

This Is So Awkward
Peoples Media, This Is So Awkward
This is so awkward…but it doesn’t have to be. These days, puberty starts earlier, lasts longer, and happens with a cellphone in hand. The most trusted voices on puberty, Dr. Cara Natterson and Vanessa Kroll Bennett, are here to remove cringe from this stage of life – not just for kids going through it but also the adults who care about them. With science, guidance and humor, they cover all the physical, emotional, and social changes that happen between ages 8-18 and beyond.Watch the full episodes on Youtube!
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 24, 2026 • 1h 6min
Gynecology for Kids & Teens: Yes, It’s a Thing!
When people think of gynecology, they usually think of care that happens for older teens and adults, from birth control to pregnancy to menopause. But there’s a whole world of gynecologic conditions that affect young girls and adolescents, too. Dr Nichole A Tyson + Dr. Joseph Sanfilippo, giants in the field of Pediatric Adolescent Gynecology, join us for a wide ranging conversation about painful periods, blood disorders, PCOS, endometriosis, MRKH, and STDs.
Show Notes:
NASPAG
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mar 17, 2026 • 55min
Exam Stress: Turning Down the Volume
Exams have always been a stressful part of growing up. But layer on growing college admissions pressure, spiraling teen mental health, and recognition of the wide variety of learning styles, and the volume turns way up. This episode was prompted by a listener's question seeking advice about how to get through exam season from every angle: from the role of AI to the necessity of exams in the first place. We get into it… along with some of our own applicable parenting fails.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mar 10, 2026 • 1h 1min
The Hidden Science of Teen Motivation
What makes kids tick? Even when they appear uninterested, defiant, or lazy, there’s usually much more lurking under the surface. To learn how to pull it out of them––and how to connect and communicate, too––we’re joined by Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes (inspiration for the movie Mean Girls), who has spent her career exploring how to get the best out of tweens and teens.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mar 3, 2026 • 46min
How Kids Get Emotionally Intelligent
Explores how kids develop emotional intelligence and why early scaffolding builds lifelong resilience. Covers neurodiversity, temperament, and cultural influences on emotional learning. Talks practical tools like feeling vocabularies and strategies to move past “I’m fine.” Highlights empathy, self-regulation, decision making, and why asking for help is a strength.

Feb 24, 2026 • 56min
Getting Real About Sex Ed with Shafia Zaloom
Sexuality education is proven to have positive impacts on kids’ lifelong wellbeing in all areas and yet, people assume it only covers S-E-X. In fact, as health educator Shafia Zaloom discusses on the podcast, this corner of education provides young people with a wide variety of life-critical skills like emotional intelligence, boundary setting, conflict resolution, and so much more. Yes, science-based sexual health is an important part of any good education but so too are the cornerstones of humanity like dignity, love, and respect.
Show Notes:
Getting Real About Sex Ed: What Today’s Students Need
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Feb 17, 2026 • 58min
Teaching Kids to Trust their Guts
Gut instinct is only partially innate – it’s also very much learned and developed over time. And it turns out to be a fundamental safety skill kids need to master. To do this, we need to shed the “stranger danger” approach of the 1980s, replacing it with the concept of “tricky people,” because it turns out that those who harm kids are often not strangers to them at all. This episode is all about helping kids recognize when someone makes them uncomfortable, how to set boundaries, and express difficult feelings in relationships.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Feb 10, 2026 • 49min
Parents Have Feelings Too: Anger, Disgust + All the Messy Emotions
Parenting brings up so many difficult emotions like: disgust, disappointment, anger and more. Layer on top the shame parents experience for having those feelings! Two mental health professionals, Hilary Hendel and Julie Fraga, authors of Parents Have Feelings Too, join us to normalize the full emotional landscape of parenting and offer tools for moving forward in loving and constructive ways.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Feb 3, 2026 • 50min
It’s Not Fair!
Kids are constantly analyzing and expressing their views on fairness––they do it in school, at home, on the sports field, basically everywhere. There are two different interpretations of fairness: equity and equality. We explore the difference between meeting each person’s individual needs vs slicing the pie the same way for all. While the constant refrain of “It’s not fair!” can be irritating to adults, the skill of understanding fairness is critical to kids’ social and moral development.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jan 27, 2026 • 53min
Mattering in Today’s World
It’s easy to feel untethered in a modern world filled with stressors and tech-laden realities, but research tells us that the secret sauce is mattering: a combination of feeling valued and offering value back. Mattering fuels wellbeing. Journalist Jennifer Wallace, author of Mattering, joins us to explain this beautiful concept, sharing data-driven ways to achieve it for ourselves, our families, and in our communities.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jan 20, 2026 • 52min
The Wild West of AI + Education
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is affecting every aspect of our lives, including education. When it comes to the impact of AI on kids’ learning and overall wellbeing, we don’t have the luxury of waiting on long-term studies. There is, however, a new “pre-mortem” study out from Brookings, looking at whether AI does more good or more harm in education. Here with the answers is Dr. Rebecca Winthrop, Director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings Institution. She helps make sense of this new landscape and the best way forward for schools, policymakers, and parents.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode on Youtube!
Join the LESS AWKWARD MEMBERSHIP HUB
Go to Quince.com/AWKWARD for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns.
Download the FREE Playbook for Getting Your Kid to Talk
Order our book This Is So Awkward
Check out all our speaking and curriculum at www.lessawkward.com and our super comfy products at www.myoomla.com
To bring us to your school or community email operations@lessawkward.com
To submit listener questions email podcast@lessawkward.com
Produced by Peoples Media
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices


