Tweens confront difficult topics at health and empowerment summit

As a pediatrician, Dr. Lisa Klein gets asked a lot about puberty.

But the Detroit-based doctor also understands that those conversations can be awkward to have, especially for tweens, or those between 8 and 12 years old.

That’s why she, along with Dr. Carrie Leff, started Turning Teen, an organization that provides education on puberty, sexual health and emotional development.

“We didn’t want [tweens] Google searching about their bodies when there were wonderful ways to teach an adult and child together, start that conversation for them, and get that awkwardness out of the way,” Klein said. “We also wanted to facilitate medically accurate, but fun, meaningful conversations about puberty and bodies.”

The organization recently hosted on Sunday, Oct. 19, at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette its first summit, which featured two different educational sessions, as well as an hour for crafting and snacks.

The summit gave tweens, and their trusted adults, an opportunity to hear from Klein about body basics, and from Highland Park resident Leslie Randolph, a life coach, about self-confidence and managing emotions.

After its founding in 2015, Turning Teen expanded nationally, with pediatricians and nurses in several locations throughout the country who speak to groups in their local area. Randolph, who serves as one of the organization’s Chicago-based experts, is one of them.

The organization’s goals are to have open and age-appropriate conversations with tweens about their bodies, puberty and sex — topics that oftentimes lead to awkward conversations between tweens and adults. 

“Turning Teen was founded with the idea of let’s not let that awkwardness turn into shame,” Randolph said.

Randolph spoke about the importance of confidence and how to manage emotions during her talk “Mind Over Mood: Managing Tween and Teen Emotions.” The Highland Park resident became a life coach after the pandemic, but she said that she’s wanted to be a coach “for 20 years.”

“I’d heard a whisper of ‘This is what I want to be doing,’ but I also very quickly heard a rebuttal in my mind that said ‘You want to be a coach? What’s a coach? This isn’t a real job,’” Randolph said.

She said that helping the attendees develop skills to build their confidence won’t just be useful to them in their tween years but will remain a skill that can be utilized throughout their lives.

She added that if she had built up her self-confidence from a younger age, she might not have initially doubted her desire to want to become a life coach.

“Everything always comes back to self-confidence,” Randolph said. “Any goal that someone wanted to go after, anything that they wanted to achieve, the Achilles heel was always a lack of belief in self. If we let our feelings be the drivers of everything we do or don’t do in life, we’re probably not going to be going after goals or chasing dreams.”

The Wilmette event was Turning Teen’s first summit, and Klein said that the summit was “nearly sold out,” with the capacity to fit approximately eight more tweens and their trusted adults.

Highland Park resident Jacqueline Widman attended the event with her daughter, Mikayla, and said that she appreciated her daughter having the opportunity to learn about things at the event to which Widman didn’t have access.

“It was mostly me encouraging her to come out and learn about her body, because it wasn’t until later for me that I learned about all of these things,” Widman said. “I didn’t want her to be in the same boat.”

In addition to the two presentations, attendees had an hour where they could have snacks, including applesauce, cupcakes and popcorn, and take part in making crafts like friendship bracelets, gratitude jars and journals that could be decorated with stickers. 

Another activity for attendees was creating period self-confidence kits: small bags that contained a pad, tampon and a wipe that could be decorated with stickers.

Abbey Shuman, 15, a student at Glenbrook North High School, volunteered at the event by walking attendees through the process of making a period confidence kit. She said that she wanted to volunteer at the event because she wanted to help show that periods shouldn’t be something that triggers embarrassment.

“I think it’s really important that girls don’t feel embarrassed about their periods,” Shuman said. “I know that’s how I felt when I was their age, and now I know that it’s not something that you should be embarrassed about. It’s just a normal thing that happens.”

Shuman said that one of her favorite parts of the event was the one-on-one interactions that she had with attendees who were making the period confidence kits.

“I was just talking to a girl about getting her period, and how it’s not something to be worried about,” Shuman said. “I like that I was able to make her feel better about everything.”

Randolph said that being in a room with others who have gone through the same experience can help tweens to not feel scared about puberty and the changes that it brings along with it.

“If we have knowledge of what’s going on in our bodies, and our brains, it’s empowering,” Randolph said. “Once I have that information, I have agency, and I can normalize ‘Of course this is happening.’ This is an experience that every tween goes through, and when we do events like these and bring people together, it reminds them that they’re not alone in it.”

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