Ep01: Reproductive Science 1, 2, 3

This is reproductive health, not sex ed. Teresa Woodruff reframes the whole conversation around puberty, retires the fifth-grade permission slip, and makes the case for teaching the body the way we teach math: one step at a time.

Transcript

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Welcome, everybody. I'm so glad you're here for Puberty 101, episodes that provide you with tools for navigating developmental changes of a child in your life. I'm Teresa Woodruff, and this podcast is made specifically for whomever you are to help navigate the kids you love through an important time in their lives. This includes parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, teachers, and caregivers of every kind. If there's a child somewhere between the ages of five and 15 in your orbit. This podcast is for you. My goal with this season is to give you fundamental knowledge, real tools, and actual talking points that will give you confidence as you navigate the very normal, sometimes bewildering, always significant developmental changes happening in the children you love as they grow up. Let me give you a disclosure, though. This is not a normal podcast. First, the tools I'll describe are materials that I've built with my lab and not AI driven. They've been tested with real kids and parents. Second, the tools I'll describe in this first season are tangible materials a coloring book for five year olds, cartoons for eight year olds, a menstrual clock, and game concepts for tweens. While talking about a coloring book that you can't see through your earbuds might sound unusual. I think it will be incredibly useful for you to hear how you might use these assets in your own setting. This is a multimedia approach with resources on our Repro 101 app and on our website, repro101 that can be used in tandem with this podcast. There are even more tools that we will talk through, including a free online course called Introduction to Reproduction. Great ways for you to learn the material so you're ready now or in the future. I do want to say, though, that I'm not going to answer all the questions a child might ask you, like, how did baby sister get in there? Instead, I'm going to give you teaching guides and resources to have conversations on your own terms or when questions arise that will be enabling to your confidence and readiness for this next phase of life with the kids you love. That's a lot about what it isn't. And now that we're over that speed bump, let me tell you what it is. So first of all, who am I and why should you listen to me? Fair question. Let me tell you a little bit about who I am, because I want you to trust. What I'm sharing with you is grounded in science, not opinion or anxiety or not what someone overheard in a school parking lot. I am a reproductive scientist. I've spent my entire career decades actually studying the reproductive system. Specifically, I've focused much of my research on the ovary and have published research also on the testis. Now I know what some of you just did. Your eyebrows went up a little. Maybe you glanced around to make sure no one was listening. She said, ovary and testis on a podcast. Yes, I did, and I'm going to say these words many times during our discussion, because one of the things that we're going to do together in this series is make words of the reproductive system feel completely, boringly, wonderfully normal. I've published scientific research, trained the next generation of scientists, and worked at the intersection of science and medicine to understand how the reproductive system develops and functions throughout a person's entire life. I've had the privilege of leading major research programs, working with institutions across the country, and contributing to national conversations about reproductive health and science policy. I was the director of the center for Reproductive Science and founded the Women's Health Research Institute at Northwestern University and coined the term oncofertility, fertility management for young cancer patients. That's now an established field of medicine.

More on that later. I was also dean of the graduate school at northwestern and am now president emerita of Michigan State University. So my career has been a tapestry of science and leadership. Recently, I was featured in a book for kids and adults called Wonder Women of Science: 4:10

Twelve Geniuses Who Are Currently Rocking Science, Technology, and the World, by Tiera Fletcher and Ginger Rue. I'm very proud of my career and the papers we have published. But here's what I've learned after all these years. The biggest gap in reproductive health is not in the laboratory. It's in the living room. So here with you in this podcast, I'm happy to take what we've learned in the laboratory and translate our work into something. You, a parent, a family member, or an educator can use so that when your favorite growing person asks a question about their development, something you weren't expecting and you have approximately four seconds to respond before the moment passes, you're equipped with the language and concepts to help navigate the moment. So this is exactly why I'm here today, talking with you to get you ready. And that is exactly why I built the tools and materials that accompany this podcast to capture that fleeting moment and make it something memorable and valuable to both of you. So let's talk a bit about permission. Close your eyes for a second. Well, don't close them if you're driving, please. But mentally go back to around the fifth grade. Or maybe it was fourth or maybe sixth for you, but somewhere around that age, a letter came home. Or maybe you were just handed a form at school, a permission slip. Your parents had to sign it so that you could attend a special class one class one hour in the gym or the library, wherever they could herd a group of squirming ten-year-olds in with one very uncomfortable teacher. Now, here's what I want you to really sit with. Nowhere else in the entire academic curriculum does this happen. We don't send home permission slips for the unit on the digestive system. No parent has ever been asked to authorize their child learning about how the lungs exchange oxygen, or how the heart pumps blood through the circulatory system. Can you imagine? Dear parent or guardian, we will be covering photosynthesis next week. Please sign and return. Would kind of be absurd. And yet for the reproductive system, a system that is absolutely as biological, as scientific and as fundamental as any other system in the human body. We require a signature. We treat it as if it's something dangerous, something other, something that needs to be permitted. And that permission slip tells children something before the class even starts. It tells them this topic is different. This topic is sensitive. This topic might be a little bit bad. Here's why I think that happens. And this is important from the very beginning. We frame the reproductive system as something sexual rather than something biological. We've conflated the two. We've wrapped basic anatomy and physiology in a layer of adult, meaning that a ten year old has no framework for yet. And so the permission slip isn't just administrative. It is, in a way, a signal, a flashing light that says warning adult content ahead even when the content is just how the body works. For girls, the content is about the menstrual cycle, the period. Now I have the little pink pamphlet used for my fifth grade class called You're a Woman. Now. It's filled with good advice on the period, which is great, and it references the multimedia approach in my day, which is a Walt Disney production called The Story of Menstruation. Nothing is necessarily bad about this information, although some is a bit cringeworthy in our modern eyes. But what that does is center the reproductive cycle for girls around bleeding. In this series, we're going to take back the language of reproduction from sex ed and give centrality to the ovaries and the testis, as opposed to bleeding. Now let's get back to the day of the sex ed class itself. I call this the great separation. The boys go one way, the girls go another. One group gets marched to the gym, the other to the library. And right there in the hallway, in that moment of separation, something happens that is quietly shaped generations of confusion, embarrassment, and silence. The mystery begins because what message does that separation send? It says, what is happening to your body is not something the other half of the human population needs to know about. It's yours to be embarrassed about. Privately, girls don't learn what boys are going through, and boys don't learn what girls are experiencing. They all just sit in their separate rooms staring at diagrams, hoping the teacher doesn't make eye contact with them and counting down the minutes until it's over. And then they pour back into the hallway together. And what happens in that hallway? Jokes and giggles. Eyeroll, snickering, the 'ew' faces and the gross reactions, and the nervous laughter that adolescents have used for generations to cover up the fact that they are deeply, profoundly uncomfortable because they were just handed information about their bodies in the most embarrassing, perhaps ill timed, one size fits all way imaginable the biological education completely lost, buried under the giggles. And then those kids grow up and they become us, the adults who are now listening to this podcast trying to figure out what to say to our own kids because we genuinely don't know. And it's not our fault because we were never really taught either. Think about this for a moment. This is multi-generational. The discomfort you may feel now, even just thinking about talking to your kids about reproductive health. That discomfort was handed to you probably in a school hallway sometime around the fifth grade. We can do better, and that's why we're here together. All right. I want to share what I consider the first and most important principle of everything I'm going to teach you in this series, and I want you to hear it, because it might be the single most useful framework you take away from today. In this podcast, we're teaching reproductive health, not sex ed. Now, that might sound like the same thing. Well, they're not, and I want to use a metaphor to show you exactly why. Because I think it will land with you immediately. Think about how we teach math. We don't walk into a kindergarten classroom and open with calculus. Nobody does that. We start with counting one, two, three. Then we move to addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, then fractions, which, let's be honest, feel hard enough on their own, then algebra, then geometry. And eventually, after years of building a solid foundation, we arrive at calculus when a student is developmentally ready for it. Nobody argues with that sequence. It makes complete intuitive sense. And not to hammer this home, but nobody sends home a permission slip for long division. We simply trust that math is math. It's knowledge. It's something children deserve to learn in the right sequence, at the right pace. Building from simple to complex in a way that actually makes the information stick. Well, reproductive health knowledge can work in the same way. We start with the basics. This is a body. These are the parts. Here's how it grows and changes over time. And we build from there. Year by year, conversation by conversation at the child's pace and at your pace. As the trusted adult in their life. We meet them where they are developmentally, not where a school calendar or permission slip or a one size fits all class schedule says they should be. Sex education, in the traditional sense are conversations about intimacy, relationships, and adult decision. That is the calculus. It has its own enormously important place. It matters deeply, but it comes later, built on a solid foundation of real biological knowledge. And I'll tell you right now, in a later season, we will absolutely get there. We'll build a foundation for those conversations as well, but we're going to do it in the right order. For now, reproductive health is learning to count. And what have we been doing for generations? We've been skipping in one hour in fifth grade, in a gym with boys separated from girls straight to calculus, and then wondering why nobody understands the math. When we slow down, we can let reproductive health be exactly what it is biology, science. Completely normal. We'll take the taboo out of the equation. We'll make it possible for five year olds to learn something age appropriate about how the body works, and for nine year olds to understand a little more, and then 13 year olds to understand even more. Layer by layer, year by year. This is the model. Before we wrap up today, I want to leave you with something that I believe could change things for the next generation. What if boys actually understood what girls were going through? Not the rumors or the jokes, not the whispered hallway mysteries, the actual biology, the hormones, the real experience of a body changing in ways that aren't always predictable or comfortable or convenient. And what if girls understood what boys were experiencing? The same thing. Real science, plain language. No mockery, no mystery. We might actually foster empathy. We might raise a generation of better friends, better partners, and better humans. What might that look like in practice? Well, maybe it looks like a little more patience in middle school. Maybe it looks like fewer kids feeling utterly alone and ashamed of what's happening to their bodies. Maybe. And I genuinely believe this. It looks like a generation of better friends, better partners, people who have more empathy for one another because they actually understand one another. This is not a small thing. This is, in fact, a radical and exciting idea. And it starts right here with us, the adults being willing to learn first so that we can teach. So over the next series of episodes, I'm going to take you through short, accessible, useful ways to think about puberty and reproductive health. We'll cover the biology in plain language. No graduate degree required, I promise. And we will talk about what's happening developmentally, emotionally and physically at different stages. And I'll hand you specific concrete tools that you can use in real conversations with real kids. This matters enormously. I'm Teresa Woodruff, and this is Puberty 101.