Evaluation of a Puberty Education Program for Girls and Their Caregivers in Arkansas

In the United States, few elementary schools offer puberty education, leaving teaching girls about puberty-related body changes and hygiene practices to other sources. When school-based puberty education programs are taught, they often are inconsistently implemented and occur too late to help prepare girls before menarche. Rigorous evaluation of puberty education programs is lacking, but it is needed to improve these programs. To address this need, our team conducted a series of puberty education training workshops designed for and marketed to girls ages 8 to 13 years old and their caregivers. Our goal was to evaluate the implementation of this program for the purposes of quality improvement.

We used a mixed-methods approach using pre- and postevent surveys in four in-person puberty education training sessions to assess the program's effectiveness in improving knowledge, comfort, and preparedness for puberty among adolescent females. We also deductively analyzed open responses provided by program participants and extracted themes and subthemes.

Our results indicated that increases in participants' understanding of puberty and female anatomy, as well as increases in participants' puberty preparedness, comfort with discussing puberty with caregivers, and comfort with puberty-related hygiene practices. We also identified several themes in the open responses, including positive workshop experience, learning/understanding, and communication, as well as training format feedback and discomfort and negative view of training content.

Overall, our mixed-methods results provide support for this implementation of a puberty education program. Future puberty education sessions will incorporate findings such as discomfort and disgust, particularly from the younger girls, as part of continuous quality improvement efforts for puberty education training sessions.