Well Beyond Medicine: The Nemours Children's Health Podcast · Nemours Children's Health

Ep. 158: Talking With Teens: Honest Conversations That Build Connection

·30 min·2 clips

Joanna Schroeder says boys are rarely asked about love, intimacy, and emotional trust.

1. Well Beyond Medicine: The Nemours Children's Health Podcast talks with Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder about conversations with teenage boys on health, emotions, relationships, and masculinity. 2. Christopher Pepper is a veteran health educator in San Francisco public schools, and Joanna Schroeder is a writer, editor, parent of three teens, and co-author of Talk to Your Boys. 3. The episode asks what adults need to say to boys in a tech-driven, social media-soaked world so they can grow into confident, compassionate men. 4. Pepper says many boys move through middle school and high school with only surface-level talk about sports or video games. 5. He says boys often report that adults are not curious about their lives or about questions such as what it means to be a man. 6. He says the book exists because many conversations are simply missing, especially around identity and values. 7. Pepper says boys often struggle with friendships and need more explicit practice in how to be a good friend. 8. He says phones, texting, social media, and video games now carry much of boys' social life, while adults lose the ability to overhear those exchanges the way they once could with a wall phone. 9. Schroeder says parents are split between giving children internet access early and withholding it until 16 or 18. 10. She says group chats and direct messages now handle social planning, so telling kids to get off their phones can leave them isolated from peers. 11. Schroeder recommends introducing texting and some social media in sixth or seventh grade with supervision on a parent's device. 12. She gives examples such as a 13-year-old Instagram account, a non-cellular tablet, and adult guidance about who to invite to the basketball courts or coffee shop after school. 13. Pepper says he was drawn to Schroeder's writing about social media leading boys toward extremist content through jokes and memes, especially for white boys exposed to racist, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic messages online. 14. He says the book is meant to be a tool someone can open to page 48 and use to start an awkward conversation. 15. Schroeder says some of the book's most important chapters are about love, intimacy, consent, romance, pornography, racism, ethics, values, and substance use. 16. Pepper says adults should not wait for children to bring up hard topics, because most teens will not do that on their own. 17. He says parents can begin with a simple admission such as, 'This is super awkward,' and can revisit a conversation if it does not go well the first time. 18. The interview style is practical and advice-driven, with Carol Vassar asking for concrete examples and both guests answering with scripts, routines, and everyday cues. 19. Parents, teachers, pediatricians, and mentors of teenage boys. 20. Listeners seeking entertainment-only conversation or a fiction-driven show.

As heard by us

A practical guide to conversations adults keep putting off.

The episode focuses on the conversations adults often put off with teenage boys: health, emotions, relationships, love, ethics, and how to help them move toward adulthood in a world shaped by tech and social media.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For the conversation you know you should have, but keep putting off.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Well Beyond Medicine: The Nemours Children's Health Podcast