on by alarmists who are in denial about the fact that sexual maturation is inevitable.

Haven't parents always been somewhat nervous about the onset of female puberty? This fear of the future or the unknown is not in itself what troubles me. What made me sit up and take notice was the latest trend in drug therapy -- to prevent "precocious puberty." On the Web and in the mainstream news media, lupron, a hormone that "slams the brakes on puberty" (as Time magazine so prettily puts it), is being marketed to parents as a "solution" to the so-called problem of early puberty. And I was shocked when friends told me that doctors increasingly offer it to the parents of pubescent girls.

Though I'm hardly pubescent today, I take this personally. What if I had been drugged at 8 when I first asked my mother about those odd sensations in my flat little chest? What if, instead of matter-of-factly explaining the biology and giving me a big encouraging smile, my mother had panicked and called the puberty police? I shudder in horror.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk