Puberty from every angle
‘This Is So Awkward’ covers hair, periods, porn, mental health, and much more. And it’s fun to read, too
Idon’t say this lightly: The new “This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained” does for teenagers what “Our Bodies, Ourselves” did for women in the 1970s. It’s the definitive coming-of-age guide that we need right now: funny, comprehensive, and even with a cover that pays homage to Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” substituting deodorant for face cream. How could you not love it?
It covers everything from the timeless — how to teach your teenager to change her sheets after a particularly messy period — to the topical, such as how to navigate online porn and gender identity. And it gives equal attention to boys, too.
Dr. Cara Natterson is an author (“The Care and Keeping of You”) and pediatrician. Vanessa Kroll Bennett, a Wellesley graduate, founded Dynamo Girl, which aims to build self-esteem through sports and puberty education. Together, they cohost the very relatable, accessible “Puberty Podcast.” The book is already getting plenty of attention from Drew Barrymore and Oprah, but I got the chance to chat with them, too, right after buying my 13-year-old his first Stridex pads.
It’s never too early to pick up a copy: Puberty starts far younger these days, with complicated consequences. Natterson and Bennett’s goal is to “flip puberty positive,” they say, and this is a good start.
What’s different about being a teenager now?
Bennett:
I don’t think we can have this conversation without talking about technology. There are a million ways in which technology is wonderful — and there are lots of ways in which it makes being a teenager more complicated: sending nudes and sexting, and the increased awareness of inclusion and exclusion on the social front. In terms of the academic world, while technology can make kids’ lives easier, it’s also really complicated because of all the different places they get assignments and have to organize their lives.
Are we handling puberty differently than our own parents’ generation did?
Natterson:
Every single generation does the pendulum thing, where they try to swing and do it differently than their parents. Every talk we give, no matter what the ZIP code, we hear the same line: “No one ever talked to me about this.” What most adults don’t realize is that it’s not a one-and-done conversation.
Bennett: There’s a layer of parenting these days where we’re trying to understand the emotional lives of our kids. We hope that so much of this book conveys that, if you see kids as full human beings, and you treat them like full human beings with all of their fallibility and all of their incredible characteristics, that this journey, while never simple or easy, will at least be more joyful. And we’ll at least recognize the total humanity of these kids.
I think that’s where so much of talking to kids about stuff comes in: “Your hormonal mood swings are not you being purposefully a jerk — it’s you at the mercy of the chemistry of your body. You’re feeling excluded and upset, and that’s why you’re lashing out at me.”
With a dose of empathy, and a dose of recognition, all of a sudden the framing of this whole journey becomes really different. We really believe that kids want to know the science, and deserve to know the science, because it makes this whole process so much less of a mystery.
Why are kids starting puberty earlier?
Natterson:
The short answer is no one knows precisely. It’s probably some combination of what we’re putting into and onto our bodies in the form of chemicals that are endocrine disruptors that are shifting the way the hormones in our bodies work, and chronic stress … sort of a chemical stew, if you will, and the chronic stress creates cortisol shifts in the body.
I wish I could say how to avoid these ingredients, or meditation will save you from early puberty, or whatever. We don’t have a silver bullet because we don’t have one explanation. But there’s an incongruity between how kids look and how old they are.
Bennett: We have to work much harder to treat kids the age they are and not the way they appear to be. When we treat kids who are on the earlier side of puberty as older, it affects their self-esteem. We place expectations on them that are unfair and unrealistic because their brain is still developing on a linear timeline. There are unfair [academic] expectations, and potentially we might be tempted to expose them to content or experiences that are not age-appropriate, because they seem older.
Natterson: We know that girls who go through puberty on the earlier side are at higher risk for a variety of things in terms of earlier sexual activity and substance abuse. It’s not that they’re prone to it; it’s because they appear older. With boys, there are all sorts of impacts on them athletically and socially, which are really complicated. Adults have a lot of work to do that, frankly, is not the child’s responsibility.
We hear a lot about girls having body image issues, but you write about boys with body image problems, too. Where is this coming from? Are they comparing themselves to athletes on social media? Natterson:
What’s amazing about this topic is how wrong we’ve gotten it for so long. Things like social media fuel some of the body image issues among boys, but this has been a longstanding yardstick for guys, in the same way that it’s been a longstanding yardstick for girls and women. We’ve talked about it with respect to girls and women ever since I was in health class in high school.
At the same time that was happening, there was GI Joe who had his six-pack abs, and he was shirtless all the time. But society didn’t talk to boys in the same way. We got the data wrong. We were identifying eating disorders in girls but we weren’t identifying boys. We were looking at girls who were trying to lose weight. And then we’re saying, “Well, let’s look for the boys who are trying to lose weight. Oh, there are none, they must not have eating disorders.” So what we were calling body image issues were already biased through our gender lens.
Where are these drivers? They’re still in magazines, in movies, and on TV, all those old-school outlets, but all across digital as well, and porn. We say in the book that the female body image ideal has evolved over time to encompass different shapes and sizes. I’m not saying we’ve solved the problem; we have not. But there’s more than one ideal, and there is still only one male body ideal. And so the downward pressure on them is actually — I don’t want to make it a competition — but it’s very heavy.
This is a new phenomenon and something that’s so dangerous: sports over-specialization among kids who are still growing and developing. I see it with my 13-yearold: There are parents who think their kids are going to be in the NBA! Where did this come from?
Natterson:
This is the chapter that we really debated taking out of the book. When you think puberty, you don’t think sports specialization. But, because puberty spans a decade, and because hormones have such impact on growing bodies, and overuse injury has such an impact on growing bodies, we couldn’t not talk about it.
Some of the data is astounding. Tommy John surgery, ligamentous elbow repair, used to only be done for Major League Baseball players. Now the most common patient to get it is an older teen. There is so much pressure for expertise and specialization in general among tweens and teens. And, when it comes to physical activity, unfortunately, when that pressure turns into overuse and over-specialization, you can end up knocking someone out of physical activity for months, years, or, frankly, for much of their lifetime.
Bennett: I think the very broken college process in our country does play a significant role in sports specialization, between recruiting and also just trying to get kids into better schools than they could normally without recruiting, and the hopes for scholarships. Colleges have become unaffordable, and this is a pathway for families to be able to afford to send their kids to college.
I also think that there’s so much great data about how sports build kids self-esteem, help kids perform better academically, give them a sense of belonging and purpose. There’s so much upside to sports. We hope kids get to participate in sports in a more balanced way, because it’s so important for their health and their well-being. But … I’m not sure how it will course-correct, unless there’s a big shift also in the college process.
What do you hope people get out of this book?
Natterson:
Talk to the kids in your life. Don’t talk at them. Talk with them, be in conversation, do a really good job of shutting up and listening.
Bennett: Leave your own adolescent baggage at the door. We have all these memories, and all this stuff, we bring into these conversations. Those are powerful, and we don’t discount that. But try your very hardest not to let them dictate and inform the path you choose with kids. Don’t dump your stuff on your kid. Their burden is heavy enough. Don’t add to their burden by putting your baggage on their shoulders, too.