If you want to check the speed at which young girls are growing up, you can subscribe to Seventeen, which is actually read by 11-year-olds, or Cosmopolitan, the Bible of 16-year-olds.
You can watch MTV or VH1 or BET and try to decipher the raunchy lyrics. You can check out Britney Spears' "Crossroads" on video or tune into The Osbournes.
Or you can consider this fact: the launch last fall of the newest Junior Girl Scout badge was the most popular in memory. More than 60,000 8- to 11-year-olds have qualified for it in less than a year.
It's called the "Stress Less" badge and it features an embroidered picture of a hammock.
Girls just wanna escape.
Escape their jam-packed lives, escape their peer-centric lives.
"It is gratifying to know that we are providing a badge that speaks to what girls need today," says Sara Au, spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts.
The badge is, literally, the junior version of the Girl Scouts' "From Stress to Success" badge for 11- to 17-year-olds, that was introduced several years ago to help older girls deal with the stress they were so clearly under.
Just like the older girls, the younger scouts have a list of stress-reducing activities to accomplish in order to qualify for the badge: exercise, keep a journal, find music that helps them relax, practice breathing techniques or create a personal stress kit filled with cartoons, photos, a picture of a peaceful scene, a squeeze ball or the scent of lavender. Generally, the girls work on their badges together or at meetings.
The idea for the badge came out of the findings of the Girl Scout Research Institute in a report titled "Teens Before Their Time."
"Stress and anxiety reign when the pressure to grow up fast conflicts with a girl's inability to cope with teen-age feelings," the report concluded.
The researchers found that, although girls' bodies mature earlier and they are exposed to sophisticated pop culture messages earlier, they are not emotionally equipped to deal with this "developmental compression."
Dr. Harriet Mosatche, "Dr. M" in an on-line advice column for Girl Scouts, is also head of the committee that approves new badges. Between the report and what she was hearing online, she decided that younger girls needed help dealing with stress, too.
"It would be nice if young girls weren't faced with these things, but the reality is that they are, and they need the tools to help them deal with it," said Au.
Meanwhile, Girl Scouts are learning stress-reducing measures that should be very familiar to the mothers of Girl Scouts: aroma therapy, foot massage, listening to rain-forest sounds, rubbing worry stones, talking to a psychologist, using soothing hand lotions, meditating, burning scented candles, getting facials and back rubs.
This all makes a sad kind of sense, I guess.
If the stress is starting younger and younger, stress-busting has to start younger, too.