For Black girls, puberty is more than physical—it transforms conversations about identity

When Rona Carter started listening to conversations between Black girls and their mothers, she heard something unexpected: growth happening in the disagreements.

Carter, a University of Michigan associate professor of psychology, spent months studying how mothers and daughters talk during puberty. Her research, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, found that these conversations are far more than check-ins about growing bodies. For Black girls, they become a space where young women make sense of race, gender, identity and the messy work of becoming themselves.

"Mothers and daughters were building these meanings together, with girls taking an increasingly active role as they mature," Carter said.

The study followed 29 mother-daughter pairs, all Black, through conversations about everything from changing bodies to social expectations. What Carter noticed was that mothers weren't just lecturing. Instead, they were scaffolding—helping daughters name their experiences, interpret their emotions, and organize what could feel like an overwhelming rush of new feelings.

Early in puberty, mothers often guided the conversations more directly. But as daughters moved through adolescence, they began asserting their own interpretations. They pushed back. They disagreed. And that, Carter found, wasn't a problem. Those moments of tension turned out to be part of how mothers and daughters negotiated, revised and repaired their understanding of who these girls were becoming.

"Healthy identity development can happen through dialogue, tension and repair," Carter said.

The research challenges a common assumption that puberty is purely biological—that it is only about hormones and physical changes. Instead, Carter's findings point to something more complex: for Black girls, puberty is also a racial and cultural experience, one shaped by messages about gender and identity that girls must learn to navigate.

Carter is careful not to compare groups directly. The study looked only at Black mother-daughter pairs. But it does suggest that how families talk about adolescence matters—not just what they say, but how they listen, how they allow space for disagreement, and how they grow together.

For communities looking to support adolescent mental health, the findings offer a quiet but powerful idea: sometimes the most meaningful conversations happen not despite the friction, but because of it.