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Puberty is what happens in children's bodies that changes them into adults. Puberty, depending on sexes, usually takes about four or five years maximum. However, when most people say "going through puberty", they usually just mean approximately the first two years. After that, people sometimes use the word adolescence, although that is a not a very precise word. As girls and boys go through puberty, they become able to have sexual intercourse (sex) and produce children of their own. A girl can become pregnant and have a baby. During puberty, a boy's body begins making semen, and he starts to be able to ejaculate, which is semen shooting out from his penis when he is sexually excited. If he has sex with a girl, meaning he puts his penis into her vagina and ejaculates in her, he can make her pregnant.
There are also changes that happen in the brain. Boys and girls may think about sex more. While children of any age explore, touch and play with their sex organs from time to time, all boys and most girls going through puberty do this a lot. This is called masturbation and is a totally normal and healthy thing to do. Boys and girls going through puberty may question their sexual orientation, meaning they find they are more attracted to the people of the opposite sex, or to people of their own sex, or to both, or their sexual feelings may be fluid (changing) and complicated, often called being queer. People going through puberty often have strong emotions or feelings about many things. Other changes in the brain may make it harder learn a new language the way they learned language(s) when they were young. This change involves something called brain plasticity. It means that children's brains are more flexible in learning.
Puberty is started by hormones, which are chemicals that tell parts of the body to do things. For reasons which are not completely understood, girls and boys now start puberty when they are younger than it happened to boys and girls in the past. Some girls now start puberty at age 9 or 10 or even earlier. For boys puberty is also happening earlier. A 2012 study[1] found that, on average, African American (Black American) boys begin puberty at age 9 while white and Hispanic boys start at age 10, on average. People around the world start puberty at different ages. The reasons for girls and boys starting puberty earlier might be that they eat healthier food and drink more milk. Other reasons might be chemicals in food, chemicals in plastic containers, chemicals in the air and chemicals in the water. The reasons are not known for sure.
Puberty happening too early is called precocious puberty. This can create problems for the child. Sometimes a young person's body is wrong for what gender they feel they are. They feel there was a mix-up. In both these situations, drugs called puberty blockers can slow down or temporarily stop the process of puberty.
Changes that happen to boys and girls during puberty include the sex organs growing bigger, hair appearing on the body, and growing taller and stronger. These changes are called secondary sex characteristics. People often notice boys' voices getting deeper, and girls growing breasts and starting to menstruate (have periods).
Because puberty is the time in a child's life when he or she becomes able to make children, this is seen as very important. Therefore, people in many countries around the world have different ways of marking this event.