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Dec 6, 2024 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett
For 24 hours every month, I hate my family. Two days later my period arrives. At which point, I am relieved because it means I didn’t actually hate them, it was just my period. This happens EVERY SINGLE MONTH. I have been menstruating for 35 years. You’d think I’d get the hang of this period thing by now. But apparently, when it comes to my own body, I can still be caught off guard by something that happens every 28 days. Why does this monthly psychodrama frustrate me?
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett |Cara Natterson
There’s a nearly universal — and always mind-boggling — reaction when we tell people we spend our life podcasting, writing, and educating about puberty: they automatically assume we talk exclusively about girls. As if men magically spring from the earth fully grown.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett
“Mima, how do you say f*ck in Yiddish?” my 13-year-old cheekily asks my mom (his grandma) over bowls of tomato soup. My mom immediately picks up the mantle of this question with great seriousness and begins to think out loud about which word for f*ck might fit the bill. One might wonder why such deliberation was necessary. Still, Yiddish is a language that has many words for one thing, each with its own nuance — the situation, the intonation, the level of humor.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
washingtonpost.com | Cara Natterson |Vanessa Bennett
Puberty begins earlier than most people realize, a fact both nerve-rattling and not particularly new. Data published between 2010-2012 revealed the average age girls show the first signs of puberty is between 8 and 9 years old and for boys between 9 and 10, which means that we’ve collectively spent the last decade overlooking the new normal.
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Oct 31, 2023 | 
libraryjournal.com | Cara Natterson |Vanessa Bennett
Pediatrician Natterson (
The Care and Keeping of You) and Bennett, cohosts of The Puberty Podcast, present a no-holds-barred guide to the aptly named awkward years. Their book covers everything from mental health and eating disorders to pornography and sexually transmitted infections. Studies show the puberty process often starts two years earlier than older generations experienced, and the authors explore why that is and offer science-backed conclusions.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
romper.com | Vanessa Bennett |Cara Natterson
It’s no surprise that boobs have become a lightning rod for parental concerns, especially with how early they appear these days. (Two generations ago, the average age for a genetic female to start budding breasts was 11; now it’s somewhere around 8 or 9, depending upon race or ethnicity.) Shock sets in when an 8-year-old walks into a room with breast buds poking out of her T-shirt — ultimately inevitable but expected two or three years down the road.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
romper.com | Vanessa Bennett |Cara Natterson
Our culture has created an unfair mythology around tween and teen boys: a kind of comic shorthand for them as hormone-crazed, acne-ridden maniacs sporting raging erections, furiously masturbating at every given opportunity. And yes, there is some truth to this caricature, which we explore in excruciating detail throughout our book, This Is So Awkward.
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Oct 5, 2023 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett |Cara Natterson
If I talk about sex, won’t it encourage my kid to make risky decisions? This is one of the most common questions we get from folks who worry that by bringing up sex for the purposes of education, they will be hastening their kids’ path towards it. While we understand the concern, we are here to say that a robust body of research tells us that teaching kids about their bodies and about sex and a million other complex topics in puberty and adolescence actually keeps them safer.
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Sep 15, 2023 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett
Growing up, my house was where everyone in the neighborhood learned their first swear words from my little brother, who conducted a profanity class from his highchair at age two. It was also where our friends saw their first R-rated movies and, incidentally, tried bagels for the first time.
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Aug 17, 2023 | 
scarymommy.com | Vanessa Bennett
For kids, summer is a break from their typical routine and environment — and that makes it a chance to try on a new version of themselves while encountering new people, new music, new hairstyles, new sports, new clothing. I love watching the tiny kids in my town march off to camp in brightly colored, too-large camp T-shirts. Or teens at the local ice cream shop awkwardly bumping into each other, making silly jokes. I remember those days well.
