Dr. Cara Natterson is a pediatrician, New York Times bestselling author, podcaster, and founder of Less Awkward, the first company aimed at making puberty less cringey and more comfortable with both product and content. Her body books for kids, "The Care and Keeping of You" series, are read by millions.
570: Decoding Boys [What Boys Need Series #2]
Dr. Cara Natterson
Dr. Cara Natterson, pediatrician, bestselling author, and founder of Less Awkward, joins Hunter Clarke-Fields to discuss how parents can guide boys through puberty with confidence, compassion, and clarity.
They explore how to maintain connection when boys start to withdraw, talk openly about body changes, consent, and online influences, and recognize early signs of emotional struggle. Dr. Natterson shares practical strategies for replacing awkwardness with understanding and fostering safe, supportive conversations that help boys thrive during these transformative years.
Ep 570- Natterson
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
Hunter (00:00)
You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast episode #570. Today is the first in the “What Boys Need” series. We're talking about decoding boys with Dr. Cara Natterson.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training. I'm the author of the international bestseller, “Raising Good Humans”, “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
Hey, welcome back to the podcast. So glad you're here. This is the first of the “What Boys Need” series. So if you are a parent of boys or know some parents of boys, maybe you wanna get this episode to them, because there's so much here and we have two other episodes in this series that are really gonna just help you raise your boys with thoughtfulness and care. And today I'm going to be talking to Dr. Cara Natterson- pediatrician, New York Times bestselling author, podcaster, and founder of Less Awkward, the first company aimed at making puberty less cringy and more comfortable with both product and content. And she is the author of the Body Books for Kids, “The Care and Keeping of YOU” series. And we are going to talk about boys, and puberty, and before puberty, and all those awkward times, and how to maintain your connection when boys start to withdraw. How to talk about emotional struggle, how to talk about some of that body stuff, and just how to have those safe, supportive conversations that will help your boy thrive during these transformative years.
So join me at the table as I talk to Dr. Cara Natterson.
Well, thank you for coming on the Mindful Mama podcast. I'm so glad you're here.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.
Hunter:
Okay, so you've been on the podcast before. We talked in 2024 about modern puberty. And today we're gonna talk about, more about puberty, oh, fun, but this time about boys, right? So you've spent a lot of time focusing on helping parents and kids navigate puberty. What made you want to focus on doing this for boys, particularly?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Yeah. Well, I think it dates back to when I was with American Girl writing all of the various body books in the “Care and Keeping of YOU” series. And really, from minute one at American Girl, I was pitching a boy book, which you can imagine did not go over super well at a company called American Girl. But they ultimately ended up doing it. We wrote a book called “Guy Stuff”, which was the boys version of “The Caring Keeping of YOU”, and then a book called “Guy Stuff Feelings”, which as advertised was about how to articulate how you feel and how to identify how you feel. And then it became clear to me that if boys got this content, maybe their parents and trusted adults deserved this content too. And so that's why I decided to write a book more in the parenting sphere than in the sort of kids sphere or sort of a narrower lane. Hunter, I love that we work in the space of parenting, and yet I reject the title parenting because I think it's not on us to tell other people how to do it. But that's the shelf that decoding boys lives on is the parenting shelf. Well, I feel like I don't have a boy, but I feel like if I had a boy and I was coming on like puberty and explaining all these things, I would feel like, give me a book because I don't know what the heck to do. I don't know what to say. I'm not sure my husband would know what to say or do. You know, I don't know.
Hunter (04:45)
You focus on making it less awkward. I guess you have that practice as a physician, making it less awkward. Where do you start with this? It seems so awkward. It is. Here's the thing about the gendering of all this. It's very much a false divide. We've decided as a society that girl puberty looks one way and boy puberty looks another. And the truth is it's looks different for every kid and it doesn't really matter what their genders are. It matters how the mix of the hormones that are shifting and changing in their bodies interact with the neurons in their brain to shape their behavior and their interactions with other people. Right?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
So those sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone, that's what changes the body and makes the body more physically mature, but it also, they impact the brain. And depending upon how your brain reacts to certain amounts of either estrogen or testosterone or a host of other hormones, that will determine your experience through puberty, your social experience, your emotional experience. So I think we, we've gotten really good as a culture at identifying things that are sort of girl puberty related, particularly outward moodiness, which is fair. The typical average girl will express emotions in a much more obvious way, in sort of the peak years of puberty. For boys, the average experience, a very common experience, but doesn't mean that everyone has this experience, but a very common experience is going quiet. So boys will often retreat. They will retreat into their room. They will retreat behind headphones. They will shut the door on their parents. They will sit at the dinner table silently in a way that they did not before.
Hunter:
And that adds a different type of awkwardness because it's not just that you have to cover certain topics that you, the adult, might not be super comfortable with, but you're covering these topics with a human who is really not engaging with you in any kind of deep and meaningful way. That often feels different, but there are girls who experience puberty in that way, and there are boys who do not. So I'm always cautious to not completely gender it. I've thought as I've talked about puberty with kids, about these people, thought about it with myself and thinking how like I completely hid it from my parents. I didn't want them to know. It was like, my God, I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to do any of that. I don't know. Maybe it's just growing up in the 80s. You know what? I think when I flash back to my own self, I felt the same way. And now I laugh out loud thinking that I could hide it. Right? I mean, you know, let's start with breast buds. They poke out of everything. There's no way to hide them, right? And also, the mood swings of puberty and adolescence, while we all think we're really great actors and we're keeping them to ourselves, our parents look at us and recognize us as transformed. They know there's something going on for us. So the difference between then and now, I think, is then it was awkward and no one talked about it. And now it's awkward and we're trying to figure out how to be in conversation. I was petrified of- I heard about a friend of mine whose mom and like grandmother threw her a party and I was like, “well, don't let that happen!” But I imagine that parents of boys are not throwing them a party when they come home with the first like what, I don't know, like, you know, stain sheets, like that's like, that's probably not happening.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
It's probably not. In fact, they are all ignoring the situation, Hunter. They are- literally. I did a social media post recently where I literally spent 60 seconds teaching people how to clean their sheets because no one talks about it, right? When does that start happening for boys?
Hunter:
I don't even know.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
It starts happening any time after the onset of puberty. So the average boy is starting puberty between nine and ten, and then wet dreams begin. You know, I mean, it's not in the first five minutes of puberty, but shortly thereafter, you can see kids having wet dreams as young as 10, 11, 12. Some kids never have them by the way. And that's totally normal, but it's also very normal to have them sometimes. And it's also very normal to have them all the time. Okay. All right. Well, let's dive into this awkwardness. So the sons are starting to pull away emotionally, they're starting to be quiet, they're starting to withdraw.
Hunter:
From your experience, what's really going on here and how can we stay connected without being too pushy or pushing too hard?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
You go right there to the big question because that's the dance, right? That's the thing that everyone's trying to figure out. How do I sort of get in? How do I get through the crack in the door and then have this deep and meaningful connection and conversation without annoying my kid, without frustrating my kid, without shutting my kid down more. And it's going to be different for every pair of adult and child, every dyad, every combination of a kid and an adult. And the reason I say it that way is, yes, this is about parenting, but this is also about you might be the trusted adult for someone. You might be the aunt, the uncle, the coach, the mentor, the healthcare provider, the educator, right? You might be the person a kid goes to. And then suddenly that relationship shifts too. So the classic shift is in parenting, but it really happens in a lot of different trusted adult to kid relationships. that sort of navigating that a little and trying to figure out how do you get in there. It's really tricky. I would say the best piece of advice I have is to try lots of different ways and acknowledge to yourself that they won't all work and that's okay. And try again a different way because it is the trying from lots of different perspectives that will demonstrate to the kid in your life that you care. If you try to talk about porn or wet dreams or hygiene and using soap in the shower, it could be anything, right? And your kid will not engage, will not engage, will not engage. And you just keep going at it. You try asking an open-ended question. You try asking a yes-no question. You try bringing it up in the car, you try bringing it up at the dinner table. If you go at it as many different ways as you can think of, something will resonate. And probably the thing that'll resonate the most is, they're really being persistent about this topic. This feels like it means something to them. I guess I should engage them in this conversation.
Hunter (12:46)
Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
Okay. All right. So I'm kind of hearing that we want to try a lot of different ways. We want to be very persistent. This, this really requires a big dose of courage on parents’ parts. Is there sort of a ratio, you know, when I think about teens in general, like we're talking about, when we're talking about development, we're, you know, we want to talk to boys about their development, right? We want to talk to boys about puberty and things like that, but also teens in general, are kind of pulling away. They're separating. They're focusing more on their peers. So in general, pre-adolescents, I always think of this idea that we should kind of think about. I tell people to like date your kids, to take them out and do like some fun things. You know, they're not like little kids anymore who are going to just come to you and want your attention. You have to kind of- like you nurture the relationship with your spouse and go on date nights, you kind of have to do the same with your kid, right? Like, “Whoa, do you want to play this? Do you want to play video games together? Or do you want to go out for some near Philly? So water ice, right? Like, what do you want to do?”
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Right. So when we're approaching these awkward development conversations, it's like a ratio. Like, should there be, you know, like, you know, talk about five positive deposits before we have a withdrawal in the bank account? Is there some ratio we can go for like that? That is a great, first of all, I love the whole analogy and it's a great question. And unfortunately, as unpredictable as puberty itself is, it shows up when it wants to show up, it happens in whatever order it wants to happen in, it takes as long as it wants to take. That's kind of the same as this sort of rule of ratios and connection. there isn't one set, you know, with toddlers, when I wear my pediatrician hat, it's like, give them a food 10 times before they'll like it. There's no, like, you might say the same thing once to a kid and they're like, great idea, mom. And you might have to say it 10 times and they're just not biting. You know, you just, there is no magic number, but what there is the marathon, the long game of it all? And I think that's what is different about raising kids through the tween and teen years and raising kids in their younger years. This is these conversations that you are embarking on are not one-off conversations. You're going to have them dozens and dozens of times. And they're not always necessarily about today or tomorrow. A lot of them are about bigger life choices that you hope they're gonna make down the road, right? Decisions about substances they might put in their body or decisions about connections with other people and whether it's sexual or romantic or friendship. These are really big topics. And so sometimes you have to sort of slowly build your case for the thing that you're trying to convince your kid of.
And that might take- I don't know, Hunter, it could take 20 conversations. It could take 50 conversations. It could take something that you don't even consider a conversation, like just a comment that you happen to drop. And that counts in their mind as a conversation, but to you, it's just a little thing that you dropped. And then sometimes it takes, you know, a long three hour, heart to heart, really rough, you know, those conversations.I wish I could give you a number. It would be really easy then. It would be more predictable, but no. Okay. But maybe sprinkle in some like some Minecraft and whatever sports conversations along the way to now I'm thinking about you're saying all these conversations. If we have like, if the listener has like a seven year old, might be a good idea to kind of lay the groundwork of like, hey, know, it, you know, see that kid over there, there are maybe nine or 10 or 11 in a few years, bodies go undergo changes, yours will too, that kind of thing. Are you, are we starting the developmental stuff like ahead of time so they know what to expect a little?
You know, it's a really fair question. The version of it I usually get is “When is it too late to have not talked about sex? Like, past what point have I messed up, right?” That's the other side of this coin that you're asking about. I think when the seven-year-old, they see the world while they're starting to incorporate the views of other people and they're starting to develop empathy and understanding in a very profound kind of way. I still think it's a lot to ask them to look at a nine-year-old whose body is changing and to say to them, one day and not too far away, that's going to be you. That's a lot for them to take in, especially for seven-year-olds who very much want to be kids. I mean, we know a lot of nine-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 13-year-olds who still want to be kids. And they will say to their parents, “I don't like what's happening to my body because I just want to be a little kid”. So when we tell a seven year old without them asking, “Hey, that's going to happen to you”. And we're excited about it in their minds- maybe it's an exciting thing for them, or maybe it's like, “Wait a second. I don't need any of that. I just want to play tag”.
So I would do this with a seven year old: I would absolutely answer any question they ask. If they say, “that happens to my body?” answer that question. If you're not sure what question they're asking, ask for clarification. “That's such an interesting question. What do you mean by that? Tell me what you're asking”. “I see that they have hairier arms than I have. Will that happen to me?” Okay, that's the question. Or, “They're a lot taller than I am. When am I gonna grow?” So you can always ask for some clarification. But if they're not asking, then you can prompt them with a question. And it can sound something like this. “Hey, I'm here to answer any questions you have. And if I don't know the answer, I will look it up or ask someone who we trust to give us the answer. So if you ever want to know about, say, how your body might start to change in the next few years as you start to grow up, just ask me.”
Hunter (21:54.286)
I love that. That's great. It's a very skillful way of putting it. Okay, let's fast forward. They're nine, they're going on ten. You're starting to see some signs. They're smelling a little. What are some ways to open up maybe some of these initial conversations about puberty?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Yeah, so when they are starting to have some physical signs of puberty and they're not asking about it, which is really the most common scenario. It is on you to start bringing it up. And it is on you because they will learn from feedback from their peers that they smell, that they haven't brushed their teeth and everyone knows, that their body is changing or their looks are shifting. Kids are very blunt with one another: sometimes feeling unkind in its delivery, sometimes not meant to be unkind in its delivery, just blunt and it is what it is. But I think, while I don't believe in paving the way for your kids and in saving them from everything that's coming at them, because I think that is an important rite of passage for kids to kind of go through life with lots of love and lots of guardrails, but they've got to go through life.
On the other hand, I think it's completely fair for you to say to them, “Hey, I'm noticing that your body smells different than it used to. And I'm happy to explain why, but I also want you to know I notice because if I notice, then probably other people are noticing. And there's something you can do about it. And if you don't want anyone to say anything to you about it, I can walk you through what to do. And that's a way of saying like, I'm not gonna save you from everything. I'm not going to helicopter and hover and snowplow and all the things, but I am gonna be honest with you and I'm always gonna tell you what I see or what I hear. And then sometimes I'll tell you what you have to do. And in this case, I'm gonna tell you what you could do to solve it. And there are, know, even when it comes to bodies, there are must do's and may do's, right? So the must-dos are the things that are preventive health measures. You must brush your teeth. If you don't brush your teeth, you're going to get cavities. If you get cavities, now we're at the dentist, you're getting your teeth drilled, all the things, it's really bad for your gum health, it's bad for your future health. This is a must-do. This is not negotiable. But the may do, the may do looks a little bit different. Hey, you know, when you take a bath or a shower, the only way it works is with soap. So I can't make you use soap, but I'm gonna tell you, if you don't, you will still smell. That's just the fact.”
Hunter:
Okay, so that's a great way to address the smell. not being overly, overly harsh. We're not being overly kind. We're just being pretty direct and offering some options. What are some of the top issues of puberty that parents of boys should make sure they are talking to their boys about?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
So first of all, boys deserve all the same information that girls get. So they should know about their anatomy. They should have the proper names of their body parts, internal and external. By the way, parents, if you don't know this information, amazingly, there are lots of books written for eight, ten, twelve year old boys that you can read and educate yourself. They were not around when you were younger, but feel free. It is really an easy way to get the information yourself. So you can do that. you have any quick recommendations on that? Cause I loved from my kids are little who has what and I can't remember some other titles now, but yeah, on my website, less awkward.com, have resources we love. That's in the footer on every page and we have a long list of books, websites, videos, all these wonderful resources. And there are a bunch of them on there. We also have a curriculum, a course for parents. And the course is really meant to catch parents up on those lessons that they may have never had when they were growing up. So we have male anatomy and female anatomy. And it's the same curriculum we teach kids in schools. We just make it accessible for the parents because if an eight, nine, ten year old is learning this in school and we don't know this, this isn't like, I can't help you with your math homework anymore because you've lapped me and I don't remember this math. You won't get that pass on this content, right? So boys deserve to know about anatomy. They deserve to know about hormones, what hormones are, what hormones do in their body and their brains. They deserve to know about emotions and the breadth of emotions and they need help naming emotions. This is all the same information that we give girls very readily. They deserve to know about periods. They may never get a period, but they can absolutely be that person who shows up for someone who has their period and needs someone else in the room to have their back, right? So they should learn about periods and period products.
Boys deserve to know about all of the sort of healthy and unhealthy relationship spectrum issues, what makes a good friendship, what makes a toxic relationship, right? They deserve to know about consent in all of its form, not just sexual consent, but consent that begins, you know, in preschool with sharing, sharing space, sharing food, right? So the list is pretty long. Some of it's physical, some of it's social emotional, and all of it will sound familiar.
Hunter:
Most people will be like, “Well, I never really thought of that as health education- what my kid needs to know- because they've been getting a lot of it along the way, especially from school”. But yeah, they need those conversations. Along with this goes all of those sex conversations too: I definitely learned that from Amy Lang- I want my kids to learn these things from me and not the internet, you know? So I have had conversations about like, what is a blowjob? Which is not the funnest conversation to have with your 12 or 13 year old daughter. I mean, right? But one of the tips that was so helpful was like, just, “You know, we're going to have this conversation. It's going to be awkward and this can be over in just a few minutes, but I do need you to have this information”. Is that something you recommend?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
So first of all, I love the shout out to Amy Lang, who is a wonderful educator on all of these topics around, especially sexual health. But yes, I mean, the, if you have got to get a piece of information across, it is a great strategy to say to your kid, “I am literally going to be in this conversation for whatever, two minutes. When the timer goes off, I will stop talking and it's over. You can ask me any questions you want always, but this is so important that even though I know you don't want to hear it, I am going to just dump it on you”. And you can even go a step further and narrate how you feel: “I'm so nervous. My hands are sweating. My heart is racing. I feel like I'm going to throw up. I don't want to have this conversation with you either because it feels so awkward, but I'm going to have it because it's that important.”
Hunter (30:25.39)
Stay tuned for more mindful mama podcast right after this break.
These boys want strategies. What do you do when it's your time to stand up in front of the class and present and suddenly there's a spontaneous erection? And they have some great strategies, really great strategies. What do they do? I would never know what to say to a child that has made up.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
There are some great ways through. We get a lot of advice from tweens and teens. We also talk to a lot of adult men who say, “o one ever talked to me about this, but I wish they had. This is what I would have recommended”. The strategies sound everything from everything like, “I tie a sweatshirt around my waist and just sort of cover with the way the arms are tied in front” to “put my hands in my pocket and pull my pants away from my body”. There is- you can't do this while you're in class- but there is the strategy that a lot of boys tell us about called “the 12 o'clock rule” where you tuck the penis into the waistband of the underpants at 12 o'clock. That's a pretty easy strategy, right? And then when my partner Vanessa first launched our podcast and we were with our then-brand new producer in the studio, and we are recording an episode about erections and wet dreams, he pipes in- he's like, 25, 26 years old- and he literally says, “can I chime in? We say, “absolutely”. And he said, “if your kid does not want to get out of the car when you're dropping them off at school, just give them a minute.” And he said, “yeah, it's not that they don't want to go in, it's that they need a minute. That spontaneous erection just showed up at the wrong time. Give them a minute”.
Hunter:
Wow. I'm glad we can spread his advice a little further here. That's really great.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
I know. It's so sweet.
Hunter:
Okay, so we wanna discuss all those things. We need to get ourselves educated. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But you also talk about how boys’ emotional lives are really underestimated. What are some of the signs that a boy is struggling, especially if he's kind of withdrawn sort of anyway, and how can parents respond well to that?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Yeah, I think this is probably the most important question to be asking in the realm of mental health, because it's very hard when a boy becomes monosyllabic, very quiet, shuts his door. All the things that you hear are typical of boys in the throes of puberty. It's very hard then to understand, what does something like depression look like? Doesn't that look very similar? And the answer is it can, but here are the things you're looking for. So first of all, you're looking for connection with other people. There was an amazing study that was published about a month ago that showed using functional MRI scans and PET scans what we have known for a very long time, which is around age 12, maternal voice, the mom's voice, no longer registers in the brain in the same way. It is replaced by peer voice. Literally, friends light up the part of the brain that moms used to. So if you feel like you're being ignored, you are. It is neurobiology, and it is part of what you were describing earlier, which is this very important individuation that's going to happen over the next several years. Kids need to seek independence. They do so all these different ways by having heightened reward, sensitivity, all sorts of things that make them push away from their home base. And they hear their friends differently than they hear us starting around age twelve. It's amazing. It's like a flip happens to a switch in the brain. So now given that, what does that have to do with figuring out their status of their mental health? If your kid is laughing and bonding and engaging with other kids. And the silence is directed at you. But in life outside of that dynamic, everything is going pretty well. You can be pretty confident that there is not a mental health component to what's going on, that this is part of normal puberty.
I say this with a gigantic asterisk because you gotta go with your gut. And if your gut is, think my kid is faking it outside the house because there is so much personality shift and mood shift happening in the house, I'm worried, go get someone to assess them. Never stop yourself from having a mental health professional step in and share their opinion about what's going on- has to be someone who's trained. It can be a pediatrician, a family practice doctor, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a school counselor. There are lots of people who are credentialed and trained to do this. But for the most part, if you see powerful, positive friendships, even if your kid is pulling away from you, that's usually a really reassuring sign. And then there are people who say, how many friendships do they need? And the answer is one. They need one close friendship in order to fill that bucket. There's a lot of data on this. Lisa DeMore speaks a lot about this. She speaks about it beautifully. And so that's that. The other things you're looking for are sort of classic signs of mental health issues. So if sleep patterns are disrupted, if eating patterns are disrupted, then you want to start to worry.
Sleep patterns are always disrupted in the teen years, right? Because kids start staying up later and they start staying up later because their melatonin, the hormone that tells them to go to sleep, doesn't get pushed out into the body until later in the night. So it can be hard to tell, is my kid having sleep disruption because they're becoming a teenager or is my kid having sleep disruption because they have a mental health issue? Likewise, if they're staying up later, they don't really want to get out of bed so early in the morning. One sign of depression is not wanting to get out of bed and not wanting to take on the day. Well, if you fell asleep at midnight and it's 6 a.m. and your parent is trying to get you out of bed, it may look like you don't want to take on the day. these, some of these sort of normal or typical signs of puberty and adolescence can also be flags for mental health issues. And you have to kind of put the whole picture together. Do I recognize this kid? Is there something in my gut that makes me worry about this kid? Is there more than one thing shifting? And if you have any doubt, reach out to someone who can help you assess the situation. Okay, so reaching out and if the parents are seeing some of those signs, are there any ways like how would you suggest they talk about it maybe with that kid?
Hunter:
Yeah, I mean, it's a great first step. Just, “I'm concerned about you. I’m a little concerned. You know, our relationship has really shifted. I'm noticing that we barely make it through a dinner without you getting really frustrated with me. I'm noticing that it's harder to wake you up in the morning and I'm putting all these things together and I'm wondering, is there something going on that you want to talk about? Because these are things that I think I need to be a little concerned about.”
Dr. Cara Natterson:
One of three things will happen. They'll either say, “Yes, you're right to be concerned, and here are all the things that went wrong this week and this is why I'm in such a bad mood”. Or they'll say, “No, you don't need to be concerned. I mean, I get frustrated because I'm tired at the end of a long day and you're there at the dinner table asking me 25 questions and I just want space”. Then you can talk about what Elisa Pressman says, which is “All feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not”. You can go down that road. Or the third bucket, the most likely, which is they don't really say anything, right? They don't acknowledge, they don't answer, but they register it. They do register it. And if you circle back and then you circle back again, they will, maybe not on the first prompt, But at some point, they will say either, “I'm worried too”, or “Really, I promise there's nothing going on”. And if they can't get to that answer, that's where you get help.
Hunter:
Okay. I think this is a good game plan for any parents who are worried. So kind of just wrapping this up, thinking about how parents are learning, parents are talking to kids, they're teaching their kids. We know that there's a lot of misinformation online. Now we know that with AI, like, my God, I feel like it's definitely gonna ruin the internet. It's ruined videos for me. But anyway, how do you recommend parents explore, letting parents explore online while also having the parent as a grounded source of truth?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
I mean, there so many questions within that question, right? So there's a kid who explores online, meaning they're looking for answers to questions that they have. There are kids who explore online, meaning they're just scrolling through an app and whatever's coming to them is coming to them that they might not even be actively looking for. There are kids who are exploring online with some parental controls in place so that certain content is blocked. There are kids who are exploring online without those controls in place. you know, everything is fair game. And because the tween and teen brain, the teen brain especially, is so reward seeking, it really feels things bigger than at any other point in life. And the reward, the dopamine hit is stronger and is more powerful than any other time in life, what they see becomes, I don't want to say more addictive, because I think that's sort of a charged term, but it becomes stickier. So if they see an ad for supplements, and then that's followed by a ton of content about how buff you can be, and they're feeling confused about how they look in this brand new body that keeps changing on them, but they would like it to look like all of these pictures of all these people, they become a little more susceptible.
Gambling begins. A gambling date is incredible in the tween and teen years, and I don't mean that in a good way. Gambling is really problematic for some teenagers, and they love the way it feels in their brain to gamble and win. Who doesn't? But that reward feels even bigger in the teenage brain. Or they stumble across pornography. Pornography is everywhere. The data is really phenomenal about pornography. The average age of first exposure is twelve. At this point, it's almost a guarantee that by the time they graduate from high school, they've been exposed, but it's usually much younger than that. It's usually by about fourteen or fifteen. We used to say boys are first. I don't think that's true anymore. So, you know, how do you handle all of that? Oh, and then we haven't even gotten to news. News is its own complicated thing, right? So, you know, the way through keeps changing. And it keeps changing because the technology keeps changing. But there's one thing that has not changed in 20 years, one thing that has not changed, which is the advice to be in conversation with your kid. And that looks different in different homes, but in my home, what it looked like after having read every single one of these studies and talked to so many experts in my home, what it looked like was, “Hey, we're going to sit down and look at your phone together. That's it. I’m curious, I want to understand what the algorithm is serving you. Let's talk about it. By the way, you're not in any trouble”. It like no judgment, no shaming. don't care what I find. And what it does is it allows conversation. Sometimes you'll see things that there's no way they could tell you they were exposed to, but now you know and they're kind of relieved, you know?
I do believe in parental controls for younger kids. I mean, when Pinterest is, a major source of pornography- Google Maps, by the way, big source of porn. Crazy. On the top 10 list. Yeah. So, like, you got to put the parental controls on for certain age, but there's a point at which, especially towards the end of middle school, beginning of high school, where your kids will say, “these controls make doing my work, navigating the research I need to do for school, impossible”. So that's gonna be an individual decision. How much access to technology you give your kid is an individual decision. What type of access is it on a laptop? Is it on a gaming console? Is it on a desktop? Is it on a phone? I think we've been really good at identifying the problems with phones, but we have fully ignored the fact that almost all of these apps are also completely available on every other device. So, you know, when we focus so much on phones, we lose sight of the bigger picture, which is like, “hey, you can't unsee the thing you saw, so let's talk about it”. So it's a lot: it's a very big question that has a very dissatisfying answer. But I think it boils down to staying in communication with your kid. And for those who feel really overwhelmed by it, then less is more. Then just pull back on the devices until you feel like, you wouldn't give your kid the keys to the car and just let them drive. So until you feel like you can wrap your head around how you're going to engage with your child about how they're using these different devices, hold back. But then as you're ready, you're gonna have to shift and change your approach as a parent many times over many years. But don't hand it to them and just say, “Well, I guess you have it now. So I'm out. Call me if you need me”. Because that's not going to help.
Hunter:
Yeah. It's funny. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but that is what happens for a lot of us. Beause it's like, “Okay, we've done it. We've given them the thing”. So finally, for the parent who's listening, we're hearing this message, dear listener: have the conversation, have another conversation, and another, and keep talking and having these conversations in all the different ways- in the car, and the at the table, wherever you are, right? So maybe if you’re feeling nervous, maybe even a little panicked about having some of these conversations, what's one small compassionate first step they can take today to open the door?
Dr. Cara Natterson:
I would say- separate from your kid- the first thing you can do is just sort of look at yourself in the mirror and acknowledge if someone had asked me one question when I was younger that would have felt game changing. What would that question be? If a parent or a trusted adult had asked me about X and that thing would have changed the way I felt about fill-in the-blank, what would that thing be? And maybe that's where you start with the kid in your life, right? Because while I always tell people to leave their own baggage at the door, this is not your puberty, this is not your adolescence, it's theirs. On the other hand, we bring a lot of our own luggage along, right? We bring our own experiences. We bring our own worries because of how things made us feel. And so maybe the first step is by answering the thing that would have helped you. And you can frame it that way. “Hey, I don't know where to start, but I'm gonna start with the thing that I kind of wish someone had asked me”. And then you can laugh about it and go, “is this completely useless to you?” At which point your kid will probably say yes, but then they might tell you the thing that would be useful for them.
Hunter:
Okay, all right, I love that. So dive in, have these conversations, be real, be vulnerable, I'm hearing all of those lessons. I love that. Dr. Cara Natterson’s book is “Decoding Boys: New Science Between the Subtle Art of Raising Sons”. And she's part of our Boys Series here at the Mindful Mama Podcast. You can get this book anywhere books are sold. I recommend you go out and get it. Kara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all your wisdom with us. I think it's really helpful and you opened up a bunch of doors for people today. So thank you.
Dr. Cara Natterson:
Thank you so much. Well, thank you, Hunter. You do wonderful things. You put wonderful work out into the world. Thank you for having me.
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