Hi Readers -

I’m inviting you to join me at some free events as part of National Fentanyl Awareness Day. These events offer a powerful way to understand today's drug landscape and take action to protect your community from fentanyl and fake prescription pills.

I’ve also featured some excellent resources for families and teachers about this topic. Together, we can turn awareness into action.

Big love,
Christopher

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#1: Overdose Deaths are Down—the Risks Aren’t

Overdose deaths are down from record highs—and that’s real progress worth acknowledging. But a closer look at the data tells a more complicated story. The drug supply is still dangerous and still evolving, new substances are entering the picture, and there’s growing concern that signs of progress may be creating a false sense of security at exactly the wrong moment.

This session brings together leading researchers and prevention experts for a frank, data-driven conversation about where things actually stand—and what it means for families, educators and communities working to keep young people safe.

Wednesday, April 29, 2026
9 am PT / Noon ET
Register Here

#2: The New Drug Landscape: A Conversation with Parents Who’ve Been There

The drug landscape has shifted—and the conversation around prevention needs to shift with it. Fentanyl remains a serious threat, but new substances are entering the supply, the relationship between mental health and drug use is coming into sharper focus, and the old “just say no” approach has never been less useful.

In this candid, unscripted conversation, three parents who have experienced the worst—and dedicated themselves to making sure other families don’t—talk openly about what’s changed, what’s coming, and where prevention goes from here.

Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Noon PT / 3 pm ET
Register Here

#3: How to Talk to Your Kids About Drugs Right Now

Most parents know they should talk to their kids about drugs. Few feel equipped to do it—especially now, when the drug landscape looks nothing like it did a generation ago. Fake prescription pills, high-potency cannabis, kratom—the risks are real, they’re evolving, and the conversation can’t wait.

This session brings together a parent and coach who has lived the stakes firsthand and a physician who works directly with teens and families for an honest, practical conversation about how to approach drug safety talks with your kids. No slides, no jargon—just the information and perspective parents need to feel prepared.

Wednesday, April 29, 2026
3 pm PT / 6 pm ET
Register Here

How Do I Talk with My Teen About Fentanyl?

In this special episode of the “Ask Lisa” podcast, Dr. Lisa Damour and Reena Ninan are joined by Ed Ternan and Marcia Lee Taylor of Song for Charlie, a national non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers of fentanyl.

Ed, who tragically lost his 22 year-old son to a counterfeit prescription pill, and Marcia, former President and CEO of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, cover the basics about fentanyl and offer concrete guidance on how to have effective conversations with teens about its dangers.

How To Teach About Fentanyl

Like some other states, California has a new law requiring schools to teach about fentanyl. Stanford’s REACH Lab is ready to help with “Aware & Prepare: A Comprehensive Curriculum for Fentanyl & Other Opioid Overdose Prevention and Harm Reduction.”

These free lessons are designed to help students:

• Describe what opioid drugs are, including fentanyl, and explain their general effects on the brain and body.

• Identify the potential harms and both the real and perceived benefits of opioid (including fentanyl) use.

• Recognize the signs and symptoms of an opioid/fentanyl overdose and demonstrate appropriate steps to respond in an emergency.

• Apply naloxone and fentanyl test strips as harm reduction tools.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Five Things Everyone Should Hear About

  Live events, trainings, and discussions you won’t want to miss

• Bigorexia, Betting, and Bros: Helping Boys Navigate Today’s World

  An extraordinary panel recorded live at the Common Sense Media Summit

• “I’m A 15-Year-Old Girl, And My Social Media Feed Is Full Of Vile Misogyny”

  A look at what girls are really seeing online. PLUS: What adults need to know about BuzzBallz, the declining birth rate, and what teens are really doing with those AI chatbots.

• Is This Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment?

  Instagram and YouTube Go On Trial For Harming Youth

• Outside The Manosphere

  What to do after watching “Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere”

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

I hope you’re having a good week. I have been hearing about so many cool/interesting/smart events lately, and I’m glad to be able to share some of them with you here. Please take a minute to check them out, and if they aren’t right for you, feel free to pass them along to others you know.

Big love,
Christopher

Subscribe now

I’m Talking Live At City College Of San Francisco

Wear jeans and join me for a live discussion about my book Talk To Your Boys. It’s part of the school’s Denim Day recognition.

• Date: April 29, 2026

• Time: 6-7:25 p.m

• Location: Cloud Hall 260, City College of San Francisco

• Cost: Free

Note: There’s no official booksigning at this event, but if you bring a copy of Talk To Your Boys we can make it happen!

Hey Men - Sign Up For This Group

I’ve participated in two rounds of the “Ask Her” group from Brian Dean Williams twice now, and found it incredibly useful and supportive. There’s a new group starting soon, and I wanted to encourage men, especially men in relationships with women, to sign up. A note from Brian about it:

Here’s something I hear from women constantly in my couples therapy practice when they are in relationships with men:

“I wish he’d ask me more questions. Not about the schedule — about me.”

Most men genuinely want to connect. They just weren’t taught how. That’s not a character flaw — it’s a gap. And it’s one of the most fixable things I’ve seen in 15 years of working with couples.

Ask Her is a skills course for men.

What you’ll walk away with:

✓ A toolkit of powerful questions drawn from narrative therapy — questions that create real intimacy, not just conversation

✓ The ability to ask in ways that make her feel genuinely seen — not interrogated

✓ A small group of men moving in the same direction — no judgment, no ego

✓ Practice that actually sticks — because you’re doing it with other guys in real time

• Starts Monday April 27th

• Schedule 8 Mondays, 5:30–6:30pm PST

• Format Online via Zoom — small group

• Cost $400 total ($50/session × 8 weeks)

• Coverage May be covered by extended health benefits

Reserve your spot — April 27th

Spots are limited to keep the group small and the conversations real. We currently have a few spots remaining for this cohort.

If you know a guy who’d benefit — forward this to him. The men who’ve done Ask Her consistently tell us they wish they’d found it sooner.

Email Brian Dean Williams at connect@briandeanwilliams.com for more information or to sign up.

Raising Boys in a Digital World

Here’s an online offering from White Ribbon Canada, which is dedicated to “engaging men and boys as allies to promote gender equality,”

Boys and young men today are navigating complex online environments that can increase their risk of sexual exploitation, radicalization, misogyny, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Preventing these harms requires a collective effort from the adults in their lives.

This virtual event brings together educators, parents, and caregivers to explore how we can better support youth—especially boys and young men—through early prevention, open conversations, and the promotion of healthy masculinities.

Participants will learn to recognize warning signs, understand how these issues are interconnected, and explore the important roles both schools and families play within the broader youth ecosystem. The session will also introduce practical tools, resources, and strategies designed to help adults respond confidently and support young people in safer, healthier ways.

• Date: April 29, 2026

• Time: 12:30 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)

• Cost: Free

• RSVP Here

Racial Justice in Sex Education

Did you know that Advocates for Youth has a free online training series called Racial Justice in Sex Education? It’s great, and they just added two new online modules.

Each module is 30-45 minutes long, free and can be taken on its own or as part of the larger learning series. These were both created by Advocates’ Assistant Director for Racial Justice in Sex Education, Dr. Nakisha Floyd, and her Youth Advisory Council. Feel free to share them!

• Module 11 - The Impact on Education & Health: What is Anti-Blackness?

• Module 12 - The Impact on Education & Health: Outcomes and Resistance

Reviews from colleagues:

“These were SOOO GOOOOOOD!! The presentation of information was clear and I appreciated the images used as well - so many hues. The multimedia aspect worked well for a visual learner like me, and I’m sure it will land well with others.” - Marriotta Gary-Smith, Co-Foundress of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network

“Once again, BRILLIANT. Fascinating. INVALUABLE. SO much covered and I loved the visuals - super striking!!” - Dr. Elizabeth Schroeder, Sex Education Author, Trainer and International Speaker

Sex Ed Training For Educators

For educators who are looking to enhance their sex educator skills, Advocates for Youth is also offering some cool live trainings (held online). Educator trainings consist of three, 90-minute training sessions that cover the following topics:

• Creating a safe learning environment

• Answering sensitive questions

• Boundaries & self-disclosure

• Sexual orientation and gender identity

• Experiential Learning Cycle

• Connecting home: Communicating with caregivers

The three 90-minute virtual sessions are offered at $175 per person.

Sign up here: https://3rs.org/training-for-educators/

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Bigorexia, Betting, and Bros: Helping Boys Navigate Today’s World

  An extraordinary panel recorded live at the Common Sense Media Summit

• “I’m A 15-Year-Old Girl, And My Social Media Feed Is Full Of Vile Misogyny”

  A look at what girls are really seeing online. PLUS: What adults need to know about BuzzBallz, the declining birth rate, and what teens are really doing with those AI chatbots.

• Is This Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment?

  Instagram and YouTube Go On Trial For Harming Youth

• Outside The Manosphere

  What to do after watching “Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere”

• How To Talk About Clavicular, Looksmaxxing, And Loneliness

  Helping young people make sense of what they are seeing online

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

Hi Readers,

After supporting two high schoolers who joined in conversation onstage there in 2025, I was thrilled to be invited to be onstage myself as part of the 2026 Common Sense Media Summit on Kids and Families in San Francisco.

Today I’m glad to be able to share a video of the panel I moderated, “Doing Better For Boys.” Panelists Ashanti Branch, Jason Nagata, and Michael Robb joined me to discuss the challenges boys face trying to form their own identities while encountering some very potent cultural forces, online and off.

We had a candid conversation about what boys experience day-to-day, how they’re being affected, and what we can do to help them. It was a joy to be in conversation with a panel of deep, reflective thinkers in front of a lively, engaged audience, and it generated a lot of subsequent discussions.

I was especially happy to see reactions like this one from Graciela Barrett:

The full video is below - I hope you get chance to check it out! I’d love to know what you think.

Big love,
Christopher

Subscribe now

Doing Better For Boys

• Ashanti Branch is the Founder & Executive Director of The Ever Forward Club, the author of Diary of a Confused Educator, and the driving force behind the Million Mask Movement. His group facilitates Young Men’s Health Groups to San Francisco public schools.

• Jason Nagata is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. He is an expert in eating disorders, particularly in boys and men, and has published over 400 articles in academic journals.

• Michael Robb is the Head of Research at Common Sense Media. His team has recently published two research studies related to this panel’s topic: Boys In The Digital Wild, which focuses on boys’ online lives, and Betting On Boys, which focuses on gambling.

• Christopher Pepper (moderator) is a Teacher on Special Assignment in SFUSD, and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men.

  ---

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Another Highlight From The Summit

In this special episode of “Ask Lisa,” recorded live onstage at the Common Sense Media Summit on Kids and Families, clinical psychologist sits down with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, award-winning physician, researcher, and California’s inaugural Surgeon General, for a conversation that may change how you think about your kid and their devices.

Together, they bring decades of clinical expertise and hard-won parenting experience to the questions families are struggling with most right now around tech and their kids. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the digital world your kid is growing up in, this conversation will leave you feeling more grounded, more equipped, and even closer to your teen.

Watch ALL The Common Sense Presentations

Common Sense Media put together a terrific playlist of all of the presentations from the Summit, including all of these speakers:

• Jennifer Klein, Chair, Clinton Policy Institute

• Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson, President & CEO, Children's Defense Fund

• , Founder and CEO, Common Sense Media

• , President and Founder, New Voters

• Nicholas Kristof, Columnist, New York Times

• , Attorney General, California Department of Justice

• , Attorney General of New Mexico, NM Department of Justice

• , Founding Partner, Puck

• Dr. Jenny Radesky, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Michigan Medical School

• Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Chief Impact Officer, ACE Resource Network

• Dr. Luke Shaefer, Chief Executive of Health, Human Services, and Poverty Solutions, City of Detroit

• Yash Maheshwari, Junior, Mountain View High School

• Sophia Zhang, Senior, Mountain View High School

• , Vice President of Education Outreach & Engagement, Common Sense Media

• , President, Untangled Media Group

• , Developmental Psychologist, Raising Good Humans

• Gary Knell, Board Member, Common Sense Media

• Jessica Rosenworcel, Executive Director, MIT Media Lab

• Sal Khan, Founder & CEO, Khan Academy

• , President, American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

• Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder and President, Emerson Collective

• Richard Buery, CEO, Robin Hood Foundation

• John White, CEO, Great Minds

• Russlynn Ali, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, XQ Institute

• Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Former U.S. Secretary of State

• , Governor of Illinois

• , Founder, End Poverty in California (EPIC); Former Mayor, Stockton

• Allison Mishkin, Youth Policy Lead, OpenAI

• Robbie Torney, Head of Digital and AI Assessments, Common Sense Media

• Dr. Nina Vasan, Founder, Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation

• Rebecca Ruiz, Senior Reporter, Mashable

• Leah Defenbaugh, Director, Youth Development Projects, Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board

• Heldana Thomas, National Youth Council Leader, UNICEF USA

• Xavier Juarez, National Youth Council Leader, UNICEF USA

• Darla Silva, Chief Program Officer, UNICEF USA

• Aisley Jett, Social Media Influencer

• Dr. Scott Kollins, Chief Medical Officer, Aura

• Chris Devers, CEO, Rancho Cielo

• Mirel Mejia, Deputy Director, John Muir Charter Schools / Rancho Cielo Youth Campus

• Terry Poole, After-School Program Manager & Counselor, Rancho Cielo

• Darrell Steinberg, Former Mayor and Senate Pro Tem, Steinberg Consulting LLC

• Eisha Buch, Head of Teaching and Learning, Common Sense Media

• Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, State Assemblymember, CA State Legislature

• Samuel Chapman, CEO, Parent Collective Inc.

• Tim Levy, Managing Director and CEO, Qoria

• Kristin Lewis, Chief Product Officer, Aura

• Edda Collins Coleman, Vice President, Communications, Common Sense Media

• Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Former Speaker of the House of Representatives

• , Founding Partner, Echelon Insights

• Celinda Lake, President, Lake Research Partners

• , CEO, SocialSphere Inc.

• Bill Ready, CEO, Pinterest

• Baroness Beeban Kidron, Crossbench Peer, House of Lords, UK Parliament

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• “I’m A 15-Year-Old Girl, And My Social Media Feed Is Full Of Vile Misogyny”

  A look at what girls are really seeing online. PLUS: What adults need to know about BuzzBallz, the declining birth rate, and what teens are really doing with those AI chatbots.

• Is This Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment?

  Instagram and YouTube Go On Trial For Harming Youth

• Outside The Manosphere

  What to do after watching “Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere”

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of the bestselling book Talk To Your Boys.

• I regularly out send curated collections of news stories and essays like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• If you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your Teen Health Today subscription. Here’s a coupon that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

In this edition:

• The High-Alcohol Drink Taking Over Gen Z

• I Am A 15-Year-Old Girl. Let Me Show You The Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me On Social Media Every Day

• Ethnic Studies Courses Linked To Higher Grades, College Eligibility

• Deepfake Nudes Are Haunting America’s Teens

• 710,000 Fewer Babies Were Born Last Year In U.S. Compared With Two Decades Ago

• Man Up! Shut Up!

• The Camps Promising to Turn You — Or Your Son— Into An Alpha Male

• What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

The High-Alcohol Drink Taking Over Gen Z (New York Times)

By Callie Holtermann: BuzzBallz are hard drinks sold in bottles that resemble phosphorescent billiard balls. They contain around 15 percent alcohol by volume, more than double that of the average beer. And Lucy Rocca first heard about them from her 13-year-old daughter.

It was December, and Ms. Rocca was talking to her daughter and a friend about a shopping list for a New Year’s Eve party. When the girls brought up BuzzBallz, “I was like, ‘Whoa, no way,’” Ms. Rocca, 50, recalled. She asked where her daughter had gotten the idea. “All my friends are drinking them,” she responded.

BuzzBallz have been around since 2009, but today they are practically ubiquitous. You can find them sprinkled like confetti throughout college parties and stacked by the checkout at convenience stores. The fluorescent orbs are easy to spot on a Florida beach during spring break; in a crowded social media feed, they glow like beacons. The drinks are portable, flavored and cheap, a combination that has earned them a reputation as a go-to beverage for Gen Z. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? As a health educator and a parent, I have to try to keep up with trends, especially around substance use. BuzzBallz have definitely moved into the “things to watch out for” category.

I Am A 15-Year-Old Girl. Let Me Show You The Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me On Social Media Every Day (The Guardian)

By Anonymous: I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualised. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? This story provides a real glimpse into what it’s like to be a teenage girl online today, and I think we need to pay attention. The fact that this story had to be published anonymously tells you a lot.

Ethnic Studies Courses Linked To Higher Grades, College Eligibility (San Francisco Chronicle)

By Aldo Toledo: Taking a year-long ethnic studies course could be helping San Francisco high school students earn better grades and exam scores, according to a newly released study that examined the program over a decade.

The research, which analyzed San Francisco Unified School District student outcomes from 2008 to 2023, found that students who took an ethnic studies course showed lasting improvement in their grades, particularly among those who previously struggled academically. And the classes even boosted some students’ chances to get into University of California schools, giving the extra edge necessary to pass eligibility thresholds.“ READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I was teaching at a San Francisco high school when Ethnic Studies was first introduced, and I saw how powerful it could be as a tool for helping all students feel welcomed and empowered on campus.

Deepfake Nudes Are Haunting America’s Teens (New York Times)

By Jessica Grose: I have been writing about this issue — the creation of deepfake nudes of minors — for two years. It’s arguably much worse now that A.I. image generation tools are ubiquitous, and the images they create are even more realistic. While social media companies may not be able to fully stamp out child sex abuse material (CSAM) on their platforms, they could be doing a far better job of prioritizing the problem, said Arturo Béjar, a whistle-blower and former engineering director on Facebook’s protect and care team. Béjar, who testified for the state in the New Mexico case against Meta, told me that social media companies can prevent a lot of CSAM from being created and shared.

For starters, Béjar said that “You should not be able to generate erotic content in the likeness of anybody unless they have positive proof that that person has very thoroughly given consent in a million demonstrable ways.” This should apply to users of all ages. Béjar noted that social media companies have incredibly sophisticated tools for labeling images, and he thinks that these companies need to use these to properly label sexually explicit images. Doing so would essentially “kill the distribution knob” that incentivizes sharing them, even if it might also cut down on engagement. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? This is a real and growing problem, and I appreciate that Grose is exploring potential solutions to change things.

710,000 Fewer Babies Were Born Last Year In U.S. Compared With Two Decades Ago (NPR)

By Brian Mann: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation’s peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The total fertility rate is now well below replacement level. That means not enough children are being born to maintain a stable population without significant levels of immigration. But some economists say it’s unclear whether the trend toward fewer children reflects a permanent national shift.

One possibility, according to economist Martha Bailey, head of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, is that U.S. women are delaying motherhood and will have more children later in life. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? This data got a lot of attention this week, and generated some meaningful discussion about the U.S. teen birth rate, which hit a historic low in 2025.

Man Up! Shut Up! (I Blame Society)

By : At this point, it’s hard to argue that we are not talking about men and boys enough. The “boy crisis” and the “male loneliness epidemic” have dominated the discourse for nearly two years now. To read the news now is to believe that every Gen Z male in America spends his entire life in a darkened bedroom scrolling redpill forums, glancing up only intermittently to remind his AI girlfriend to obey him, and to smash his own jaw with a hammer.

People are clearly scared about the state of modern boyhood, and desperate for answers. Since “Boymom” first came out, I have given probably close to 200 interviews on the topic- for newspapers and magazines, radio and TV and podcasts all over the world. The book went into four printings in hardcover and has sold tens of thousands of copies. The runaway success of shows like Netflix’s Adolescence and Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere followed, the conversation continues to dominate and several states have since set up workgroups to focus on the challenges of boys and men. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? Whippman’s essential book “BoyMom” is newly out in paperback, and in this article she explores two ways (“Man up!” and “Shut Up!”) she’s seen people talking about boys online, and why both fail to meet the mark.

The Camps Promising To Turn You — Or Your Son— Into An Alpha Male (The New Yorker)

By Charles Bethea: In the past several years, the phrase “alpha male” has seeped into the language around us, like the contamination of an underground aquifer. By the time former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars an “alpha male response,” I was using the term ironically. But there are plenty of American men these days who regard alpha masculinity—or “warrior mode,” or “modern knighthood,” or other such appellations—not ironically but aspirationally. There are now programs offering to help such men achieve these aspirations, or something close.

On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, RISE’s founder, told me. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? This is another Manosphere offshoot that we need to pay attention to. When you read the story, I encourage you to think about why guys might think this is what they need in their lives.

What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots (New York Times)

By Kashmir Hill: “If you think your child is not talking to chatbot companions, you’re probably wrong,” said Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at U.N.C. Chapel Hill.

At the beginning of last year, a high school teacher in Chicago told me that some of her students were dating chatbots, and she worried that they were having their first erotic experiences with them. I wanted to find out what teens had to say about that, so I joined communities devoted to social chatbot apps on the online messaging forum Discord. I introduced myself as a reporter and “an old,” and explained that I was interested in talking to young people who used the services regularly. That’s how I met Quentin. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I like stories that try to help adults keep up with the technology that’s shaping teens’ lives, and this story really does that well.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Wait, Are Young People Actually Doing Better Than Previous Generations?

  Does the data say that the kids are alright? PLUS: The case for a rec sports comeback, new science on the clitoris, and what happens when high school students “nudify” their classmates.

• Is This Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment?

  Instagram and YouTube Go On Trial For Harming Youth

• Outside The Manosphere

  What to do after watching “Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere”

• How To Talk About Clavicular, Looksmaxxing, And Loneliness

  Helping young people make sense of what they are seeing online

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of the bestselling book Talk To Your Boys.

• I regularly out send curated collections of news stories and essays like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• If you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your Teen Health Today subscription. Here’s a coupon that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

In this edition:

• How to Navigate Toxic Masculinity When Parenting Young Boys

• In Many Ways, Young People Are Doing Better Than Previous Generations

• Kids Need Rec Sports To Make a Comeback

• Two Boys Made Deepfake Porn Of 60 Girls. It Left A School, Small Town Reeling

• Boys are Pulling Away. Mentorship Can Bring Them Back

• States Step up to Bring in Male Teachers, Support Young Men and Boys

• Full Network Of Clitoral Nerves Mapped Out For First Time

• A New Jersey Teen Finds Treasure, and More, in Abandoned Storage Units

How to Navigate Toxic Masculinity When Parenting Young Boys (Today)

Research shows that young boys are struggling to find connections in today’s society so experts , professor of developmental psychology and author of “Rebels With a Cause,” and Carlos Whittaker, podcaster and author of “Reconnected,” join TODAY to talk about the root of the “crisis of connection” they're experiencing and offer advice for how parents and role models can help them foster meaningful friendships and teach them the importance of soft skills.

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? Niobe Way has been doing important work around boys and emotional connections for decades, and I love to see her getting a chance to share her wisdom out on a big media outlet like “TODAY.”

In Many Ways, Young People Are Doing Better Than Previous Generations (Scientific American)

By : If you were to ask most people how kids are doing these days, you’d probably get an earful of complaints and concerns. Compared with children from past generations, kids today are often portrayed as being less mentally healthy, less resilient and less empathetic. “America’s Children Are Unwell,” read a New York Times headline last November; online magazine Parents recently ran “How to Know if Your Kid Is a Narcissist—and What to Do about It.” In a 2025 Common Sense Media survey of 1,300 nationally representative parents, 61 percent said they believe kids today lag behind past generations in their morals and values, and more than half said youth today are less resilient and independent.

Although quality data are sparse, the research that does exist suggests a different narrative—one in which kids are faring better in many ways than those of previous generations. Studies suggest youths are more empathetic and less narcissistic than in the past, as well as more open-minded and inclusive. Drug use is down, youth violence has dropped and teen pregnancies have declined. IQs have gone up, and kids exhibit more self-restraint and patience than they did 50 years ago.

Read more

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of the bestselling book Talk To Your Boys.

• I regularly out send curated collections of news stories and essays like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• If you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your Teen Health Today subscription. Here’s a coupon that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

A quick request: If you know anyone in Charlottesville, Virginia, please let them know them that I’ll be doing a “Talk To Your Boys” discussion and book signing at St. Anne’s-Belfield School on March 31. It's free and open to the public. RSVP here.

In this edition:

• Teens Are Sleeping Less Than Ever And Screens Aren’t Primarily To Blame

• Many Teens Face Strong Peer Pressure to Share Sexual Images, Study Finds

• Boston To Become First District In The U.S. To Mandate AI Training In Public High Schools

• The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead If Vaccines Vanish

• Men Can Get Out Of The Manosphere. Here’s What Former Incels Say About Why They Left

• Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones

• Students Feel Safer In School When Their Concerns Are Heard, YouthTruth Finds

• A Mississippi Mother Couldn’t Find Accurate Sex Ed For Her Kids. So She Started A Class At Church

Many Teens Face Strong Peer Pressure to Share Sexual Images, Study Finds (New York Times)

By Catherine Pearson: No parent wants to learn their child has been pressured into sending a sexual image, but a new survey suggests many teens are doing exactly that, and often with someone they are dating.

More than 90 percent of those who said they had received a coercive request for a sexual photo were women, and more than half complied. They were far more likely to do so at the request of a dating partner, rather than a stranger or someone they knew online only.

Teens who complied with coercive requests were more likely to do so if the requests persisted for more than a month, or if the person asked for photos four or more times, suggesting they may have felt worn down by the requests. Respondents who decided to share photos when pressured were also more likely to skip school or have thoughts of self-harm after sending them than those who did not share images. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I like how this story clarifies that, in most cases, these requests are coming from other teens, not unknown strangers. This gives us openings to talk to youth about the issue, and encourage them not to ask other teens to send nudes.

Teens Are Sleeping Less Than Ever And Screens Aren’t Primarily To Blame (NPR)

By Ari Daniel: Tanner Bommersbach, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, says that it’s been clear for some time that teens are sleeping less now than they once did. But he and his colleagues wanted to know if that loss of sleep has been impacting certain groups of adolescents disproportionately.

Read more

Hi Readers,

I spend time this week at the Common Sense Summit on Kids and Families in San Francisco. The panel I moderated, “Doing Better For Boys,” was terrific, and it was great to meet several Teen Health Today readers in the crowd!

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing reflections on one of the big questions being discussed at that conference: “Have tech companies intentionally caused harm to our youth, and should they have to pay for that harm?” I promise it will give you a lot to think about.

Big love,
Christopher

A quick request: If you know anyone in Charlottesville, Virginia, please let them know them that I’ll be doing a “Talk To Your Boys” discussion and book signing at St. Anne’s-Belfield School on March 31. It's free and open to the public. RSVP here.

Big Tech On Trial

One of the most talked-about panels at the Common Sense Summit was “Is This Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment?," which featured California Attorney General Rob Bonta () and New Mexico Attorney General in conversation with .

At the time of this panel, both AGs were waiting on results in cases they filed against tech companies. The verdicts in New Mexico and California have since come in, and they are generating a lot of reaction. Here’s what Common Sense Media’s had to say about the California decision:

“This verdict is a powerful recognition of what Common Sense Media and families across the country have known for years: Social media companies deliberately design their platforms to keep kids hooked, consequences to their mental and physical health be damned. The momentum for change is no longer building. It’s here.

Social media giants would never have faced trial if they had prioritized kids’ safety over engagement. Instead, they buried their own research showing children were being harmed, and used kids and society as guinea pigs in massive, uncontrolled, and wildly profitable experiments. Now, executives are being held to account.

This verdict, along with other recent court rulings, should embolden lawmakers in California and across the country to use their authority to force real change in how these companies design and operate their products. We must keep pushing, advancing, and enforcing stronger laws for social media and AI youth safety.”

To add some context to this news, I’m sharing an essay below from a trusted expert on technology and youth, , the author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.

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Instagram And YouTube On Trial

By

Two big verdicts were announced today, one in New Mexico and another in a Los Angeles Court.

The New Mexico case argued (and won) that the very design of Instagram is harmful to users. While the monetary judgement will barely touch a huge company like Meta, the focus of the argument could be a game-changer. New Mexico v. Meta Platforms centers on how features like endless scroll and algorithmic recommendations—can contribute to harm, particularly for teens.

For years, companies like Meta Platforms have been protected by Section 230, a law from the 1990s that says platforms aren’t legally responsible for what users post. Within that legal framework, social media has been legally treated more like a neutral bulletin board than a newspaper—hosting content rather than curating or vetting it.

What makes the New Mexico case such a big deal is the argument that the platform itself—its structure, its incentives, its algorithms—was designed in a way that creates foreseeable harm. So the app is found to NOT be a neutral bulletin board, but a bulletin board that prioritizes more harmful messages.

This legal reasoning will impact cases moving forward in other states, many of them asking the same question: Were these platforms designed in ways that push users—especially minors—toward harmful experiences?

Unlike the New Mexico case, the Los Angeles case—took a different approach, arguing YouTube, Snap Inc., and Meta’s apps caused specific mental health harm to specific individuals. In this case: Snap and TikTok settled before trial and only Meta and Google went to trial. The jury didn’t fully agree on causation. It is tough to isolate any single cause of mental health challenges. When we look at the kids we care about--when they suffer, it’s rarely just due to one thing. Yet the results will still affect these companies going forward.

Taken together, these trials are a great big warning signal to these massive, powerful companies. People are getting more and more skeptical and mistrustful of these apps.​

What Might Change

If these legal approaches continues to gain traction, we may begin to see shifts in how platforms operate, especially for younger users: More friction in feeds versus endless scrolling, changes to recommendation systems and possibly stronger default safety in direct messaging and other settings.

Unfortunately, companies and parent activists may lean into age-verification instead of focusing on holding the companies accountable to the experience of ALL users. While stricter age-gating may seem like a solution to the harms demonstrated in these trials, it creates new problems for user privacy and the right to speech and assembly for kids.

It’s worth noting: companies may choose to make changes only for minors to limit liability. But from an ethical standpoint, the design of these platforms affects users of all ages. Shouldn’t safer, more intentional design should be the standard for everyone.​

A Big Tobacco Moment?

​When I hear that social media is having a “big tobacco” moment, the analogy fits in some ways (quashing internal research about harms...) Yet the substance is different--Tobacco is always harmful. Social media, on the other hand, can genuinely support connection, affinity and learning. Many of us have seen that upside in our own lives.

For me, the most helpful part of that analogy is the cultural shift de-centering tobacco. Even with the rise of vaping, overall nicotine use is still significantly lower than it was when I was growing up in the 1980s.

It makes me wonder: if more people come to feel that social media is doing more harm than good, will they begin to step away?

Many adults—and some teens—are becoming more intentional. They’re reducing their usage, setting boundaries, or gravitating toward platforms that feel more positive and less draining. There’s a quiet recalibration happening.

Right now, it’s hard to imagine a full-scale shift away. These platforms are deeply woven into how we communicate, find affinity and connect with one another. But things could change a lot if we decide to prioritize other ways to connect and share information.

Talking About It

For parents and educators: ask young people if they have heard about these legal cases. You could discuss:

• How do these platforms make us feel—and why?

• What does healthy use look like?

• What would we want them to be, if we could redesign them?

• What responsibility do designers have for user behavior?

• How do algorithms shape what we see—and how we feel?

• Where is the line between engagement and manipulation?

These cases don’t settle those questions—but they do make them harder to ignore.

In the meantime, we want to model healthy use of social apps and also show kids that we can step away when they don’t serve us.

Learn more about ’s work - including how to buy her books and bring her in as a speaker - at devorahheitner.com.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Outside The Manosphere

  What to do after watching “Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere”

• How To Talk About Clavicular, Looksmaxxing, And Loneliness

  Helping young people make sense of what they are seeing online

• “This Is Very, Very, Very Worrying,”

  An alarming new study on teen cannabis use and later psychosis. PLUS: Teens want more male vulnerability onscreen, and experts question tech in classrooms.

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

Hi Readers,

I hope you are doing ok! This week I spent some time doing in-person sex ed lessons with high school boys, which is both funny and fascinating, as I explained in this essay for The American Institute of Boys and Men.

At the same time, I started hearing a lot of reactions from people online who had watched the new Neflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. I’ve linked to some of most interesting takes at the end of this post, but I don’t feel like I need to add to the alarm about the influencers trying to reach our boys. Instead, I want to focus on solutions.

Talk To Your Boys

It seems like a good time to remind you that and I recently wrote a book, Talk To Your Boys, for people worried about their boys being pulled in by unsavory influencers.

In many ways, this book began way back in 2019, when Joanna looked over her son’s shoulder at his social media feed and grew alarmed at what she saw. She chronicled this experience in a viral New York Times essay: “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.” She was one of the first to recognize how extremist content was starting to slip into mainstream apps, and she wanted to help parents see what was happening so they could intervene.

In Talk To Your Boys, we help parents navigate lots of awkward conversations, about things like consent, guns, pornography, and substance use. We don’t spend too much time describing the problems - Netflix specials and books like ’s wonderful BoyMom do a good job of that - but instead focus on practical advice, conversation scripts, and tips for staying connected during challenging talks.

Learn How The Manosphere Is Reaching Boys

Recently, Common Sense Media asked me to work with them on a research project to understand what teen boys’ digital lives are really like. This included creating a large national survey of boys about their experiences online - how they spend their time, what they look at, and how it influences them. Here are the top line findings:

• Adolescent boys live and connect online, with 94 percent using social media or playing online games daily. For more than half of boys, digital platforms and gaming make them feel like they belong.

• Influencers have emerged as significant sources of guidance and emotional support for adolescent boys. Sixty percent of boys find influencers inspirational, and 56 percent report receiving practical advice from them.

• Algorithms, not user intent, are the primary driver of boys’ exposure to posts about masculinity. 68 percent of boys who see such material online say it started showing up in their feed without them searching for it.

• While most boys find a sense of belonging in gaming, 70 percent observe bullying or harassment and more than half hear racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language.

• Ninety-one percent of boys encounter body image messages online, with three-quarters of boys exposed to online material about being muscular.

• Over two-thirds of adolescent boys (69%) regularly see masculinity content that promotes problematic gender stereotypes. This includes messages that girls only want to date certain types of guys (28%), that girls use their looks to get what they want (25%), that boys are treated unfairly compared to girls (12%), or that girls should focus on home and family (12%). Boys with high exposure to this material are significantly more likely to feel lonely, suppress their emotions, and avoid vulnerability. Nearly half of boys believe they must follow “unwritten rules,” like not crying or showing fear, to avoid being teased or picked on.

Find Better Influencers

There’s no reason we have to let toxic bros rule the internet. Check out some of the people trying to spread more positive messages:

• Johnny Cole

• Luke Bateman - (also on Substack: )

• Moses Williams

• Jeff Perera

• Dustin Pace (also on Substack: )

• Ashanti Branch (also on Substack: )

• Jonathan Jacobs (also on Substack: )

• Dr. Brendan

• Professor Neil

• Justin Martinez

• Andrew Bailey

• Sex Ed For Guys

• Jeremy Mohler (also on Substack: )

• Real Feels Project

• Brad Gage

• Pierre Fleury

• Jason Biehl

• Richard V. Reeves (also on Substack: )

• Mark Greene (also on Substack: )

• Jackson Katz (also on Substack: )

• Andrew Bernie Bernard (also on Substack: )

• The Speech Prof (also on Substack )

• Organizations I recommend checking out include , Next Gen Men, , , A Call To Men, American Institute For Boys and Men, and

Five Takes On “Inside The Manosphere”

Here are some reflections on “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere” I think are worth your time:

• Who Are The Young Men ‘Inside the Manosphere?’
  The Netflix documentary devoted ample time to the influencers themselves, but too little to the young men who watch them.
  By , , and

• Boots On Their Necks
  Why is the toxic manosphere so obsessed with breaking the spirits of men?
  By

• One Weird Trick for Being a Better Man

  When a man is with other men, why does he lose his moral compass so reliably?
  By

• Are the Boys All Right?

  What the Manosphere, Locker Room Talk, and the Epstein Files Have in Common

  By

• The Manosphere is Just an MLM
  And your kitchen table is the antidote.

  By

  

Talking It All Out

Here’s a video of my conversation with Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman on The Daily Whatever Show. Dana’s essay “Middle-Aged Men Keep Ogling My 16-Year-Old“ had just gone live, and our discussion was essentially the other side of that story—helping the adults in boys’ lives raise kids who don’t become the men in Dana’s essay. We talked about how to actually have hard conversations with teenagers, why screen time’s bigger problem is what it’s replacing, and the radical idea that staying close to your kid matters more than any single talk. I also got to talk about Fugazi!

I know a lot of people are feeling the stress of the world right now, and I hope you are not getting too overwhelmed. One of the things that’s been helping me is gathering regularly with others - sharing lunch with co-workers, going to concerts with friends, singing in my choir, and joining an online men’s group called AskHer (they have a new round starting soon - please encourage guys to join, it’s terrific!)

Talking with this year and hearing her discuss her book The Art of Gathering has prompted me to pay closer attention to this part of my life, and I am grateful for the change.

I have several in-person and online events coming up, and I’d love to have you gather with me at one or more of them. Here’s a rundown:

March 17 - The Daily Whatever Show (Live Online)

I’m thrilled to join and on “The Daily Whatever Show,” their excellent morning talk show. To watch live and join in the chat, just go to The Daily Whatever Show page on Tuesday, March 17 at 10 AM Eastern/7 AM Pacific. Subscribe to their newsletter to get a reminder.

March 23-24 - Common Sense Media Summit on Kids (In Person — San Francisco)

I’m excited to be speaking at this year’s Common Sense Summit on Kids and Families on March 23-24 in San Francisco. I’m looking forward to conversations about youth mental health with leaders who are shaping the future of childhood in the digital era, including , , , , Sal Khan, Nancy Pelosi, and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris.

I’ll be moderating a panel called “Doing Better For Boys” with a fantastic line-up of speakers:

• Ashanti Branch, Founder and Executive Director, The Ever Forward Club

• Jason Nagata, UCSF Associate Professor of Pediatrics and expert in eating disorders in boys and men

• Michael Robb, Head of Research at Common Sense Media

• Moderator: Christopher Pepper

Register here, and use the code PEPPER30 for 30% off summit passes.

March 26 - Parent’s Coalition of Bay Area High Schools (Live Online)

I can’t wait to do this online talk with , who co-wrote the bestselling book Talk To Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men with me.

Here’s what the event page says: Joanna and Christopher will share helpful advice, scripts, and ideas about how to have conversations with boys about many essential topics, starting with the most important of all — communication. They will share strategies for moving past the false “adolescent boys don’t want to talk” narrative and get them to really open up. Our speakers have developed talking points on significant challenges young men face today such as bullying, screen time, substance use, and more. They will discuss insights from leading experts, and perspectives from boys themselves, in their own words.

Gain insight on how to have crucial, but sometimes awkward, discussions on emotions, identity, respect, friendship, sex and more, with the larger goal to raise emotionally intelligent young men who care about themselves and others.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear about what our speakers have learned while interviewing over 80 boys and dozens of experts while writing their book, and leave with practical ideas about how to help the boys in your life navigate today’s world.

Thursday, March 26, 2026
7-8:00 PM PT
REGISTER HERE

March 31 - St. Anne’s-Belfield School (In-Person — Charlottesville, VA)

I am so excited to be heading to Virginia at the end of the month, where I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Booth Family Inspiration Speaks Series at St. Anne’s-Belfield School. It’s free and open the community.

From the event page:

Parents of boys, do you struggle with talking to your tweens and teens in today’s high-tech world of gaming and social media? Join us for a TED-style talk with award-winning health educator, speaker, and bestselling author Christopher Pepper. He’ll expain how parents can break through the digital noise and remain engaged in their sons’ lives as they move into young adulthood.

Drawing on his experience leading health groups and his widely-celebrated curriculum used around the world, Pepper will share practical strategies and actionable scripts, providing parents with the confidence to tackle the big topics with clarity and warmth.

Free and open to the public.
St. Anne’s-Belfield School, Charlottesville, VA
March 31 at 7 p.m.
RSVP

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• How To Talk About Clavicular, Looksmaxxing, And Loneliness

  Helping young people make sense of what they are seeing online

• “This Is Very, Very, Very Worrying,”

  An alarming new study on teen cannabis use and later psychosis. PLUS: Teens want more male vulnerability onscreen, and experts question tech in classrooms.

• ON STRIKE! What I Learned While Our School Were Closed

  Finding strength and joy on the picket line

• My Dad Just Died. He Would Want You To Gather.

  Lessons from a very connected life

• Let’s Really Talk About Immigration

  Does America still welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

• Every Middle School Needs A Health Class

  Tweens and teens deserve real information about their brains and bodies

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

I’m traveling home to Wisconsin for my father’s funeral this weekend (read my reflections his life here) but I wanted to share some quick Talk To Your Boys-related updates with you. I appreciate all of your kind words and support!

Big love,
Christopher

Wait, Who Is Clavicular? What To Know Now

Beth Greenfield of SheKnows interviewed me for this story about the suddenly famous influencer Clavicular, who is perhaps best known for encouraging boys to hit themselves in the face with a hammer to try to produce a stronger jawline. Here’s a sample of what I told her:

“You might want to just sit down with your teen and have them take you through the accounts that they follow, talking about why and what each content creator believe in. Have them ask questions: “Who is this messenger? Are they trying to sell me something? What is the message they’re trying to get across, and do I agree?”

“Boys want advice. They want guidance. And when they’re not getting it from caring adults in their own lives, they are going online and looking for advice. Often, they have questions about how to look better or how to get bigger muscles. And as soon as you put those into a search bar or go on social media looking for answers like that, you start to get a curated feed. You get answers, but they’re often from people who don’t have your best interests in mind.”

Be sure to check out the whole article here.

How To Talk To Boys About Tough Topics

My Talk To Your Boys co-author and I were thrilled to talk to Dr. Robyn Silverman for her podcast “How To Talk To Kids About Anything.” There’s a short clip above, and there are lots of gems in the full 51-minute episode.

We also love the many quotes they pulled out on the showpage. Here’s a sample:

• Keep Knocking on Closed Doors: Christopher Pepper – “I think that we really need to keep talking to boys longer than most people think we need to talk to them. So as they go through middle school, as they go through high school, as they go off into their young adult life or into college, to keep having kind of graduated levels of conversation involving them more and respecting that their ideas may not always be the same as yours. And even if they’re sometimes shutting the door or saying, ‘I don’t want to talk right now,’ to keep knocking on that door and keep trying to have those conversations.”

• Move Beyond the “Man Box”: Joanna Schroeder – “Boys grow up limited by what’s been referred to as the ‘man box’—these expectations and limitations that box them in as it relates to what they can do, like, become, strive for, feel, and how they should behave. And we have to actively talk to them about those messages. Because if we don’t, they just absorb them from culture and peers. And a lot of boys actually want something bigger than that—they just need permission to step outside of it.”

• Consent Means Everyone Walks Away Feeling Good: Christopher Pepper – “I think the language of consent can be really powerful when they’re thinking about sexuality, because they can set limits and expect their partner to respect those limits. And the goal of a consensual encounter is for everybody to walk away saying, ‘Oh, that was fun. That was satisfying.’ Even if they say, ‘I don’t think I want to do that again,’ they’re not walking away feeling manipulated. They’re not feeling regretful or forced to do something.”

Mighty As A Mother Takes On Parenting Boys

was a guest on the podcast, and they had a great discussion, and talked candidly about:

• Why boys’ mental health deserves our attention — without ignoring the bigger picture

• The subtle ways society teaches boys to disconnect from their emotions

• How to help boys regulate anger without shaming their feelings

• What emotional safety at home actually looks like (especially when we’re dysregulated ourselves)

• How social media and online content shape boys’ identity earlier than we think

• Practical boundaries around screen time, smartphones, and tech in the bedroom

• Why repair matters more than perfection in parenting

• How to raise boys who are both strong and soft

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or directly on the showpage.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• “This Is Very, Very, Very Worrying,”

  An alarming new study on teen cannabis use and later psychosis. PLUS: Teens want more male vulnerability onscreen, and experts question tech in classrooms.

• ON STRIKE! What I Learned While Our School Were Closed

  Finding strength and joy on the picket line

• My Dad Just Died. He Would Want You To Gather.

  Lessons from a very connected life

• W. Kamau Bell - The Teen Health Today Interview

  The Emmy-award winning comedian explains how laughter can help fight ignorance and build community

• Let’s Really Talk About Immigration

  Does America still welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

• Every Middle School Needs A Health Class

  Tweens and teens deserve real information about their brains and bodies

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of the bestselling book Talk To Your Boys.

• I regularly out send curated collections of news stories and essays like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• If you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading your Teen Health Today subscription. Here’s a coupon that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

In this edition:

• Teens Want Less ‘Stoic’ Men and More Male Vulnerability in Their Movies and TV Shows: Survey

• A Huge Study Finds A Link Between Cannabis Use In Teens And Psychosis Later

• Why Social Media Algorithms Can Exploit Us So Well

• ‘If A Drug Had The Same Benefits As The Arts, We’d Take It Every Day’

• AI Is Poised to Reshape Social-Emotional Learning. But for Better or Worse?

• The U.S. Spent $30 Billion To Ditch Textbooks For Laptops And Tablets: The Result Is The First Generation Less Cognitively Capable Than Their Parents

• Biohackers And Wellness Influencers Are Pushing Nicotine As Part Of Their ‘Stacks’

Teens Want Less ‘Stoic’ Men and More Male Vulnerability in Their Movies and TV Shows: Survey (She Knows)

By Beth Greenfield: A new study, released this week, sends a powerful message to the entertainment industry around the desire for more content that shows men in loving, caregiving roles.

“Our findings reveal a profound cultural shift: Youth are craving a version of masculinity defined by emotional availability and joyful connection,” Yalda Uhls, founder and CEO of CSS, the study’s senior author and adjunct professor in UCLA’s psychology department, said in a press release. “By highlighting these narratives of partnership and care, storytellers can offer a vision of masculinity rooted in hope and love. For today’s young audiences, the most compelling hero isn’t the one standing alone, but the one who has the courage to be present.”

Health educator Christopher Pepper, co-author of Talk to Your Boys and the Teen Health Today newsletter, says it would behoove producers to listen to the message, and to understand the power behind what they create. “Many people look to their entertainment for guidance around how they should be living their lives and how they should act,” he says. “And I love that young men are saying they want to see more examples of sensitive guys, or emotional guys, with a full range of feelings that they show to the world.” READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I loved this study, and appreciated being able to share my opinions here. It really gives me hope for young people and for our media!

A Huge Study Finds A Link Between Cannabis Use In Teens And Psychosis Later (NPR)

By Rhitu Chatterjee: As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later

“This is very, very, very worrying,” says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn’t involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? This is a large, well-constructed study, and the results are super concerning. I’m glad this issue is getting some real focus and research attention.

Why Social Media Algorithms Can Exploit Us So Well (The Noösphere)

By : Social media algorithms, the invisible strings of our digital reality, target us with ever-more-specific, just-for-you messaging.

In Careless People, a recent memoir by former Facebook director of public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, she describes how the platform’s ‘Lookalike Audiences’ algorithm was used during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The tool first identified users who resembled existing supporters — for example, people who liked pickup trucks but hadn’t yet pledged political allegiance — and then flooded them with what she describes as a steady stream of ‘misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages’ designed to secure their support. And, perversely, the more the content enraged the viewer, the cheaper it was to run the ads.

Like the mythical Sirens, algorithmic entities also often know exactly which emotional chords to pluck. And just as sailors struggled to resist the Sirens’ call, it can be tough to resist the algorithms’ pull. But that’s precisely the point. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? Jagielnicka is a thoughtful writer who isn’t prone to panic or exaggeration, and I appreciate her helping us uinderstand the currently that are shaping the world we live in.

‘If A Drug Had The Same Benefits As The Arts, We’d Take It Every Day’ (New Scientist)

By Daisy Fancourt: I can pinpoint the precise comment that made me want to embark on a career researching the health benefits of the arts. I was fresh out of university, working in the NHS, managing the performing arts programme at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. A pianist had just finished playing on the dementia ward and a relative of a patient came up to me: “What a lovely entertainment programme you run”.

It was kindly meant – she’d enjoyed the session. The thing was, I already knew myself that the hospital arts programme wasn’t just entertainment. Far from it. In that sing-along session, I’d seen a patient who couldn’t remember the relatives who were visiting her sing along word-perfect to The White Cliffs of Dover and chat away afterwards about her childhood. Earlier that day, I’d seen a child with burns in the accident and emergency department who hadn’t needed any morphine once the theatre group started their performance, a premature baby who was crying inconsolably and refusing food but who calmed and started feeding the moment her mother started singing, and a man who’d had a stroke whose walking suddenly increased in speed and symmetry when we put headphones on him. Yes, the arts programme was enjoyable, and a welcome alternative for many patients to television viewing. But I was seeing firsthand, every day, the tangible, meaningful effects the arts were having on patients’ health. And I wanted to understand how and why these effects were happening – what was going on inside our brains and bodies. So, I left the hospital to find the answers. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I often see arts programs being sidelined or cut from school schedules, and I think we need reminders of just how important the arts can be.

AI Is Poised to Reshape Social-Emotional Learning. But for Better or Worse? (Education Week)

By Arianna Prothero: Will artificial intelligence short-circuit students’ social-emotional development? Or can it help them build vital interpersonal skills in an increasingly tech-driven world?

They’re no longer theoretical challenges for educators: AI-powered products are becoming increasingly powerful, and existing education tools that incorporate AI are being developed with the intention of supporting kids’ social-emotional learning. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? The great need for mental health support in schools creates an opening for AI tools, and I think we need to be aware of what’s going on and really consider how we feel about it.

The U.S. Spent $30 Billion To Ditch Textbooks For Laptops And Tablets: The Result Is The First Generation Less Cognitively Capable Than Their Parents (Fortune)

By Sasha Rogelberg: In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I have heard more than one teacher say that all the tech in schools just gets in the way of learning, and its interesting to see some evidence emerging that they might be right.

Biohackers And Wellness Influencers Are Pushing Nicotine As Part Of Their ‘Stacks’ (STAT News)

By Sarah Todd: Biohackers like it. Athletes and Joe Rogan do, too. Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman says it “sharpens the mind.” On social media, health and wellness influencers explain how they use it for a pre-workout boost or as part of their “stacks.”

Nicotine, the stimulant that makes cigarettes so addictive, is getting a reputational makeover. As smoking rates fall in the U.S., companies and influencers are pushing the purported cognitive and health benefits of indulging in oral nicotine and other products.

Beyond mega brands like Philip Morris International’s Zyn, a wave of startups with millennial-minimalist packaging now market “clean,” “modern” nicotine pouches aimed at helping people “lock in” and achieve their goals — whether that’s leaping over a Land Rover on a mountain bike or, per the tongue-in-cheek but still bro-y pouch brand Excel, “the relentless pursuit of shareholder value.” Tech companies like Palantir now stock vending machines with nicotine pouches from brands Lucy and Sesh in the hopes of boosting their workers’ productivity. READ MORE

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? The history of the tobacco industry is filled with pivots, with companies redesigning and repacking their addictive products in different ways. This is their latest move.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Fighting Sexism In Schools

  Other countries have coordinated anti-misogyny programs. What about the U.S.? PLUS Essential stories about AI harms and a Scott Galloway controversy.

• ON STRIKE! What I Learned While Our School Were Closed

  Finding strength and joy on the picket line

• Vaping, Drinking, Weed, And Youth - What’s Next?

  What you need to know about youth drug use, PLUS essential stories about ICE protests, looksmaxxing, and the auntie movement

• My Dad Just Died. He Would Want You To Gather.

  Lessons from a very connected life

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.

• During the week, I send out Teen Health Today posts that are free for all to read - the most recent is ON STRIKE! What I Learned While Our School Were Closed.

• On Sundays I send out curated collections of thought-provoking essays and news stories like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• These Sunday news roundups are paywalled to give you a gentle nudge to upgrade your Teen Health Today subscription. Lucky for you, here’s a button that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

• I LOVE AND APPRECIATE the folks who pitch in a little bit to keep this newsletter going. Thank you!

In this edition:

• The Research on Protecting Teacher Well-Being

• Misogyny Is Rising in U.S. Classrooms. Where Is the National Response?

• The Front Line In America’s Child-Vaccine Battle

• How Political Chaos Is Affecting Americans’ Mental Health

• Why Public School Families Are Protesting Linda McMahon’s Visits

• Scott Galloway Is Wrong About Dads And Childbirth

• How Did We End Up Threatening Our Kids’ Lives With AI?

The Research on Protecting Teacher Well-Being (Edutopia)

By Paige Tutt:Teaching is often referred to as a “calling”—but for many educators, it feels more like an endurance test. For decades, the demands of the job have expanded in every direction: longer hours, larger class sizes, wider academic gaps to close, and growing pressure to serve as de facto counselors and caregivers. It’s a recipe that can leave even the most passionate educators feeling drained.

The question of how to support and sustain teacher well-being is a cause close to cognitive scientist and Yale professor Laurie Santos’s own heart. She’s felt firsthand the strain of working in education and acknowledges that neither platitudes around “choosing joy” nor empty calls for self-care are likely to make a meaningful impact. Instead, she advocates for larger structural changes in schools and districts rooted in teacher feedback, alongside smaller, evidence-based tools that educators can use daily to reclaim a sense of balance. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I appreciate it when people recognize how complicated, emotional, and demanding teachers’ jobs are now. I love the idea of making systemic changes to provide eduators with more support.

Misogyny Is Rising in U.S. Classrooms. Where Is the National Response? (Ms. Magazine)

By Joel Levin: Educators and students are witnessing an alarming rise in gender-based harassment and hostile sexism. This includes rape “jokes,” degrading language toward female and LGBTQ+ students, and aggressive behavior that undermines school safety.

Online platforms and social media influencers create echo chambers producing a cultural shift in which women and girls are devalued, and gender equality is portrayed as a threat. As a result, girls may limit their classroom participation, avoid enrolling in certain courses, or feel discouraged from pursuing their career choices. Navigating hostile school environments can lead to self-censorship, reduced ambitions and damaging self-perceptions that constrain potential.

Read more

Reflections On My First Strike

At the end of her recent post about finding joy, asks “what’s bringing you joy right now?”

For me, my answer is something unexpected: memories of marching on a picket line with my coworkers. Schools were closed all last week because the labor union I’m a member of, United Educators of San Francisco, was on strike. It was a new experience for me (and almost everyone else involved) and I learned a lot.

When I finished college in the late 1990s with a journalism degree, I immediately started working as a writer and editor. However, after about five years I had to change tracks because the newspaper and magazine industries started to collapse and jobs were disappearing. That’s when I started teaching high school health education in San Francisco public schools, where I’ve now been for more than two decades. I love my work.

I’ve always been happy that my teaching job is unionized, which means I have a solid retirement plan and strong job protections (important when you teach about topics that are often at the center of culture wars!)

Our union renegotiates a contract with the school district every couple years, and they’ve always worked things out — in fact, before last week our union hadn’t been on strike for almost 50 years.

This time around, however, bargaining didn’t proceed as smoothly, and our union started to let us know that we might have to step up the pressure for a fair contract, and that we might even have to go on strike. This included doing a lot of education for members.

One of the FAQ sheets they distributed started with this:

This kind of clear messaging was necessary, because almost none of the 6,500 members of our union had ever been part of a strike before. To get people ready for this possibility, the union held practice pickets and a weekend “strike school” for volunteer leaders. The plan was spelled out - if a strike was necessary, we would have active picket lines at every single school, and then come together later in the day for rallies and marches.

Our negotiation team was made up of teachers, counselors, social workers, and paraprofessionals who agreed to come to bargaining sessions in addition to working their day jobs. When it started to seem like a strike might really happen a whole other set of volunteers stepped up to be “strike captains” at each site, willing to lead chants and rally their co-workers on the line each day.

Families Were On Our Side

If you’re wondering why the district didn’t get serious about negotiating when they saw all this strike preparation happening, I recommend reading Joe Eskenazi’s in-depth article “SFUSD Fumbled The Teachers’ Strike” in Mission Local.

As he explains, although there was some grumbling online about the strike, once it started that sentiment wasn’t reflected on the ground.

“If you visited the actual school picket sites — and Mission Local reporters criss-crossed the city all week, covering protests at schools, large rallies, and even giant human messages at Ocean Beach — they were high-energy, positive and well-attended, with many families and students present and drivers honking loudly in support. Of course, not every public-school family supported an agonizing work stoppage, but the people who were backing the teachers were a lot more active and visible than the people who weren’t.”

That fits with my experience - our picket lines were boisterous, angry, and fun. My crew was in front of the school district headquarters, so we ended up on the news a lot, and it was sometimes hard for them to do interviews because it was so loud - the air filled with drums, maracas, chants, and car horns. Many of my co-workers brought their children, and multiple other unions marched with us as well.

This Brought Us Together

I have to say I did not expect striking would be such an athletic event - we walked over 20,000 steps each day of the strike - and I did not expect it would feel so connected. Our small group got very tight - as I told some people, it seemed like the best teambuilder we have ever done!

We were active and loud together, but also shared quieter moments where we exchanged stories about how we came to education and what our jobs meant to us, as well as talking about our families and lives outside of work. It was a special kind of bonding time that we don’t often have.

And when we joined all together in the afternoon, with strikers from around the city coming to one location, it was tremendous. One day we had a rally in Dolores Park and then marched all the way to City Hall, thousands strong, with neighbors cheering us on the whole way.

Another day we headed out to Ocean Beach and made a giant human banner together, photographed by a drone from above.

My favorite day was Thursday, when the sun finally came out and we joined our bargaining team in shouting “FIGURE IT OUT!” to district leaders, and then had a massive, street-closing march down Market Street, San Francisco’s main drag. It was like a spontaneous parade that shut down the whole downtown. Along the way, I saw so many people I knew - colleagues from other schools, former students, retired teachers, and community members.

I wasn’t the only one who felt the joy - teacher Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely wrote a whole essay called “On the Picket Line, I Rediscovered the San Francisco That I Love.” I couldn’t agree more.

I don’t want to have to go on strike just to find this sense of community again, but I think there are lessons to be learned here about how good it feels to stand up for one another and speak loudly for fair treatment. We all recognized how much power people have when they push together for a shared cause. I want to remember that.

EXTRA: A Few Of My Favorite Picket Line Chants:

And, and the strike continued…

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• My Dad Just Died. He Would Want You To Gather.

  Lessons from a very connected life

• Some Teachers Are Determined To Keep AI Out Of Their Classrooms

  Concerned that AI may discourage deep thinking, some teachers going analog

• W. Kamau Bell - The Teen Health Today Interview

  The Emmy-award winning comedian explains how laughter can help fight ignorance and build community

• Let’s Really Talk About Immigration

  Does America still welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.

• During the week, I send out Teen Health Today posts that are free for all to read - the most recent is My Dad Just Died. He Would Want You To Gather.

• On Sundays I send out curated collections of thought-provoking essays and news stories like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• These Sunday news roundups are paywalled to give you a gentle nudge to upgrade your Teen Health Today subscription. Lucky for you, here’s a button that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

• I LOVE AND APPRECIATE the folks who pitch in a little bit to keep this newsletter going. Thank you!

In this edition:

• This Small School District Kept Losing Students To ICE. So It Mobilized.

• The Future Of Substance Abuse In Youth

• I Cut Technology Out Of My Classroom For A Month. Here’s How It Went.

• We Have A Loneliness Epidemic. We Have An Overwhelmed Parent Epidemic. Could The Two Problems Help Solve Each Other?

• When We Talk About Body Image, We Usually Picture Girls. Maybe We Shouldn’t.

• Handsome At Any Cost

• Students Across the U.S. Are Protesting ICE. Texas Wants to Punish Their Schools.

This Small School District Kept Losing Students To ICE. So It Mobilized (The Washington Post)

By Karin Brulliard: First period was about to begin Tuesday when the phone rang at Columbia Academy. The parent of one of the middle school’s students had been detained by immigration authorities, and the family needed help finding a lawyer.

It was one more in a steady stream of daily crises that had confronted Leslee Sherk, Columbia Academy’s principal, in this immigrant-heavy Minneapolis suburb every day for more than two months. They arrived in dings on her phone, in scratchy dispatches on her walkie-talkie, in frantic calls to the office, in whispers from children in hallways, in emails on her sticker-covered laptop, tallying the latest number of students with at least one parent detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: 16, up from 10 the week before. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? A lot of my readers are teachers and/or parents of school-age kids, and it’s important we think strategically about how to respond to government agencies threatening families and children.

The Future Of Substance Abuse In Youth (The Future of Everything Podcast)

Developmental psychologist Bonnie Halpern-Felsher specializes in teenage health-related decision-making, especially in their use of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, and other substances.

Young people, she says, value immediate social benefits over long-term risks. In response, she supports bans on flavored nicotine products and has developed nationally and internationally used evidence-based substance use prevention and intervention programs, including some that are culturally targeted, such as her vaping prevention curriculum in Hawaii zeroing in on popular flavors like mango and poi. The reward, she says, is reduced substance use and better mental health. “Talk to your kids. Don’t lecture. Have a conversation,” Halpern-Felsher tells host Russ Altman of the best way to break through on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. WATCH

Read more

Two big things happened in my life this week.

1. , the author of the book “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” and the Group Life newsletter, was the guest on The Ezra Klein Show. She gave a very strong recommendation to “Talk To Your Boys,” calling it “brilliant and beautiful” and suggesting that people read it together with ’s “BoyMom.” This is a podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners and huge cultural influence, and being recommended there is a big deal. We were thrilled.

2. My father died. His death was not unexpected - he had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that was spreading through his body - but it came very fast. Luckily he felt very little pain, and my family and I were able to be with him, care for him, and tell him we loved him before he passed.

At first, I didn’t see these items as related at all. But then I got a chance listen to the podcast in full and reflect on the messages Parker shared, and the echoes between her excellent advice about forging human connections and the way my dad lived his life started to become clear.

My father died about five blocks away from where he grew up. He never moved out of his hometown of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, but he made connections all over the world. My dad was an extroverted, social man who would talk to anyone. He and my mom Jean were married for 55 years, and enjoyed a wonderfully loving and adventurous life together.

One of the places my dad gathered regularly was at the weekly meeting of the Elkhorn Rotary Club, and he loved the organization’s focus on service and community betterment. He was a founding member of the club, which started in July 1969. He remained active in Rotary his whole life, serving as club president twice. It was such a big part of his life he recorded a StoryCorps interview about it.

One of the big tasks he took on was coordinating the club’s youth exchange program, which he did for decades. He worked with Wisconsin students as they prepared to go on international exchanges, and welcomed students from many countries as they arrived for a year in the U.S. My dad and mom themselves hosted exchange students from the Netherlands, Turkey, Finland, Brazil, and France.

With his encouragement, my sister Cary participated in a short-term Rotary exchange in the Netherlands, and a year-long Rotary exchange in Brazil while she was in high school.

My mom and dad loved traveling together, and made trips to dozens of different countries, eventually visiting every continent except Antarctica. They often stayed with people they met through Rotary’s International Travel & Hosting Fellowship, and regularly hosted guests from around the world at their home. They loved entertaining, especially throwing unique theme parties.

In 1999, they expanded their family to include two “sons,” Nazim and Fadil, who arrived as refugees from Kosovo. My folks helped them establish a new life in Wisconsin, where they are both now thriving members of the community.

In 2021, my mom and dad helped sponsor a family of seven refugees from Afghanistan, in partnership with a local church. They provided support and housing as the big family resettled and figured out the ins and outs of life in America. The family reached out to my mom with condolences as soon as they heard my dad had passed.

When he was home, my dad enjoyed spending time at my family’s cottage on Lauderdale Lakes, especially taking people out on the pontoon boat in his role as “Captain John.”

He loved Elkhorn and was committed to giving back to his local community. He was a member of the Elkhorn Economic Development Alliance and served on the Executive Committee of the Walworth County Economic Development Alliance. He helped start the Elkhorn Fund and served on its advisory board.

He retired from his work in commercial real estate work in 2015, but continued to use his real estate skills to help local service organizations, like the Open Arms Free Clinic and New Beginnings APFV, which supports survivors of domestic violence and abuse. Multiple people have made donations to these organization in his honor, which he would have appreciated so much.

As his son, my dad always made it very clear how proud he was of me, but that was especially true this year when “Talk To Your Boys” came out. He told so many people about it I think he may be the reason it hit the bestseller list!

These were the kind of things that I was thinking about while listening to Parker and Klein talk about gathering and how to bring people together.

“These next few years are going to be long,” Klein says. “I am tempted to say we’re going to need to take breaks — and that is true. But we’re also just going to need each other. Thinking about how we pull the people we love closer and how we are more in community rather than less — more together rather than more alone — is as essential as any political, civic or personal discipline could possibly be right now.”

The whole episode is excellent, and its messages about how to build community with others and how to share space with people who are different than you really reminded me of my dad.

Give it a listen, make some plans to get together with people, and - if you have a dad who is still around - give him a good long hug.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Some Teachers Are Determined To Keep AI Out Of Their Classrooms

  Concerned that AI may discourage deep thinking, some teachers going analog

• W. Kamau Bell - The Teen Health Today Interview

  The Emmy-award winning comedian explains how laughter can help fight ignorance and build community

• Let’s Really Talk About Immigration

  Does America still welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

• Every Middle School Needs A Health Class

  Tweens and teens deserve real information about their brains and bodies

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.

• During the week, I send out Teen Health Today posts that are free for all to read - the most recent is W. Kamau Bell - The Teen Health Today Interview.

• On Sundays I send out curated collections of thought-provoking essays and news stories like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• These Sunday news roundups are paywalled to give you a gentle nudge to upgrade your Teen Health Today subscription. Lucky for you, here’s a button that will give you a 30% discount:

Get 30% off forever

• I LOVE AND APPRECIATE the folks who pitch in a little bit to keep this newsletter going. Thank you!

In this edition:

• What The ICE Reign Of Terror Is Doing To Our Kids

• To Keep AI Out Of Her Classroom, This High School English Teacher Went Analog

• What Adolescence Reveals About Teen Mental Health That Parents Are Missing

• Young People Today Are Stressed, Depressed—And Changing The Fundamental Pattern Of Happiness, New Research Shows

• Thousands Gather in San Francisco, Businesses Close as Part of Nationwide ‘ICE Out’ Protest

• Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age

• Opinion: Tech Giants Always Planned To Get Us Addicted

What The ICE Reign Of Terror Is Doing To Our Kids (The Golden Hour)

By : As of 2022, one in four children in the United States had at least one foreign-born parent. That’s about 18 million children who could plausibly worry about they or their families being targeted by ICE / CBP.

Many are staying home from school because of that worry. Which is rational, because federal agents are making schools a target of their operations, after decades in which public schools were considered sanctuaries.

L. is a high school senior in the Minneapolis suburbs and the child of immigrants from West Africa. “One of my friends is Hispanic and her parents aren’t letting her go to school,” she told me. “She has to carry her birth certificate and passport when she leaves the house. My little brother is scared to go out with his friends. He’s only 12. We got a message last week about ICE coming to another school in our district. I wasn’t surprised. It gets to a point where you’re disgusted, but you’re not shocked anymore.” READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I appreciate the deep humanity and care Anya Kamenetz brings to her coverage of children, and appreciated her recognition of just how disruptive the recent raids and violence have been to young people’s education.

To Keep AI Out Of Her Classroom, This High School English Teacher Went Analog (NPR)

By Lee V. Gaines: Stacks of worksheets sit atop desks and tables in Chanea Bond’s Fort Worth classroom. Her students all have their own school-issued laptops, but Bond has swapped computers for paper — lots of paper. Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in.

“If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting,” Bond says, “and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil.”

Read more

I’m not up to writing a new essay from his hospital room, so I’m resharing a great interview with one of my favorite comedians, W. Kamau Bell of This originally ran in February 2024.

I’ve been a fan of Bell ever since a co-worker took me to see him at a small club in San Francisco’s Mission District more than a decade ago. I’ve followed his career as he moved into TV with shows like Totally Biased and United Shades of America. In addition to sharing laughs, I’ve learned a lot from his work, and I’ve taken my kids, my partner and my parents to his live events. I always appreciate how he incorporates humor even when discussing serious topics, and how much he values human connection across difference.

I’m so glad to be able to share this interview with you - I hope you enjoy it! — Christopher

W. Kamau Bell Has A Lot Going On

When you meet people who haven't seen your work before, how do you describe what you do?

• That’s a funny question, because the answer can go in so many different directions. Often it depends on the context in which I meet them. For years I could just say, “I have a show on CNN.” And that was enough to either get people to stop asking or at least I knew the direction the conversation would go. But now I don’t have a show on CNN, so generally I would say something like, “I work in TV” and then I let the chips fall where they may, because I can at least prove that easily. They can just Google that. I find if I say, “I’m a comedian” that can lead to people wanting me to prove it live and on the spot. No, thank you.

Are any projects you've been involved with you especially like to share with parents and educators? 

• Depending on the age of your students or children, every episode of my CNN show “United Shades of America” takes a very 101 approach to big, seemingly complex American issues. There is sometimes some adult language. And certainly the topics can be intense (police brutality, transphobia, undocumented folks), but I have heard from many parents who watch it with their kids who are as young as mine (12, 9, and 5). When my oldest kid turned 10 she said she was ready to watch it. We had some incredible discussions during the commercial breaks. I really loved it. But none of my kids have seen the KKK episode. It is different when the thing on TV is happening to your dad.

• We made “1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed” with families in mind. There are definitely some unflinching conversations, but they are led by kids as young as 7 years old. And although my book that I co-wrote with Kate Schatz, “Do The Work: An Antiracist Activity Book” was written for grown ups, you could easily pull activities out of it for kids of all ages.

What's something you love about doing this kind of work? 

• I love working on lots of different things at once. It is how my mind works best. I love the fact I can see the particular value of each medium and that so much of it is collaborative. And I feel extremely lucky that over the course of my career that I have found people who both believe in my vision for various projects and who want to help me strengthen my vision.

• I love the fact that even though the subjects can be challenging, we always find ways to bring humor to them.

What's your new newsletter all about? What are you hoping to do with it? Why should people subscribe? 

• My newsletter is a way to challenge myself to write every week about something I care about and that I most likely wouldn’t write about without this newsletter. So far I’ve written about George Carlin and A.I. and Tracy Chapman’s performance at The Grammys. These are subjects that I have a lot of thoughts on, but I wouldn’t necessarily write those thoughts down.

• I also love having a more direct connection to my audience and supporters. It takes so long to make television. But writing can be quicker. I wrote the Tracy Chapman piece in less than 24 hours. Also, if you comment on my Substack I am more likely to respond to you than I am on social media.

I understand you and are working on a version of "Do the Work!: An Antiracist Activity Book" for young readers. How did you decide to take this on? How will it be different from the original book? When do you think it will be out in the world? 

• Everywhere we went when we were promoting the first book, people would ask about if there would be one for kids. It will be basically a completely different book. The adult book is based on motivating / shaming adults to get in the fight to end racism. The kids book will be more about sharing the history, facts, figures, and inspirational stories that will hopefully make kids more curious about America. It is meant to give them information in a fun way that is often presented in a dry or intimidating way. We are hoping it arrives sometime in 2025. HEY! THAT RHYMED!

What are some things you learned while making and promoting your Emmy-award winning film "1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed"? Who do you hope sees the movie? What kind of feedback have you had from viewers? 

• As with most of my projects there are people who absolutely love it and people who aren’t big fans of it. And that is okay. It is only an hour long and is aimed at kids and families so the approach is not for everybody, but it has really landed with families and mixed folks of all ages. I was also pleased because it is the first project that my company made ourselves.

• One of the best things about it is that it is on United Airlines flights, so I have heard from many people who have seen it on a plane. That is so cool to me. People have talked about crying on their flights while they watch it. I am also most happy that my daughters, who were involved in the film, still feel proud of it. And also the community of kids and families that we assembled for the film are still in contact with each other. We had an Emmy celebration at our house.

What can you tell us about "What Would You Do?"

• I have been a fan of the show for years. I was shocked to get the offer to be on it. We filmed most of my segments in Mobile, Alabama, which is where my dad lives, so I was able to have dinner with him every night. The crew was amazing. I really hope I am invited back on to do more.

I appreciate that you regularly try to help teachers by sharing their Donors Choose lists and helping them find what they need for their classrooms. Why is it important to you to be such a strong ally of teachers? 

• In addition to having been taught by some incredible teachers, I have always had a lot of teachers in my social circle. I have seen up close how most teachers regularly reach into their own paycheck to make sure their students have everything that they need. And I have seen that they don’t just do it for fun things like donuts. They do it for necessities, like hygiene products and books.

• When I first discovered Donors Choose as a user of the site, I was also really happy to find a way to help people directly in the middle of a world where it sometimes feels impossible to do anything to make the world a better place. And it also became a way for me to motivate my audience to do some good. It became an engine of hope, at a time when we need it most.

• Also, even if you don’t have kids, you should support teachers in some way, because all those kids will one day grow up to be adults. And believe me, you would rather they had something closer to the best school experience than something closer to the worst one.

Your friend and frequent collaborator Hari Kondabolu recently served as host for a series of mental health videos for youth. Have you done anything similar? 

• During COVID, I volunteered to host videos about the vaccines. They were designed to help people have good information when the time came to get vaccinated. I heard that the videos actually were shown to people in hospitals and that some people decided to get vaccinated based on the videos. Amazing. I had no idea that this would be my life when I started my career.

• And I am an ACLU Artist Ambassador for Racial Justice. I have made two commercials for them. They air so often that some people only know me from those commercials. I also did a video supporting reproductive rights that was aimed at encouraging dads to get in the fight.

What’s a topic or a message you wish young people learned more about in school?

• I wish we had some real clear and deep dives about civics and how the government actually works (or is supposed to work). Like, what does a mayor really do? What is a comptroller? What are the responsibilities of a congressperson or a senator? How much power does a president have? How much should they have? SO many of our problems now stem from people not actually understanding the jobs and how they work. I include myself in that. Also, I would love it if this included a history of policing in America and how they came out of “slave patrols” in the south.

As a father to three girls, where do you turn for guidance and advice? Do you have any books, podcasts, or resources you recommend or wish more people knew about? 

• So many things… Alphablocks, Dr. Binocs, Doc McStuffins, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Wild Kratts, Bob Books… Most kids books about racism or Black history are great leaping off points for conversation. Don’t expect the book to do all the work. Youtube is a very valuable resource  for helping your kids with homework. They don’t do math the way I did math, so I YouTube the math they are doing and then I can help them. I taught my daughter how to ride her bike in five minutes, based on a YouTube video that said it would teach my kid how to ride a bike in five minutes.

At some of your shows in the past, you would run a "bring a friend of a different race and get in 2 for 1!" ticket special. Why was this important to you? Do you think this idea could be adapted to events (like educational conferences) that have struggled to diversity their attendance?

• It was important to me because I was performing in theaters and the audience for theaters tends to be of a majority single race depending on the production. I was determined to try to get interracial audiences. It absolutely helped. I sorta of wish I was still doing that. I would recommend it to anybody. The truth was that if people said they were two different races we would just trust them. But it definitely made a visible difference to me when I looked out from the stage. And it got the conversation started before the show would even start. And the shows were usually great, which was all I really wanted.

• Also, I wanted racism to end. We have to figure out a way to get all the stakeholders in the room together if we are having conversations about systemic problems and if we truly want systemic changes.

How can people learn more about or follow your work?

• Join me on Substack. I’m still on Instagram regularly at @wkamaubell. I’m on the other platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Threads) but less often.

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• Let’s Really Talk About Immigration

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Hi Readers,

When I got home from work yesterday, I caught this news report about kids in Minnesota being taken into custody by ICE, and then another story from the same school district that spelled out this detail:

”Masked agents apprehended 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his driveway on Tuesday as he returned home from school with his father,” Zena Stenvik, the Columbia Heights superintendent, said.

“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused,” Stenvik said. “Instead, the agent took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”

In addition to that chilling story, Superintendent Stenvik said that a 17-year-old high school student who was traveling to school was snatched up by armed agents.

These pieces hit me hard, especially since I’d spent a good part of my workday yesterday visiting high schools in San Francisco, and seeing the heightened awareness of ICE all around.

Each school I visited had big signs up about ICE, and clear instructions for staff about what do if immigration agents show up at the school door.

Articulating An Alternative Vision

Everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Rogan agrees that the brutal techniques being used by ICE in Minneapolis need to end. But I think we should go beyond criticizing that campaign and agency, and start to more clearly articulate what immigration policies we would like to see.

On a recent New York Times Opinions podcast, Michelle Goldberg made the case for reclaiming pride in the idea that America is a land of immigrants:

“I just think it’s the best thing about America, quite simply. It’s the thing that we have historically done better than others. We absorb immigrants. We integrate immigrants. I still am very sentimental about the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty. Historically, we’ve gone through these periods of racial nationalism like we’re in right now, where people want to define America as an ethnic community, and periods of civic nationalism where America is about ideas and values that are open to anyone who is willing to do the work of embracing them.”

I think we should be having big, broad conversations about immigration, and I’d love to see teenagers participating in those discussions. Some things to talk about:

• How hard do you think it should be for people to come to the U.S. to work?

• How hard do you think it should be for people to become U.S. citizens?

• How welcoming do you think we should be to people who are fleeing war or violence?

• How welcoming do you think we should be to people who say they want better economic opportunities for themselves and their families?

• How big of a priority do you think border and immigration enforcement should be in the federal budget? 　　

• Do you think we should give amnesty to undocumented people who are already living in the United States, like Ronald Reagan did in 1986, or lay out some other pathway to citizenship?

• Do you think we should provide specific protections for people who were brought to the U.S. as children, like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)?

• Canada welcomes three times more immigrants on a per capita basis than then the U.S. Do you see anything in Canada’s immigration policies and goals that you think the U.S. should adopt?

Lessons From The Past

History teacher recently wrote about the hope she found in a visit to Ellis Island:

Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, the USA quickly and efficiently processed millions of immigrants. Ellis Island processed 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. Over a million entered the United States in 1907 alone. Most immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were processed in a few hours. No passports, visas, or papers were needed to enter the United States through Ellis Island.² For most people, getting through Ellis Island took only about 3 - 5 hours. And then they were off to their new lives in America.

When I tell this to my students, many of whom have helped their families sort through piles of immigration paperwork, their mouths drop open in flabbergastment.³

Those who say things like “immigrants today need to follow the rules, just like my ancestors did,” generally have no idea what they are talking about.

I’ve been to Ellis Island myself, and paid particular attention the exhibit on Norway, where I took the photo above.

My family roots are in Norway. In the 1800s, things were pretty rough there, and like a lot of Norwegians, they came to the U.S. to escape poverty and famine, with hopes for a better life.

Even back then, immigration didn’t sit well with everyone in the U.S., according to this Washington Post story:

“For the vast majority of their shared history, including the period in the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s that comprised the biggest wave of immigration to the United States, Norway might have been on the president’s so-called manure pile.

European immigrants of that time fueled many of the same fears about immigration we see today, and politicians fought to close the nation’s borders back then as successive waves of migrants from different European countries faced hostility upon arrival in the United States.

Today, those immigrants are idealized as a fast-assimilating group that came over with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and handed their children the American Dream. Some place them in sharp contrast to what they see as the insular communities of present-day immigrants such as those called out by the president. But it only appears that those migrants assimilated quickly because past economists only looked at a moment in time, instead of following individuals throughout their lives.”

Despite the challenges, I am so grateful that the United States made room for my ancestors, and made it possible for us to build a life here.

I appreciate the many immigrants who help make my community vibrant and wonderful, and I want our country to keep making space for newcomers and refugees. Warmly welcoming people who want to come here seems a lot more likely to produce a positive, bright future for our country than walls, bans, or raids.

Catching Up And Lending Support

I know there is a lot of news coming out of Minneapolis. If you haven’t been following things closely and want to catch up, listen to this episode of The Daily podcast, On The Frontline Of Minnesota’s Fight With ICE, or check out the ongoing coverage from Minnesota Public Radio.

If you feel inspired to support the people on the ground, Wisconsin-based organizer is collecting love letters to Minnesota and Stand With Minnesota is providing an excellent vetted directory of places to donate.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Why Is Nicotine Use Being Normalized?

  Products like Zyn are bringing nicotine back into mainstream use. What’s really going on?

• Every Middle School Needs A Health Class

  Tweens and teens deserve real information about their brains and bodies

• Michael Pollan Takes On The New Food Pyramid

  The “Omnivore’s Dilemma” author would like a word. PLUS: Why is smoking making a comeback with Gen Z?

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• How To Become A “Trusted Adult” For Teens

  Great tools for getting better at talking about substance use

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼

• I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.

• During the week, I send out Teen Health Today posts that are free for all to read - the most recent is Every Middle School Needs A Health Class.

• On Sundays I send out curated collections of thought-provoking essays and news stories like the one you are reading right now. Think of me as your friend who keeps up with everything and sends you the most interesting stuff.

• These Sunday news roundups are paywalled to give you a gentle nudge to upgrade your Teen Health Today subscription. Lucky for you, here’s a button that will give you a 30% discount:

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In this edition:

• ‘My Hands Were Really Shaky’: High-School Journalist Documents ICE Raids

• The New Age of Nicotine

• Science Shows Very Different Psychiatric Disorders Might Have The Same Cause

• My Picture Was Used In Child Abuse Images. AI Is Putting Others Through My Nightmare

• Stay-At-Home Sons Are Here — And They’re Not Going Anywhere

• Breaking The Cycle Of “Toxic Masculinity”

• For Teens, Any Cannabis Use May Have Impact on Emotional Health, Academic Performance

‘My Hands Were Really Shaky’: High-School Journalist Documents ICE Raids (The Guardian)

By Rachel Leingang: When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolis high school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day. The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school.

Dominguez is one of the city’s tens of thousands of students living in the middle of ICE’s surge into their communities. Soon after agents came on to school grounds at Roosevelt, Minneapolis Public Schools announced it would cancel school for two days and give students the option to attend virtually through mid-February.

Dominguez started Roosevelt high school’s digital newspaper a few months back. Her instinct after ICE came to campus on the same day as the shooting: write about it, tell her classmates what was happening. Agents had used chemical irritants outside the school and detained a staffer. The school had locked the doors to protect those inside during the chaos, but staff and students saw agents in action. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I’ve been riveted by the stories of how ordinary citizens in Minneapolis are coming together as neighbors to non-violently defend their communities from ICE and deliver groceries to families in hiding, and was especially struck by this account from a teen journalist of what happened when ICE showed up at her own school.

The New Age of Nicotine (Men’s Health)

By Rachel Epstein: When did nicotine become so...normalized? It’s a question Men’s Health staffers asked ourselves as we watched athletes and actors and a certain health secretary alike pop nicotine pouches like it’s nobody’s business. Small tea bag–like pouches of tobacco-free nicotine powder that you tuck between your gum and lip, they’re discreet and spit-free, and they don’t make you smell like smoke. These pouches have gone so mainstream that last year, the FDA authorized the marketing of 20 Zyn products (arguably the most popular nicotine pouch brand in the U.S.) despite also warning of its addictive properties and stating that no tobacco product is safe.

Read more

Hi Readers,

Since 2002, I’ve been a health education teacher in San Francisco public schools. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a well-planned, well-taught health class in action, but it is pretty amazing. We directly address some of adolescents’ biggest concerns: mental health, relationships, sexuality, social media, and substance use. Students learn skills they can use for the rest of their lives, and get help accessing services they might need to get through their teen years.

These classes make a difference. I’m not just saying that - public health researchers have spent years trying to determine what actually changes health behaviors in teens, and have published their findings as “What Works In Schools.” One of the “big three” key strategies: Providing quality health education, including sexual health education.

In my school district, a semester of health education has long been a high school graduation requirement, and our program is seen as a model of innovation and excellence.

However, many students, families, and educators recognized that young people needed to get the information we cover before high school. That’s why, in 2015, SFUSD started its first middle school health education classes.

Since then, the program has grown steadily, with more middle schools adding health classes each year. Now most SFUSD middle schools had health classes on their rosters, and we have a terrific cadre of enthusiastic, well-trained middle school health teachers in place.

Unfortunately, we recently learned that this middle school health education program is at risk of being eliminated, and we’ve been kicking into action to save it.

I firmly believe that defunding, eliminating, or turning these classes into “electives” will harm young people. Today, I want to tell you about what we’ve been doing and why I think its important, both because we could use your support and because I think there are many lessons here that could be applied in other communities.

What I Told The School Board

Earlier this week, I stepped up to the podium at the San Francisco Board of Education meeting and delivered this public comment:

I’m Christopher Pepper. I’m a teacher on special assignment and I help coordinate and support our amazing health education program.

I’m coming to you tonight in a state of alarm about your proposal to eliminate middle school health classes.

After a full decade of growth, where we have steadily moved closer to our goal of having health classes in every middle school, our teachers now being told their jobs won’t exist next year.

This is a huge mistake.

Health classes provide an opportunity for young people to learn about vaping, periods, suicide, and sexual harassment from well-trained teachers who really care about them.

Health education should be a rite of passage for all students. Instead of cutting it, I recommend making it a scheduled semester-long class for all 7th graders. At minimum, you should find a way to keep our current program in place.

Please save middle school health education!

Students Say Middle School Health Classes Matter

After hearing about these proposed cuts, some students who are now in high school have been sharing their experiences with middle school health education. I was particularly touched by this statement from a 9th grader:

I have been struggling with my mental health since 7th grade, and for a long time, I didn’t really understand what was happening to me. Some days were tough, and I felt overwhelmed, stressed, and confused. Health class helped me put words to what I was feeling and helped me realize that mental health is just as important as physical health. Learning about emotions, stress, and coping skills made me feel less alone and showed me that what I was experiencing was real and valid.

The idea of the health class being cut makes me feel worried and upset. Health class isn’t just another class, it teaches things that actually matter in real life. For students who are struggling like I was, this class can be one of the only places where mental health is talked about openly and seriously. Taking it away could make students feel ignored or unsupported.

If health class is removed, I don’t know where young people will learn accurate information about their bodies and mental health. A lot of people turn to social media, but that isn’t always reliable. Because I know that if I never had health class, I would’ve turned to social media because mental health isn’t talked about in my family, and I know that some students also don’t feel comfortable talking about their mental health. Not everyone feels comfortable asking parents or adults questions.

I Told Everyone That “Our District Was Smart To Add Health Education To Middle School”

Getting health classes established in middle school took a lot of time and effort, and required redesigning the middle school day. This redesign had a lot of benefits, but large systems changes like this take time and always encounter some resistance. To make sure these changes stuck, we had to be persistent, tenacious, and committed to a long-term vision of success. We knew that if we could get health classes established in a few key middle schools, we’d develop some momentum to keep going.

By August of 2019, I was so excited about these burgeoning efforts that I wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle:

High school health teachers get these kinds of questions all of the time:

“Weed is a plant, so it’s not dangerous, right?”
“What are periods even for?”
“Do all carbs make you fat?”
“Am I normal?”

I’ve always been surprised at the gaps in students’ basic knowledge about health. They often enter ninth grade with many questions about their bodies, their development and their feelings.

That’s why I am thrilled that the San Francisco Unified School District has a new initiative to make sure all students get to take a health-education class in middle school.

Middle schoolers need help understanding how their bodies are changing, how to navigate pressures around sexuality and substance use, and how to help friends who are struggling with mental health concerns.

As part of SFUSD’s Middle Grade Redesign Initiative, students will take a trimester of health in both seventh and eighth grade, along with art, computer science and world language. Importantly, these won’t be “elective” classes that only some students will get to take — they will be built into everyone’s schedules. The redesign is being piloted at two schools this fall and will eventually roll out at all San Francisco middle schools.

To get ready for this change, SFUSD has been providing lots of professional development and credential support to educators who want to teach middle school health. There’s now a whole cadre of caring teachers who are excited to make health education a rite of passage in middle school.

As these classes are implemented, I look forward to spending less time catching high schoolers up on basic information, and more time delving deeply into issues like planning healthy meals, practicing mindfulness and preventing sexual harassment.

Health education class will give middle school students in San Francisco a safe, caring place to talk about their concerns, find real answers and get support when they need it. Teachers may not be able to make all the drama and worries of middle school go away, but there’s a lot we do a lot to improve the experience and prepare our young people for healthy lives. I’m excited that San Francisco is taking this progressive step forward to meet the needs of our youth.

Why Is Health Education Threatened Now?

In our district, unlike some other places, there really hasn’t been much opposition to health education. The proposed cuts seem to be almost entirely budget-related. We had been using a grant to support the middle school health education rollout (it paid for 1/2 of each health teacher’s salary). That grant is ending at the end of this school year, which means that that schools would need to pay for their health teacher’s full salary out of their site budgets, in the same way they pay for the salaries of their math, science, and English teachers. Unfortunately, the first response to this change was not “let’s get creative and find some funding to keep our awesome health classes in middle school” but “let’s eliminate the health classes.”

I do have hope that this train can be reversed. Just last month, the school district reversed its plan to eliminate dozens of social work positions after “a riotous school board meeting at which dozens of students called out the district for neglecting their well-being and communities.”

Public advocacy can prompt a lot of change.

How To Advocate For Health Education

It can be hard to know where to start with a campaign to support health ed. Here are some ideas I shared on CaliforniaHealthEducation.org

Educate the School Board of Education:

• Include student, parent and community members’ voices.

• Present Health Education as solutions to relevant community level health

  needs (such as vaping or mental health concerns).

Educate school administrators on need for health education:

• Share best practice models.

• Identify student needs using local/site data.

• Provide support with creating a suitable master schedule.

Work with student, parent and community partners to build advocacy for programs.

Pro Tips

• Establish a guiding principle/philosophy forwhy health and how health education should occur.

• Capitalize on local city health issues, to promote health education.

• Work with local partners to make education relevant and build a guest speaker

  pool.

• Test models at pilot schools before expanding to the entire district.

• Build a sense of community among health teachers throughout the district.

• Invest in existing teachers who want to obtain a secondary Health Credentials.

• Educate teachers on the need for understanding new research and evolving health education with trends over time.

• Education on media and data literacy for teachers.

• Ensure universal health education exposure in secondary schools; identify a district-wide standard for length of time (trimester, semester, etc.) and specific grade level for implementation.

• Establish trust with upper-level management and school administrators by being responsive to their needs.

One Last Thing

• Feel free to reach out to members of the San Francisco Board of Education and let them know how important middle school health education is and why we should be working hard to keep it in place.

Recent Teen Health Today Highlights

• Michael Pollan Takes On The New Food Pyramid

  The “Omnivore’s Dilemma” author would like a word. PLUS: Why is smoking making a comeback with Gen Z?

• Raising Teens Today - A Roundtable Discussion

  Todd Kashdan, Joanna Schroeder, and Christopher Pepper in conversation

• How To Become A “Trusted Adult” For Teens

  Great tools for getting better at talking about substance use

If you enjoyed this post, please forward it to someone else who might like it, and click the ❤️ or 🔁 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏🏼