The Boy's Body Book (Fifth Edition): Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up!

By Kelli Dunham and Robert Anastas

The #1 bestselling Boy's Body Book includes everything you need to know about growing up, even the embarrassing stuff. The newly updated fifth edition provides advice for parents and addresses questions a pre-teen boy may have while maturing through puberty.

Everything is changing! How will you survive this trying time in your life? This book made just for boys contains all of the guy stuff you need to know about growing up, from your voice changing to peer pressure. The newly updated fifth edition of The Boy's Body Book helps prepare young boys and their parents for the ups and downs of puberty, middle school, and everything in between. This guide for pre-teen boys addresses issues like changing bodies, personal hygiene, self-confidence, leadership, school safety and personal boundaries. This updated fifth edition book for boys is expanded to include topics like:

• School safety and consent
• Emotional health, mindfulness, and self esteem
• Cyberbullying and internet safety
• Learning disabilities
• Personal boundaries and communication
• Stress management
• Building healthy friendships
• and more

The Boy's Body Book helps prepare boys for puberty and beyond by giving them age appropriate information, tools, tips, and tricks to take care of themselves and grow up in a healthy environment.

Kelli Dunham, RN, BSN is a nurse, a comedian, and author of three other books: How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Nursing School, How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Your Life as a Nurse, and The Girl's Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up You.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781400340507

Kelli Dunham

Kelli Dunham, RN, BSN, is a nurse, stand-up comic, and author of How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Nursing School, How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Your Life as a Nurse, and The Boy's Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up You, also published by Applesauce Press. She has worked as a primary care and home visiting nurse with first-time new moms. She has lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Portland, Oregon, New York, and on a houseboat in Philadelphia. In her spare time she likes to read, skateboard, and she would really, really like to learn to play the banjo.

Book preview

Foreword:

DESTINY IS A MATTER OF CHOICE

By Robert Anastas, Founder of SADD (Students Against Driving Drunk)

As an educator, I fully endorse and recommend The Boy’s Body Book. Kelli Dunham presents important material in a very easy-to-understand and factual manner. In my travels speaking to students throughout the world, I have found they need a solid foundation of facts to make proper decisions. A young person’s destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

I have spent over 30 years working with young people in schools and colleges. My major focus as an educator and counselor has been on illegal drinking and drug abuse. Over the years I began to see a society whose young people were exposed to a great deal of peer pressure to go along with the crowd. Despite the valiant efforts of many in the field of drug and alcohol prevention, abuse continued to soar during the 1980s and early ‘90s. It seemed clear that teenagers were going to do their thing no matter what we said. I am convinced that a great deal of illegal drinking and drug abuse is caused by peer pressure, and with this in mind I created SADD (Students Against Driving Drunk). I found through my work at SADD that because the problem of illegal drinking and the use of illegal drugs lies with young people that the solution lies with them as well. In order to solve a problem of this magnitude, we must first shed a light on it, and then look at the root cause. Through my experience working with teenagers, I concluded that deaths caused by drinking and driving had been camouflaged for teenagers in two ways. First, lack of communication between parents and their children, and second, the peer pressure that teenagers face every day doing things they may not wish to do. My experience led me to believe that, as determined as we are to provide a drug-free environment for our children, statistics have proven that our efforts have fallen on deaf ears. My belief is that if we give our sons information that is designed to address the broader subjects of responsible decision-making based on factual information, they will make the proper choices. They must be equipped with information to address the symptoms of high-risk behavior with key life skills (i.e., self-esteem, motivation, maturity, and leadership).

This book presents good information on a wide range of topics that will help young men make proper choices on their journey through life. It is my wish that all boys reading this book will get a better understanding of their bodies and how to deal with the many pressures associated with adolescence and thereby gain a head start on a productive life. Parents of preteens can feel confident that this book will allow their children to find the answers to the many questions that arise concerning their development. It may also open the door to healthy conversations between you as parents and your children.

Introduction:

WHAT’S CHANGING?

AT THIS TIME in your life, on some days it might seem like everything is changing!

Your body is changing.

Your feelings are changing.

Your relationships with your friends and family members are changing.

It hardly seems fair, does it?

Especially because as a boy gets older, he often finds that it gets more difficult to talk with the adults in his life about the kinds of things he used to. There are a few very good reasons for this:

• He might be afraid to ask a question he thinks he should already know the answer to.

• He might feel like he doesn’t know the best (or the most polite) word to use to describe something that is happening with his body.

• He might be worried that something he is feeling isn’t normal, and that people would laugh at him if they knew what was going on in his head (or his body).

This is not fun, but it is 100 percent normal!

And it isn’t just kids who sometimes develop troubles communicating. You may have noticed that sometimes the adults around you have trouble talking about the changes you are going through. It seems like they should be able to handle it, since they’ve been through the kid-to-adult transition themselves. So what are they worried about? Mostly the same things you are! They might worry about not having all the right information. They might remember how awkward this time was for them and feel like they don’t have any advice to help you get through it. They might even be worried (does this sound familiar?) about not knowing the correct or polite terms for body parts and body processes, what words you might use, or what information you might already have learned from your friends or by looking around online. And they might be especially worried about giving you more information than you want to know or are ready for.

With boys and adults all red-faced and stammering and stuttering, it makes it hard for information to flow back and forth. That’s where this book comes in.

QUICK TIP

If you don’t like to read (there are probably lots of guys who wish someone would develop an all about your changing body video game), you can ask an adult you trust to read through this book with you. Maybe you can use it as a starting point for a discussion about any questions you have.

This book has a lot of information about the changes that are coming your way. We hope it will answer many of your questions so that you feel ready and informed, not confused and scared.

There is no right or wrong way to use this book. You are the expert on how to make it work best for you! You might want to sit right down and read it from cover to cover all at once (maybe under the covers with a flashlight, if you are feeling particularly shy). You might just look at the chapters that interest you for now, and then put it on your shelf until you have more questions about the other stuff in the rest of the book. If you aren’t interested or don’t want to know about the stuff in this book, no problem. You can always put this book away until later when you want to know more!

This is just one small book, so it can’t contain the answers for every question that you might have about this exciting—but sometimes confusing—time of your life. Having a trusted adult that you can talk to comes in handy. If something written here doesn’t make sense to you, or is different from your experience, discuss it with a parent, teacher, health care provider, or another responsible, trusted grown-up.

Although this time is not easy, you already have many resources for dealing with the changes that are coming your way. You have past experiences that you have learned from, you have friends that are going through the same things you are, and you have adults who care about you. All these things will help make the process smoother. Best of luck to you as you begin the important transition of growing from a boy into a man.

Chapter 1:

WHAT ON EARTH IS

GOING ON AROUND HERE?

If you are a boy between the ages of 8 and 12, you have probably noticed some changes in your body. These changes are called puberty. Puberty is the general name for the process everyone goes through to change from a kid to an adult. Some of the changes are physical, and some of the changes are emotional.

Puberty takes place over several years, and while it may seem like the process will never end, most boys are through puberty by age 16 or 17.

All About This Thing Called Puberty

The changes your body will go through can seem a bit mysterious, but they basically come from one thing: extra amounts of special chemicals (called hormones) being produced in your body. In boys, the hormone most responsible for puberty is called testosterone, while the one responsible for puberty in girls is called estrogen. You’ll be hearing a lot more about testosterone in the pages ahead.

Growth