Today, Explained - Puberty hits different now

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Kids are going through puberty earlier, and scientists think they have found another reason why. Pediatrician Dr. Cara Natterson and puberty educator Vanessa Kroll Bennett explain why it should also change the way we talk about puberty. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Miles Bryan, engineered by Rob Byers and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Cover art for "This is so Awkward" by Cara Natterson, MD and Vanessa Kroll Bennett. Image published with courtesy of Rodale Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I do remember when my voice started to change. I was listening to a voice recording last night of a voicemail that I had sent to my dad in August 2022. And you could really hear the high-pitched little squeak in my voice. And I was like, was I really like that when I was 12 or 11? Puberty will always be puberty. For better? i think the best part was definitely getting taller i was pretty insecure about my height in seventh grade or worse and the worst part i definitely think was the moodiness yeah that hit hard ahead on today explained kids are going through puberty earlier these days and some new research helps explain why.

And it's okay. The kids are all right. I still have a heck of a lot more of a journey to go through, but I think I'm inching closer day by day to becoming an adult. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What do you think today explained us? I don't know. Prior to the 1990s, data showed that girls on average entered puberty at about 11 years old and boys at about 11 and a half. But in the last 15 years or so, studies have shown the age is dropping for both boys and girls, with some girls starting puberty at six or seven. Vanessa Kroll-Bennett is a podcaster and writer on puberty, and Cara Natterson is a pediatrician.

Together, they wrote the book, This is So Awkward, Modern Puberty Explained. Cara, let's start with you and with this question. What is causing puberty to start earlier than it used to? There are actually four answers. The first answer is no one really knows. But there's a lot of data being collected. And these next three buckets are really probably the reasons why. So bucket number one is stress. So we know that stress causes the body to produce cortisol, the stress hormone,

and cortisol has been shown to be connected with tipping kids into earlier puberty. We can talk about what stress looks like, but it looks like different things in different kids. And it's chronic in most kids these days because they are constantly, constantly on alert, telling their adrenal glands to release cortisol because of the big game coming up or the big test coming up or their food insecurity or the trauma that they just witnessed. It was a random drive-by shooting. Ruth's children weren't physically hurt, but her older daughters, Andrea and Michelle, can't shake the memory. Yeah, I was scared. I was crying. I thought I would die.

There's a lot of stress out there. So that's one bucket. The second bucket is exposure to antibiotics. It might look good, but what's added to beef, pork, and poultry has the attention of the CDC

and hospitals all over the U.S. 80% of the antibiotics used in this country are used in animal agriculture. That's 30 million. This is not a dose of antibiotic for an ear infection. This is the chronic ongoing exposure to antibiotic in our food supply, which has been connected with inflammation in the gut and also looks to be involved with earlier puberty.

But the third bucket, and this is, I think, what you're most curious about given the recent study that just came out, is a group of chemicals called endocrine disrupting chemicals, EDCs. There are a thousand of them. And these chemicals mess with the way that hormones work inside of bodies. And there's one in particular called musk amburette that was just shown to be connected with the onset of puberty. The parents hoping to prevent early puberty need to check cosmetics, fragrances, and household products that their children might use. New research has now revealed a common environmental chemical that is found in a... It's the very first endocrine disruptor that has ever been shown to be physically connected with sort of that first domino in the domino chain that gets a body starting to transform. What is musk ambrite? What is musk ambrite is the most common question we've gotten

for the last several weeks. So musk ambrite is a chemical that is used largely in cosmetic products to help fragrance. As its name implies, it's got kind of a musky quality. It's not in every cosmetic product by any stretch. But ask me which cosmetic products it's in and I'm going to say, I don't know, because there is no requirement that the fragrance ingredients appear on an ingredient list. This is highly annoying to doctors, by the way, but fragrances are protected, so they don't have to be individually listed, which means go to your local drugstore or supermarket and try to find it on the label, and you're going to have very little luck. But musk amarette is in the fragrance, and when we put it into or onto our body, so if you wash your hair with a shampoo that has it

or you slather moisturizer all over your body that has it, the musk ambrite that gets absorbed, it looks like when musk ambrite enters your body and it goes into your brain, it can fit into receptors in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus releases GnRH at the beginning of puberty. GnRH travels over to a different part of the brain called the pituitary gland.

The pituitary gland gets the message from GnRH, uh-huh, it's time to start puberty. And then the pituitary gland releases its hormones, LH and FSH, and that triggers the cycle that will eventually turn into a parent right now. And there is this slight panic happening in my brain, which is, should I stop using scented shampoos? Should I stop using scented soaps? Should I go to a doctor like you and say, figure out what's in it. Tell me what I'm not supposed to give my kid. Like, is this bad news? The truth of the matter is that doctors have been saying, oh, I don't know, forever, that

you should stay away from scented products. And there are a lot of reasons why. They irritate the skin. People have eczema, get worse eczema. So for all of us listening, this is a very relevant question. And the advice is always going to be go fragrance-free. Now, when you layer on kids, it's like everything else in the world, right? Like kids shouldn't be on their screens all the time. Neither should we. Kids shouldn't sleep with their phones in their room. Neither should we.

Kids shouldn't use fragrance products. Neither should we, right? If we need a reason to get fragranced products out of the bathroom for kids in our lives, great. You can use this as a reason, but I just think it's pretty harmless to also get them out of our own bathrooms. Vanessa, I have never heard anyone talk about early puberty as if it is a good thing. Is hitting puberty earlier inherently a bad thing? So we don't want to demonize it because there are tens of millions of children in this country who have or will be entering puberty earlier than generations past. And so whatever it is currently, we want to approach it in as constructive and empowering a way as possible. So that's number one. Number two, there is data and research that

connects earlier puberty in girls to higher risks for substance abuse, for anxiety and depression, for lower body image, and also for risks of earlier sexual behavior. Now, I want to be super clear here that the research is not saying one causes the other. This is correlative. And it's correlative because when a kid looks older, the world treats that child as older. Mm-hmm. And that treatment, that exposure, those invitations, those advances to participate in certain things, that's what puts a kid at risk.

Many of us associate puberty with becoming an adult, at the very least the early stages of adulthood. There are lots of cultural traditions that go back many, many, many hundreds, even thousands of years, that kind of tie puberty and adulthood together. Should we stop doing that? It's so funny, Noelle. My best response is a haiku that was written about bar mitzvahs. And it was something like, today I am a man, tomorrow I return to the seventh grade. Aww. I'm tearing up. I like that. I love it because it's a perfect reframing of where kids are in this stage.

I mean, perhaps we want to rethink some of the language we use around these coming-of-age experiences. And, you know, they may be anachronistic in some ways, or they may put pressure on kids to feel older or more mature. You're a woman now. Why didn't you tell me, Mom? Here's what I will say. Kids this age, tweens and teens, are so awesome. They are so fun and so smart and so insightful, and they are evolving on a day-to-day basis. And I think if our traditions and rituals and markers of these moments can make space for that almost perpetual evolution of these kids. Do you feel older now? Like more mature? Oh, yeah. I don't know how to explain it. And you won't understand it till you get it. But I feel like everything's changed.

It's actually really celebratory of what this experience is really about, which is you are a work in progress. Your body is a work in progress. Your brain is a work in progress. And we love you and we believe in you no matter what. It's not about their survival out in the wild trying to capture beasts. It's not about being left on a mountaintop for most cultures these days. But it is about independence. It is about self-awareness. It is about taking on more

and more responsibility. And those are amazing things that we don't want to eliminate from our experiences and conversations with kids. We'll have more with Vanessa Kroll-Bennett and Dr. Karin Adderson up next. I feel like I'm still a kid in some sort of way. Like, you know, running around the hallways with my friends or going to the movies and watching Mets games at my house, playing video games. But I think that I've matured in a lot of ways, definitely, in terms of, you know, terms of staying focused in school.

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Hi there, guys, it's me, Mark, Margaret. I've never been so jealous my entire life, and I hate myself for being jealous. Just please, please just let me grow and let me get my period. Let me just be normal and regular like everybody else. Just please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Amen. Today Explained, we're back with Vanessa Kroll-Bennett and Dr. Cara Natterson. Together, they wrote a book called This Is So Awkward, Modern Puberty Explained. Vanessa, the book explores how puberty has changed in some very real ways. It starts earlier, it lasts longer, it now involves a phone. So what should conversations between parents and kids sound like today? So first of all, and I so appreciate, Noelle, that you, conversations was plural in your question, because it's many, many,

many, many conversations and a half. It's okay. Come on upstairs. We have to have a little talk. So knowing that it's many conversations, we hope that takes the stress off of adults back to do it right and to do it perfectly. And we like to say that when you mess up, take the do-over. Say to the kid, you know what? I totally blew it the other day. You asked me what a blowjob is, and I freaked out and avoided it. And I want another chance to be in conversation with you. I just want to jump in and say, it is the rare child who is game to have the blowjob conversation a second time. I'm not through talking to you yet. I'm through listening.

So if and when they turn on their heels and walk out of the room, that is okay. The second most important piece of advice that we give is to zip it. Just take the moment to let them absorb what you've said and then keep your mouth shut and give them space to respond. My mommy and daddy did that? Actually, a very beautiful thing. I think it should be outlawed. Over time, what they begin to understand is that you are there to impart information

and then to stop and to listen to what they have to say, and some of them will come right out with it in 30 seconds. I want a bra, okay? A bra, a bra weave. I want a bra. I want a bra, a bra. And some of them, it'll take them three months, but eventually they'll come out with it

and they'll start being in conversation with you because all of this is about being in conversation. I wonder, Vanessa, if you can walk us through the stages and the ages. So, based on what you were both telling us earlier, it sounds like the door to conversation may open around the age of seven? We think of the conversations that happen at puberty or with teenagers as actually sitting on the building blocks of earlier conversations with kids. And those conversations can start, and some people may find this surprising and some people may totally be on board, with babies on the changing table or

toddlers in the bath or kindergartners standing online at recess. And those are conversations that are about teaching kids the correct anatomical language for all of their body parts, including their genitals. And there's tons of research that shows that helps keeps kids safer from sexual predation. It promotes bodily autonomy and self-awareness. It allows them to tell a doctor what hurts or what doesn't feel good. So that can happen with little, little kids. Understanding the names of their body parts and understanding consent gives kids a foundation so that when you start to talk about changing bodies, right, when you start to talk about a growing penis or growing testicles, the words penis and testicles are not bad words in your house.

They're not foreign words in your house. They are just everyday ho-hum words that get uttered at various parts, hopefully not in the aisles of the supermarket, but definitely at bedtime or bath time. We like to think that by the average age for the onset of puberty, right, if we figure the average age for girls is eight and the average age for the onset of puberty, right, if we figure the average age for girls is eight and the average age for boys is nine, so like by third grade, you are having conversations with kids, not about sex, but about taking care of their bodies, about changing bodies. And then as they grow older, the conversations spiral up and they become more and more sophisticated as a kid is developmentally able, psychologically able to understand the complexity of taking care of a body, of respecting

other people's bodies, of understanding their bodies in relationship to other people, and then as they may or may not choose to become sexual, what that looks like in sexual relationships. You both talked earlier about the problem of young people who look older than they are. They've gone through puberty or they're going through puberty and you have a 10-year-old who maybe looks 15. What is the best advice for parents who see it happening? What is the best advice for the young person who also probably sees it happening but doesn't really know what to do? And-year-old as a 10-year-old, to give them the loving care and to set the expectations of them as a 10-year-old, and to make sure that the world around them does the same. So their teachers, their coaches, their extended families

who may look at them and be super confused because the 10-year-old looks 15 to reinforce to those trusted adults that the 10-year-old is still a 10-year-old with the decision-making capabilities, the executive functioning, the brain development, the romantic inclinations of a kid that age. It's weird. I mean, boys were always chasing me and I never really cared. But whenever I'm with him, my heart goes, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett, Brett. How do I get him to be my boyfriend? With the kids, it's important to acknowledge to them

that this is a phenomenon, that they may be in the world and people may treat them older than they actually are, and to begin to role- play with them and be in conversation about what can they say and do to remind people that they are the age they are. So for example, one well-meaning adult may try to strike up conversation with a kid who looks older and is actually younger and may say something like, hey, you got any boyfriends lately? Do you want a date yet? Do you have a boyfriend?

No, I don't. I like, I mean, I go, well, I, you know, I do like boys that are like movies. Like I like Ryan Felipe, even though. To which a kid can say, actually, I'm only 10. Do you want to talk about the books I'm reading? Right. And to give them the language, to brainstorm with them, to role play with them, how they can respond, because it's kind of a shocking and uncomfortable thing to have that. And then when we think about the adults

in the world, it's not only the kids who look older than they actually are, it's also the kids who look much younger than they actually are. Where are your pubes? I had them. I shaved them off. A sixth grade classroom can look like, have kids who look eight and have kids who look 16. And all of those kids are struggling with that reality. And so one piece of advice we love to tell adults is please don't guess a kid's age. Because if you guess that a 10-year-old is 15, that's going to be pretty uncomfortable. And if you guess that a 10-year-old is seven, that's going to be pretty uncomfortable. So that's number one. And number two, we really, really, really beg of all adults out there, please don't make comments about kids'

bodies. Don't make comments about their' bodies. Don't make comments about their physical development, about their height, about their weight. Ask them about their interests, the movies they watch, the music they listen to, the books they read, any of that stuff, but try to keep the conversation away from their growing and changing bodies, no matter what stage they're at in their development. It's not our job to relive or relitigate our own puberty with the kids in our lives. It's our job to just support them and love them and listen to them and try to understand them and ultimately to keep them safe and healthy.

It's not to be their best friend. It's to be the adult in their life, which means giving them limits and keeping them safe and healthy. Cara Natterson is a pediatrician. Vanessa Kroll-Bennett is a writer and podcaster. Together, they wrote a book called This Is So Awkward, and they host a podcast of the same name. You also heard from my nephew, Isaiah King. Halima Shah produced today's episode. Amina El-Sadi edited.

Miles Bryan fact-checked. Rob Byers and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered. The rest of our team includes Amanda Llewellyn, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mouagdi, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain, and Laura Bullard. Matthew Collette is a supervising editor. Miranda Kennedy is an executive producer. Sean Rama's firm went through puberty at 34. I still have a heck of a lot more of a journey to go through, but I think I'm inching closer day by day to becoming an adult. You sure are, Sean.

We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. I'm Noelle King. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox. you