This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The ultimate guide for adults helping tweens and teens navigate the rollercoaster of puberty.

“An accessible, enjoyable, and detailed road map for addressing even the most delicate topics with confidence and compassion.”—Lisa Damour, PhD, author of Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers

Almost everything about puberty has changed since today’s adults went through it. It starts, on average, two years earlier and stretches through high school . . . and for some, beyond. Gens Z and Alpha are also contending with a whole host of thorny issues that parents didn’t experience in their own youth but nonetheless need to understand: everything from social media and easy-access pornography to gender identities and new or newly-potent drugs. Talking about any of this is like puberty itself: Awkward! But it’s also critical for the health, happiness, and safety of today’s kids.

Bewildered adults have begged for reliable and relatable information about the modern adolescent experience. This Is So Awkward answers their call. Written by a pediatrician and a puberty educator—together the hosts of a lively and popular podcast on puberty, and moms to six teens between them—this is the handbook everyone has been searching for, and includes:

• Pointed advice about how to talk to kids about almost anything: acne, body odor, growth spurts, eating disorders, mood swings, sexuality, and more.
• Science-based explanations for all of puberty’s physical, emotional, and social changes, including the many ways hormones affect kids both above and below the neck.
• What adults needs to know about today’s teen culture: their mental health drivers, the un-gendering of body image issues, the ways they think about sexual orientation, and more. 
• Invaluable commentary straight from young adults just out the other side of adolescence that highlights what they wish the adults in their lives had known or done differently.

Eye-opening and reassuring, This Is So Awkward will help adults understand the turbulent pubescent decade and become confident guides for today’s kids.

Dr. Cara Natterson is a pediatrician, speaker, educator, and leading voice in tween and teen health. She graduated from Harvard college and Johns Hopkins Medical School and trained in pediatrics at UCSF. Cara launched her career at Tenth Street Pediatrics in Santa Monica. She traded patient care for writing, and has authored 10 books including the New York Times bestselling The Care and Keeping of You series with American Girl. In 2020, Cara founded the first company aimed at making the tween and teen years more comfortable, starting with physical products. Over the next five years, she partnered with Vanessa Kroll Bennett to create content channels across social media, a podcast called This Is So Awkward (which has 2.5M downloads to date), a growing library of books, and most recently a digital, school-based K-12 health and wellness curriculum that’s not even two years old but already used by schools in seven states and internationally. It’s all in service to her mission—which is, conveniently, also the name of her company: Less Awkward.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett is the founder of Dynamo Girl, a company focused on building kids’ self-esteem through sports, puberty education, and parent workshops. She runs all media at Order of Magnitude, a company dedicated to flipping puberty positive. She co-hosts The Puberty Podcast (with Cara Natterson, MD), hosts Conversations on Parenting and Beyond at the JCC Manhattan, and writes the Uncertain Parenting Newsletter about the messy process of raising tweens and teens. A graduate of Wellesley College, Vanessa holds an MA from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She lives in Northern Westchester with her husband and four teens.