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As a mother of two little girls, I expected that puberty would be a tempestuous time for our family, full of emotional roller coasters and bodily changes. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. When my oldest daughter turned 9, her pediatrician said she could get her period within the year. I was blindsided: When I was growing up, girls expected to get their periods around the age of 13. I rushed out to buy a pack of menstrual pads to keep in her backpack, in case she gets her first period in school, and ordered The Care and Keeping of You, the iconic puberty guide that has sold 8 million copies since it debuted in 1998. I’m far from the only flummoxed parent. Generation Alpha girlsthe oldest of whom are just entering middle schoolare expected to go through puberty between six months and two years earlier than their parents. But don’t panic. Help has arrived in the form of Less Awkward, a company that provides resources that allow children, parents, and schools to better navigate puberty. Less Awkward is the brainchild of a pediatrician, Cara Natterson, who has written extensively about puberty (including serving as the medical consultant on The Care and Keeping of You), and a puberty educator, Vanessa Kroll Bennett, whose career has been devoted to helping girls build self-esteem. In the past, parents could look back at their own adolescence as a guide for what might happen to their children, but today’s kids are experiencing adolescence differently than any previous generation. And while there’s an abundance of resources for early childhood, it’s far harder to find reliable information about how to navigate this brave new world of puberty. Many parents today are looking for reliable parenting information beyond books, and through other forms of media such as apps, podcasts, Instagram, and TikTok. Dr. Becky Kennedy, a guru for parents of young children, has mastered the art of speaking to Gen Z and millennial parents on social media and through her new AI-powered app that provides parents with answers tailored to their specific problems. Natterson and Bennett are following a similar playbook, picking up where Dr. Becky leaves off, and guiding families through the transitions children will face between the ages of 8 and 18. It’s an approach that seems to be resonating with parents, who are willing to pay to use these services. Natterson and Bennett started Less Awkward in 2021 as a podcast called This Is So Awkward. And as their audience has grown to more than 2.5 million listeners a month, so have their ambitions. They recently turned Less Awkward into a full-fledged resource for parents with puberty-aged children, including a $10 a month hub that gives them access to videos, workshops, and even an AI chatbot that allows parents to ask specific questions and receive answers trained on Less Awkward content. And this year, they’re expanding into schools with a curriculum meant to improve the way kids learn about puberty. Given the relative lack of resources for parents of tweens and teens, Natterson and Bennett want to provide trustworthy, evidence-based advice that is tailored to the very unique circumstances today’s kids are facing. But it turns out, this is also a recipe for a new kind of parenting business. “There is this wide open lane,” Bennett says. “We wanted to fill it quickly because we believe we can change a child’s trajectory if we can surround them with empathy and community during these years, rather than ignoring or judging them.” The Brave New World of Puberty Over the past five years, the media has been flooded with unsettling stories about how puberty is shifting earlier. In 2022, The New York Times reported that girls were developing breasts as young as 6. Last year, NPR described how more girls were getting their periods before the age of 9. Parents everywhere began to panic. Doctors have been observing this trend for several decades now. In 1997, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department at Duke University Medical Center, published a longitudinal study of 17,000 girls, which found that they were hitting puberty at the age of 10, a year earlier than girls in the 1960s. Many studies since have found that all over the world, puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s. We see a similar pattern, though less extreme, in boys. Researchers don’t fully understand why this is happening. But newer studiesthe ones which newspapers have covered in recent yearssuggest that earlier puberty may be the result of obesity, childhood stress, and the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals in our personal care products. All of this set off alarm bells. As puberty experts, Natterson and Bennett are very familiar with these studies. But as they saw the panic this news provoked among adults, they were concerned about how little attention people were paying to the kids going through this new experience of puberty. “There was so much Monday morning quarterbacking about what’s causing this earlier puberty,” Bennett says. “What we cared about was the 45 million kids going through puberty right now. They need reliable information from adults who aren’t freaking out.” When they looked around, they couldn’t find many resources for parents and kids trying to navigate these years. Natterson, who helped write the updated version of The Care and Keeping of You, arguably the most influential puberty guidebook on the market, believed that families were craving more knowledge and guidanceparticularly since puberty itself is evolving. But while there is an abundance of resources about each stage of early childhood, there are relatively few resources for tweens and teens. “The parent industry drops kids like hot potatoes after kindergarten,” Natterson says. Natterson and Bennett have theories about why this is the case. For one thing, many adults today dealt with the trials of puberty on their own, without much support from their parents or communities, so they assume their job is to distance themselves from their children during these years. There are aso many cultural stereotypes that teenagers are intolerable, prone to violent mood swings, and rude to adults. Even some doctors and psychologists avoid working with adolescents. “It’s an intimidating stage of life,” Bennett says. “It’s unpredictable. And people are scared of dealing with young people’s reactions.” Dr. Rebekah Fenton, who specializes in adolescent medicine (and has no connection to Less Awkward), observes that many pediatricians are not very comfortable speaking with teens, and she wishes there were more resources for them to learn how to speak with older patients. “When we’re dealing with older children who are seeing changes in their own bodies, we really should be having conversations with them directly,” she says. “But there’s a gap in our training when it comes to learning how to speak with teens.” Making It Less Awkward Less Awkward began as a pandemic project. In 2021, in the midst of the lockdown, Natterson and Bennett poured their energies into launching a podcast targeted at parents called This Is So Awkward. They began by covering the basics of puberty today, like when a girl can expect to get her period, how to talk to tweens about sex, and why kids experience emotional swings. The show quickly developed an audience, racking up hundreds of thousands of listeners, and Natterson and Bennett began to tackle more complex and nuanced questions about the sociocultural impacts of earlier puberty. For instance, even though girls’ bodies are developing faster, they are not more emotionally mature; yet other people might sexualize them because they look older than they are. “When strangers on the street are sexualizing 9-year-olds, this has an impact on their mental health and self-esteem,” Bennett says. “But we don’t need to assume that young girls are going to have these negative outcomes. There are plenty of things we can do to intervene.” [Cover Images: Less Awkward] Soon, Natterson and Bennett were flooded with requests to conduct workshops at schools and other organizations. It wasn’t long before they couldn’t keep up with these requests. Their solution was to write a book so they could get their ideas into the hands of more people. In 2023, they published This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained. It explains the science of puberty as well as covers their approach to parenting, which is all about staying connected to children during this period and creating spaces for conversation. Fenton believes it is critical to offer parents and kids more information about puberty and thinks it is good that Less Awkward is creating resources that are easy to digest. “The main resource families have access to these days is books, and many are very research-heavy rather than practical,” she says. “This information needs to be in a form that parents and children will be able to receive it, like social media posts, podcasts, and videos.” Now, Natterson and Bennett are thinking about how to make their content accessible across even more formats. They’ve spent the last few years building “The Hub,” a website that makes it easy for parents to access all of the Less Awkward content, organized by theme, at a price of $10 per month. If a parent is trying to help their child deal with acne or a friendship problem, they can search for the topic and find everything from short social media videos to long-form podcasts that address the issue. They’ve also built an AI tool on the site that is trained on all of Natterson and Bennett’s work, allowing parents to ask more specific questions and get Less Awkward-approved answers, tailored to their situations. This approach is similar to Dr. Becky Kennedy, who became a guru to millennials during the pandemic when she started posting short-form parenting advice videos on Instagram and TikTok. This blossomed into a book called Good Inside, and more recently evolved into an AI-powered app that answers parents’ questions on the go, using Kennedy’s methodology. Beyond the book Natterson and Bennett are now taking their content a step further and bringing it to schools. There isn’t a standardized sex education curriculum that schools across the country use today, and there is a lot of variation in terms of what content they cover. But broadly, many educators aren’t being equipped to handle the complexities of puberty in 2025from the fact that it is happening sooner to the ways that technology is impacting childhood. [Screenshot: Less Awkward] They’ve launched a school-based health education course called That Health Class that provides teachers with the tools to educate kids from fourth grade to high school. They’ve tailored the content to each age, and go beyond biology to consider the sociocultural aspects of puberty. Fifth graders will learn about physical anatomy and periods, but there are also modules about body image, social media, and consent in relationships. By the time kids get to eighth grade, there is a module about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and how to prevent them. “Sex ed is not reliable if its outdated,” Natterson says. “We’re trying to offer relatable content in whatever form a kid and their trusted adults can best receive it.” The curriculum comes with decks and videos that teachers can use in the classroom, as well as professional development content for the educators. And it also gives access to The Hub, so parents can view parallel lessons, allowing them to understand what their childrenare learning and engage them in conversations. “The kids need to be educated about modern puberty, but so do teachers who are teaching them,” Natterson says. While Fenton applauds Less Awkward for helping to spread knowledge about puberty and make the concept less terrifying, she hopes theyand other puberty educatorscontinue to make a lot of their content free. “I’m always a little worried education is available to parents who have the resources, even though every parent needs it,” she says. “We should be trying to make as much high-quality, reliable information as possible free.” If there’s one message that Bennett wants people to take away from the whole Less Awkward approach, it’s that puberty doesn’t have to be such a difficult time for children, parents, and their teachers. In her experience, it can also be a very rich time of connection between children and their parents, laying the foundation for a deeper lifelong relationship. But to get there, we need to rewrite the cultural narrative about puberty. “We all have baggage and trauma from these years,” Bennett says. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can rewrite the script.”
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Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isnt just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized. The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having too much money, there are striking cultural differences. In wealthy, more economically equal countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, people were more likely to say that having too much money is immoral. In countries that are poorer and more unequal, such as Peru or Nigeria, people tended to view wealth accumulation as more acceptable. Beyond economics, we found that judgments about excessive wealth are also shaped by deeper moral intuitions. Our study drew on moral foundations theory, which proposes that peoples sense of right and wrong is built on six core valuescare, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, and purity. We found that people who highly value equality and purity were more likely to see excessive wealth as wrong. The equality result was expected, but the role of purity was more surprising. Purity is usually associated with ideas about cleanliness, sanctity, or avoiding contaminationso finding that it is associated with negative views about wealth gives new meaning to the phrase filthy rich. As a social psychologist who studies morality, culture, and technology, Im interested in how these kinds of judgments differ across groups and societies. Social and institutional systems interact with individual moral beliefs, shaping how people view culture war issues such as wealth and inequalityand, in turn, how they engage with the policies and conflicts that emerge around them. Why it matters Billionaires wield growing influence in politics, technology, and global development. The richest 1% of people on Earth own more wealth than 95% of people combined, according to Oxfam, an organization focused on fighting poverty. Efforts to address inequality by taxing or regulating the rich may, however, rest on a mistaken assumptionthat the public generally condemns extreme wealth. If most people instead view amassing wealth as morally justifiable, such reforms could face limited support. Our findings suggest that in countries where inequality is highly visible and persistent, people may adapt by morally justifying their structural economic system, arguing that it is fair and legitimate. In wealthier, more equal societies, people appear more sensitive to the potential harms of excess. While our study shows that most people around the world do not view excessive wealth as morally wrong, those in wealthier and more equal countries are far more likely to condemn it. That contrast raises a sharper question: When people in privileged societies denounce and attempt to limit billionaires, are they shining a light on global injusticeor projecting their own sense of guilt? Are they projecting a moral principle shaped by their own prosperity onto poorer countries, where wealth may represent survival, progress, or even hope? What still isnt known One open question: How do these views change over time? Do attitudes shift when societies become wealthier or more equal? Are young people more likely than older generations to condemn billionaires? Our study offers a snapshot, but long-term research could reveal whether moral judgments track broader economic or cultural changes. Another uncertainty is the unexpected role of purity. Why would a value tied to cleanliness and sanctity shape how people judge billionaires? Our follow-up study found that purity concerns extended beyond money to other forms of excess, such as disapproving of having too much ambition, sex or fun. This suggests that people may see excess itselfnot just inequalityas corrupting. Whats next Were continuing to study how cultural values, social systems, and moral intuitions shape peoples judgments of fairness and excessfrom views of wealth and ambition to knowledge and AI computing power. Understanding these gut-level, moral reactions within larger social systems matters for debates about inequality. But it can also help explain how people evaluate technologies, leaders, and institutions that accumulate disproportionate, excessive power or influence. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Jackson Trager is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Below, Zelana Montminy shares five key insights from her new book, Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction. Zelana is a behavioral scientist who is pioneering a transformative approach to mental health and resilience. She has built a career advising and speaking for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and academic institutions. Her recent clients include American Express, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Bank of America, UCLA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She appears regularly on The Doctors, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Access Hollywood. Whats the big idea? We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our attention and, with it, our capacity to think clearly, feel deeply, and live purposefully. Finding Focus is about how to come home to yourself and what matters most. Focus isnt about what we pay attention to; its about how we move through the world. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Zelana herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Focus is not about forcing attention. Focus is about creating the conditions for attention. We treat focus like a musclepush harder, power through, tune outbut attention doesnt work that way. Its more like breath. The more we grip it, the more it slips away. Think of a snow globe. When you stop shaking it, the flakes settle. Clarity rises. Focus works in the same way. The real work of harnessing attention is not about willpower, but rather its about the conditions. Its about clearing the clutter mentally, physically, and emotionally so that your attention can finally exhale. 2. We are addicted to avoiding discomfort. Lets be honest, most of us dont pick up our phones out of curiosity. We pick them up to escape boredom, stillness, and that quiet ache just beneath the surface. One study found that people preferred electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts. Thats how intolerable stillness has become. But if we want to reclaim our attention, we must reclaim our capacity to stay with the pause, the discomfort, the urge, because distraction isnt random. Its patterned, protective, and emotional. If we want to change it, we have to start in the discomfort. 3. Do you remember how it feels to focus? We talk about focus like its purely mental: a task, a strategy, a checkbox. But real focus is also a state. Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive. The problem is that weve been so overstimulated, scattered, and flooded with inputs that we hardly even recognize that feeling of focus anymore. Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive. Thats why I created something called The Focus Baseline. Its a guided process to help re-attune to your own internal clarity and remember what being present feels like in your body, not just your brain. Once you feel it, you can find it again because you know what to access. That becomes your compass through the noise, chaos, and overwhelm. 4. Theres no clarity without grief. This is the quiet truth underneath so much of our distraction. When we finally slow down, put down the phone, close the tabs, and turn off the noise, the first thing that rises is not peace. Its grief and loss. Grief over how long weve been on autopilot. Grief over what weve missed, what weve buried, and what we didnt let ourselves feel. One reader wrote to me after finishing the book and said, When I stopped distracting myself, I realized Id been numbing the ache of being alive. Thats it right there. Focus asks us to sit with that ache, not to fix it or outrun it. In making room for it, we give that ache less power over us, and slowly, over time, it dulls. That room and that honesty are what clear the fog. Its what makes space for something real, and in that realness, we can reconnect with our attention and focus. 5. Hold focus and tenderness at the same time. Weve been taught that focus means grit and control. But the most powerful, grounded people arent the ones who shut down their feelings to get things done. Theyre the ones who know how to hold both clarity and compassion, direction and depth, presence and heart. Thats the new frontier. Not just the laser-sharp minds that are super productive, but also steady nervous systems that can handle the task switching that comes with tender focus. We dont need more control. We need more coherence. People who can stay regulated under pressurewho can stay human under stressare the ones who will lead us forward. We dont need more control. We need more coherence. If your focus feels fractured, if your mind feels foggy, and if your days feel like a blur, know that youre not broken, failing, or alone. Its literally all of us, and youre responding wisely and humanely to a world that has been at odds with our biology for far too long. But there is another way. You dont have to outsource your attention to the loudest thing in the room. You dont have to perform productivity while feeling completely numb. You can build a different rhythm that feels less like chasing and more like coming home. So much becomes possible when you quiet the noise inside and out and return to your life. Stay grounded, stay human, and above all, stay close to what matters. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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