How Can We Make Puberty Less Awkward?
How Can We Make Puberty Less Awkward?
A wonderful new book tries to explain - and normalize - modern puberty. PLUS: How safe is our food supply? Do men trying to "prove their manhood" live shorter lives?
Hello! I’m excited to be back with you, with a small name change - instead of Teaching Health Today, this newsletter will now be called Teen Health Today. Why? Well, it turns out that a lot of parents, caregivers, counselors, and other folks who aren’t teachers are interested in what I cover here, which is wonderful. I want to make sure this newsletter reaches everyone who might find it useful.
Resources
How Should We Talk About Puberty Now?
If you're anything like me, you hesitate to teach or talk about an issue until you feel like you’ve developed some expertise on it yourself. That can make discussing puberty with kids tough, because there are so many things to become an expert on!
It’s especially challenging because many adults never got solid education about puberty themselves, and because researchers have learned so much new information in recent years. That’s why I’m grateful for a wonderful new book, “This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained,” by Vanessa Kroll Bennett and Dr. Cara Natterson.
This book features a ton of science-based information about almost everything that might come up when talking to young people about puberty, presented with care and compassion in an easy-to-understand format.
The authors, who also host the excellent Puberty Podcast, have lots of personal experience with the challenges of raising teens and tweens, and it shows. Reading this book is a great way to help you feel more like an “expert” and develop the confidence to start having these important talks.
Want to know more about what they’ve learned? Check out the delightful series on Instagram where they share “10 Slightly Shocking Facts About Modern Puberty,” listen to them on KQED’s “Forum” or Slate’s “Mom and Dad are Fighting,” or watch them on Good Morning America.
Wellness
Does Pressure to “Be A Man” Shorten Men’s Lives?
It is true: men generally don’t live as long as women. But why? In a fascinating new article, Jill Suttie from the Greater Good Science Center writes about scientists who “wanted to see how beliefs about manhood might result in men engaging in more risky behavior in order to prove themselves.”
They built on prior work that assessed the attitudes about manhood of people in 62 countries, by gathering responses to statements like “Some boys do not become men no matter how old they get”; “It is fairly easy for a man to lose his status as a man”; or “Manhood is not assured—it can be lost.”
The researchers found that men in countries with stronger beliefs that that becoming a man is hard, must be earned, and is easy to forfeit had much higher rates of risk taking and worse health than countries with weaker beliefs.
So what do we do with this information? Suttie interviewed one of the researchers, Joseph Vandello, who thinks that health education courses should challenge masculine beliefs about what it means to be healthy and introduce the importance of mental health early in life. “Boys, especially, need to understand that it’s OK to talk to someone when you’re having problems and to open up emotionally,” he says.
Building Connections Through (Fast) Art
How can we build connections in our communities? Try sitting down with a stranger and drawing them for 60 seconds. In The Importance of Looking at What (and Who) You Don’t See, artist
Who’s Checking On Our Food?
In a funny - and scary - episode of “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver discusses the groups in charge of keeping our food safe – from the FDA, to the USDA, to the Association for Dressings and Sauces.
Keep On Learning
Talking to Youth About the Israel-Hamas War
In its “First Person” series, Chalkbeat features personal essays from students, teachers, and parents. This week, they ran a striking essay from Sari Beth Rosenberg, who teaches U.S. History in New York City.
“By the end of last week, I heard some students walking around asking peers if they were “Team Israeli” or “Team Palestinian.” And sure enough, a student posed that very question to me in front of the whole class.”
Read the essay to see how Rosenberg responded, and click through this excellent collection of resources she provides for help talking to young people about this conflict:
War Grips Israel and Gaza After Surprise Attack from PBS NewsHour Classroom
Processing the Violence in Israel and Gaza from Facing History & Ourselves
The Israel-Hamas War: A Forum for Young People to React in The New York Times
How Do I Talk to My Kids About Violence? from Common Sense Media
What Is U.S. Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis? from the Council on Foreign Relations
If you’re struggling to separate fact from fiction when it comes to navigating news about the war, the News Literacy Project has some great tips here, including:
Analyze what kind of information you’re viewing and be cautious about what you share
Keep in mind that misinformation often flourishes during breaking news events.
Seek credible news sources
The site also has a classroom-ready resource designed to help people answer the question “How do you know what the story is when the story is still developing?”
News
How ‘thinly veiled’ social media ads are influencing what we eat and drink (PBS NewsHour)
News about food safety can be hard to keep straight. That’s been complicated by a little-known tactic used by the food and beverage industry to influence what we eat and drink through social media, the subject of a joint investigation by The Washington Post and The Examination. John Yang speaks with Washington Post health columnist Anahad O’Connor, who worked on the investigation, to learn more. WATCH
Students Are Missing School Because They’re Too Anxious to Show Up (Education Week)
Aside from physical illness and bad weather, anxiety is the top reason high school students missed school in the past year, according to the results of a student survey from the EdWeek Research Center.
Sixteen percent of students who were absent for at least a day in the past year and missed school for reasons other than physical illness said they didn’t attend because of anxiety, and 12 percent said they felt too sad or depressed to attend. READ MORE
Stricter state laws are chipping away at sex education in K-12 schools (ABC News)
A dozen state or county agencies have parted ways with tens of thousands of dollars in federal grants meant to help monitor teenagers' sexual behaviors and try to lower rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
The withdrawals reflect a shift in many states that is further complicating and polarizing sex education in K-12 schools as some Republican-led legislatures more strictly regulate when and what students learn about their bodies. The new laws are part of a broad push to fortify “ parents' rights ” and strike LGBTQ+ content from the classroom, core themes that have flooded the campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. READ MORE