EP #1027: Puberty Self-Care: Navigating the Challenges with Dr. Cara Natterson

Send us Fan MailCARA NATTERSON, MD, is a pediatrician, consultant, and New York Times bestselling author of puberty and parenting books. In 2020, she launched OOMLA, a company dedicated to making puberty more comfortable, literally.Cara’s journey through health advocacy began at Harvard College, Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the University of California at San Francisco. In 2000, Cara joined Tenth Street Pediatrics in Santa Monica, caring for thousands of kids from birth through their teen years. In 2008, she founded Worry Proof Consulting, a practice that gives parents time their primary doctors often don’t have to cover medical, behavioral, and parenting issues in depth. Cara travels the country speaking to both kids and parents about taking ownership of their health and wellness, translating cutting- edge research into understandable, actionable, and even entertaining information.Cara has served on several boards as a Director or Advisor, including Starlight Children’s Foundation, The Honest Company, Zemcar, Baby2Baby, and The John Thomas Dye School. And when she’s not doing any of this other stuff, she is spending time with the people who make her all the better at it: her husband and two teenage kids.About OOMLA: Julie, the mom of a then fourth grader with budding boobs, called Cara, a similarly situated mom who also happened to be a pediatrician and writer of books about puberty. Julie and Cara didn’t really know one another. The conversation went something like this:Julie: Where do you buy your daughter bras?Cara: I don’t… because they’re categorically terrible! None of them work well or feel good or look anywhere close to cute.Julie: Well first of all, your daughter needs a bra. (Long pause…) And second of all, my mom – who sewed all of the clothes I ever wore as a child, down to my underpants – has made one. Can I bring it by your house so that you can check it out? A few days later Julie, her daughter, and the bra showed up on Cara's front doorstep. At the end of an hour, the two tweens decided they had to be best friends because there were two of them but only one bra. Every other bra they had tried was too pulling, pushing, padded, itchy, wired, scratchy, or so flimsy it didn’t do a thing. And all of the bras out there used broken sizing systems like judge-y S/M/L or confusing number/letter combos that make zero sense for kids with barely anything there yet. But the girls wanted a bra they could wear regularly - their morphing chests were super sensitive to tops in a way they had never been before. Not to mention that the area had become so surprisingly tender that if an errant backpack or elbow made contact, ouch!As the girls (and their boobs) grew and grew, Cara and Julie kept iterating and sizing up. By the time they launched OOMLA, the game changing OOMBRA fit perfectly whether breasts were just starting to bud or they’d grown all the way up to bra sizes 34D or 36B. Because the OOMBRA is made from buttery cotton that feels like second skin, it’s ridiculously soft and so comfortable you forget you’re wearing anything at all. Between the outer layers sits a middle panel to give gentle compression without any tight binding or bulky, awkward pads... an innovation designed to support boobs and hide nipples considered so novel that it received a patent. We invented a bra that felt like hugs for your boobs - sweatpants for your chest - and everyone who tried it on fell in love.