Dr. Cara Natterson is a pediatrician, speaker, educator, and leading voice in tween and teen health. She graduated from Harvard college and Johns Hopkins Medical School and trained in pediatrics at UCSF. Cara launched her career at Tenth Street Pediatrics in Santa Monica. She traded patient care for writing, and has authored 10 books including the New York Times bestselling The Care and Keeping of You series with American Girl. In 2020, Cara founded the first company aimed at making the tween and teen years more comfortable, starting with physical products. Over the next five years, she partnered with Vanessa Kroll Bennett to create content channels across social media, a podcast called This Is So Awkward (which has 2.5M downloads to date), a growing library of books, and most recently a digital, school-based K-12 health and wellness curriculum that’s not even two years old but already used by schools in seven states and internationally. It’s all in service to her mission—which is, conveniently, also the name of her company: Less Awkward.
Vanessa Kroll Bennett is the founder of Dynamo Girl, a company focused on building kids’ self-esteem through sports, puberty education, and parent workshops. She runs all media at Order of Magnitude, a company dedicated to flipping puberty positive. She co-hosts The Puberty Podcast (with Cara Natterson, MD), hosts Conversations on Parenting and Beyond at the JCC Manhattan, and writes the Uncertain Parenting Newsletter about the messy process of raising tweens and teens. A graduate of Wellesley College, Vanessa holds an MA from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She lives in Northern Westchester with her husband and four teens.
