Nothing could have prepared me for what that class actually was.
As you might have guessed, we were first split up by assigned gender—girls with Mrs. H and another lady whose name I never learned from some organization in town I didn’t bother to register, and boys with Mr. J and his counterpart. Then we were ushered into a room where we were given slips of paper and told to write down questions as they came up. We could pass the slips of paper up at the end and have our questions answered. Everything went downhill after that.
“Hi, girls!” said the lady whose name I never learned. “As Mrs. H said, I’m here to talk to you about puberty and periods. Who here knows what a period is?”
Cautiously, a few of us raised our hands. There was safety in numbers.
“Okay, great! Maybe a few of you know because you have already had your period. Has anyone here already had their period?”
I didn’t even need to glance around the room to know there wasn’t a soul who was going to raise their hand and risk being the only one. A quick scan told me that I was right to have kept my hand down.
“Oh well, I suppose you all are a bit young, being fifth graders.”
Dear God, please don’t let anyone see me blushing. She had just told me I was too young to have the thing I had been having for months. I don’t remember even a second of the rest of her spiel—my mind was racing, imagining what everyone would think if they knew I already had my period. I sat in this thought spiral as the instructor passed around a model uterus and ovaries and handed out sample maxi pads. She may have talked about how to keep bodies clean, or put a pad into your underwear … I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that after a few agonizing minutes, she dimmed the lights to show a movie.
The film depicted a fictitious set of friends about our age who are planning a sleepover. Everyone is excited to stay up late talking, laughing, and playing games. During the night, one of the girls wakes up in pain and notices blood on her underwear. The adults in the film discreetly take care of the mess and provide her with the products she needs. The next morning, however, the girls are given a pancake breakfast made by the host’s mom. She stands in the kitchen pouring batter on the griddle … in the shape of a uterus and ovaries. She’s standing there on the screen, using the fluffy breakfast food to explain the menstrual cycle to her daughter’s friend, as my classmates and I watched in horror.
She gets her period and someone who isn’t even her own mom explains it with … pancakes? In front of her FRIENDS? All the questions we’d scribbled on our bits of paper were abandoned—we all wanted class to be done as quickly as possible so we could debrief about the period pancakes. It was the only part of the entire lesson that any of us talked about for days afterward.
I am so grateful that my own curiosity (thanks again, World Book Encyclopedia) and my mother’s scientific approach to parenting had prepared me for that class. I didn’t leave the class in the same state as some of my peers—somehow more confused than they were before and fearing that if they got their period during a sleepover, there might be Menstruation Muffins the next morning.
No, my mom is one of the primary reasons I have approached periods with my own children the way I have. I know that children all come from someone who had a period. I know that many children will see menstruation at some point, whether depicted onscreen, in a book they’re reading, or in their own home. And roughly half of all children will eventually experience a period themselves. Rather than the mysterious blue liquid poured out of a test tube in an ad, or the old adage about a dubious “change” that will somehow “make them a woman” overnight, it’s important that we treat periods as what they are: a biological mechanism that is part of the reproductive cycle in people with a uterus. No more. No less.
Treating menstruation this way—matter-of-factly and with only as much fanfare as the child demands—can help prevent children from developing feelings of fear and shame. Instead of “I don’t want to bleed to death” or “I hid my bloody underwear for months because I couldn’t tell my dad I had my period,” let’s aim to have children who understand what is happening in their body and who feel capable to obtain the products and information they need to be comfortable at all stages in their cycle.
It’s important to know, too, that all this information can and should be given to children who do not have a uterus. They will eventually interact with people who do have a uterus—perhaps siblings, friends, or future partners—so it is important that they are equipped with the basic biological facts at the very least.
Sample Scripts
The Vagina is a Self-Cleaning Organ
Early and Middle Childhood (ages 3 to 11)
“Hey, buddy—you’re doing a great job of wiping when you go potty! Remember—you gotta wipe from the front to the back. You don’t want to get any poop on your vulva!”
“You are learning how to clean your body by yourself and that’s really great! When you clean your vulva, I want you to remember that you need to use just a little bit of soap and water on your washcloth and then gently wash your vulva, going from the front toward the back.”
Adolescence (ages 12+)
“Now that you have your period, you might think you have to clean your vagina a different way. That is not true. Your vagina does not need soap or water or anything else in it to keep it clean. Keep wiping from front to back and ignore any ads you see about ‘balancing your pH’ or keeping you ‘fresh’—you don’t need any of those products to keep yourself healthy.”
“Please remember that your vagina keeps itself clean—yes, even when you are on your period. You don’t need to do anything special inside your vagina to ‘keep clean.’ All you need to be doing is rinsing your vulva with warm water every day, and wiping from front to back after you go to the bathroom.”
“You might notice that your vulva has an odor, especially if you have exercised a lot or gotten really hot or sweaty. That smell is from the outside of your body—not from your vagina. Clean your body like you usually do, and the smell will go away.”
How Do Periods Work?
Early Childhood (ages 3 to 6)
“Mommy is okay—this blood doesn’t mean I’m hurt. I am having my period. Every month, my uterus—the place where you grew when you were in my body—pretends it’s going to have another baby! It puts tissues on the walls like it’s decorating for a baby that might grow there. But when no baby ends up in my uterus, it takes all the tissues down and they come out of my vagina. Then it does it again the next month, just in case I decide I want to have a baby in there.”
Middle Childhood (ages 7 to 10)
“You are getting closer to the age where you will probably start your period. You remember that a period is when the uterus grows some additional nutrient-rich tissue inside it just in case the person decides they want to have a baby, right? Well, that tissue, along with some blood, is what comes out of the vagina when a person is having their period. Often for your first period, the blood and tissue doesn’t look red like you might expect—they can look brown. Some kids have said that when they wiped during their first period, they thought that their period was poop and that they had wiped incorrectly. But it wasn’t poop—it was just the tissue from their first period, so they got some products to help keep their clothes and body clean, and they went about their day.”
Adolescence (ages 11+)
“We’ve talked before about how having a period or menstrual cycle means your body is preparing itself to potentially become pregnant. It does that roughly every month by changing your hormones, and those hormones signal your ovaries—where your eggs stored—to release an egg and your uterus to make itself ready just in case you get pregnant. The lining of your uterus is called endometrium, and it gets thicker and makes a place for the egg to implant if it’s fertilized in your fallopian tube. If the egg reaches the uterus and it isn’t fertilized (and even sometimes when it is), your body will shed the extra endometrium and the egg—that shedding is your period.”
“The average length of a cycle is anywhere from around 21 to around 35 days, and you are most fertile for pregnancy during ovulation, when the egg releases, roughly in the middle of that cycle. It’s important to know, though, that you can get pregnant at any point in your cycle. A lot of people think that you can only get pregnant when you are ovulating, but since we don’t always know exactly when a person is ovulating, it’s the safest to assume that you are always at least a little bit fertile.”
Discharge
Middle Childhood (ages 8+)
“As you get closer to having your period, you will notice some signs that your body is changing. One of those changes is that your vagina and vulva will start to feel different—there will probably be some fluid that you didn’t have before. That fluid is called discharge, and it is completely normal, and can even tell you some important things about how your body is feeling!”
“I choose to wear panty liners in my underwear because I prefer to have the panty liners catch my discharge instead of my underwear. You can wear panty liners if you want, but you do not have to.”
“You mentioned that you noticed your underwear changing colors—that is from vaginal discharge. Most people have discharge that is somewhat acidic, and when it comes into contact with the fabric of the underwear, it can bleach the fabric a little bit, making it lighter. If you don’t want that to happen to your favorite dark undies, we can get you some panty liners to protect them, if you’d like.”
Puberty Prep
Middle Childhood (ages 8 or 9+)
As your child approaches the age where a period is likely to start (as early as age eight or nine, but generally speaking around age eleven or twelve), it is helpful to discuss what to do if their period starts when they are away from home. Consider assembling a Period Preparedness Pack to keep in their bookbag—a spare pair of underwear, a pad, some wipes, and a pair of comfy leggings/shorts that go with anything (I’m a big fan of black leggings for this purpose). This is one of those situations where humor can go a long way toward making upcoming changes feel much more approachable and less scary. Maybe you can give the pack a special or silly name, like “the go bag,” “Triple P,” “Janitor’s Keys,” both to remove some of the gravitas of having to pack these items, but also to increase your child’s sense of agency and privacy. Only they get to decide if they are going to explain why they are carrying an “aisle 7” (as in “cleanup on aisle seven!”) in their bag—to everyone else, it’s a mystery.
