Cara Natterson's Blog

It’s just about time for the annual onslaught of year-end reviews. Pretty soon, every news show, magazine, and digital outlet will whip out montages of The Best Of. While I will confess that the tradition makes me a little batty, I also completely get the need for a break from the content creation grind. Spoiler alert: I will not be sending you a highlights reel about anything – not about COVID, and certainly not about puberty. (Though I can't resist a visual summary of 2021 vaccines-that-went-into-my-arm!)

Feels important to take a moment, though, to share a few things that popped onto my screen this week. READ MORE

Let’s start with this: apparently, it’s pronounced Oh-mic-ron. If you were playing charades, you might act it out by communicating that it s like the first syllables of the Old McDonald Had a Farm. Big props to any person who could guess Old McDon and then Omicron from there.

Back it up: Let’s start with what we know. Last Tuesday, South African scientists reported the detection of a new COVID variant found on tests taken the week prior. READ MORE

Amidst a surge of gratitude newsletters and holiday sale alert emails, I am suddenly guilty of sending both. My puberty company, OOMLA, is deep into its CYBRA weekend deal (which is a total misnomer given that it stretches out over two weekends and the week in between – but... READ MORE

Today we launched a new episode of The PUBERTY PODCAST. Full disclosure: it's long. But follow up disclosure: it's well worth it. That's because our guest is Dr. Louise Greenspan, the revered pediatric endocrinologist behind some of the most important studies documenting the earlier march of puberty. Louise has been at this work for two and a half decades. People were so hungry for the information she was discovering, that in 2014, she co-authored The New Puberty to summarizing her findings and postulate all of the reasons behind them. READ MORE

Doesn't it always seem as though kids are on the cusp? For me, teetering on the verge has been the overwhelming theme of parenthood: feels like I am constantly watching them just about to do something, desperate for them to get there (even when I know they can and will), and then almost as soon as they do… READ MORE

During lockdown, when life was limited to the walls of your house and the air of the neighboring streets, it was easier to focus narrowly on COVID. At least it was for me. I could churn these newsletters quickly and easily, mostly because I had nothing but time to watch/read/listen to every kernel of information out there. But now, with our communities almost fully reopened and well back into the…READ MORE

I think a lot about one particularly classic treatment paradox: convincing a psychiatric patient to take medication. At first, this can require major negotiation, but once the drugs begin to work and neurochemical balance appears, the patient feels better enough to buy… READ MORE

For no explicable reason, predicting what might happen in the future makes many of us feel better... or worse, I suppose, depending upon what we've predicted. But there's something intoxicating about this universal game. If we predict something good and we're right, it's… READ MORE

Britney Spears wants to be emancipated. So do a sizable number of teenagers across the country whose parents have pressed pause on their COVID vaccination. Never did I ever think I would be writing about Britney and the right to get vaccines in a single paragraph but there we have it, and I am pro both. 

Britney has lived under the conservatorship of her father for the past 13 years, an arrangement stemming from…READ MORE

It’s all happening: days growing longer and warmer, schools letting out (right after they let in!), and just beneath the normal buzzy feeling of the start of summer sits an almost indescribable once-in-a-lifetime energy of reopening.

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