Study Finding Earlier Puberty Raises Sex Ed. Questions

American girls are entering puberty sooner than was generally thought, lending weight to the argument that sex education should begin early in elementary school, a study in last week's edition of the journal Pediatrics reports.

Nearly half of the nation's black girls and 14 percent of its white girls start to develop breasts, pubic hair, or both by age 8, according to a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They monitored 17,000 girls, ages 3 to 12, who visited their doctors from July...