Apparently the word 'vagina' is incredibly offensive and should be kept off TV - even in an ad for sanitary towels...

You can probably deal with it by analogy with nipples on boys without getting into 'whats it for' too much.

Surely most six-year-old girls will be aware of their clitorises; I spent ages trying to work out if I weed out of mine.

Actually I thought the clitoris was what turned into a willy in boys, am I wrong? That would be an easy way to introduce it without majoring on the orgasm feature.

My parents didn't pull me out of classes. I think most parents who don't deal with sex education aren't against it or whatever: they are just embarrassed.

Why is six too young? Most kids are going to have seen baby brothers/sisters come along by that age, they're going to have questions.

It's only the names for parts of the body. If the teacher was teaching them "leg" or "arm" there wouldn't be any trouble.

I'm not saying not at all but 6 is too young and tbh the parents who don't teach will pull kids that young out of the classes anyway

The problem is that often parents don't teach their children anything of value, or what they teach them is inaccuarate especially if their own sex ed was poor (which historically it was).

I mean, I saw a young woman at work once who came to ask me to check her down below as she thought she had "a growth". It was her clitoris.

Sighing, my parents taught me NOTHING about sex. Nothing. If it weren't for school education and a healthy interest in teenage magazines, I really would have known nothing. It's great you're teaching your kids, but what about the ones who learn nothing or who are taught that sex is dirty?

I dont think there is anything wrong with teaching them correct terms - DD is taught them - at 2 - but that's my choice (with DH).

11/12 year olds will always snigger at terms like that. Different schools teach different things in different ways - there will still be no consistency.

And I for 1 don't want my 6 year old Learning about the mechanics of reproduction - I think it's far too young. DD knows willy and vagina at 2 - gradually I will introduce more - but I don't believe at 6 - it's for anyone except parents to decide these things.

I suspect most of our kids will only ever come across 'douche' in french classes or as an unflattering term in American comedies.

Many years ago in my youth I worked for Boots the Chemist. One day an American man came in and asked me for a douche for his wife. I had never heard of such a thing and had no idea what he was talking about. The customer thought I was deliberately trying to embarrass him and got quite angry with me. My superviser, a motherly lady on the eve of retiring, took charge of the situation and took him to task! Her defence was that I was an innocent young girl, that douches and other such unnatural products were "foreign and unfeminine and unnecessary" and that he had no right corrupting me with such horrible notions!! Sometimes I think our grandmothers knew a thing or two and we have not always made progress!

But why shouldn't children learn the name for their genitals, Sighing? I mean, it seems incredibly coy to be offended by children learning the correct terms.

I mean, if we end up with the "it's up to the parents to decide when the children learn these terms" stance, we end up with parents who will raise their children with the correct terms from a young age. We have other parents who won't teach it at all, thus leading to kids learning about sex and their bodies through media and playground gossip (hardly the most reliable method).

It also leads to inconsistencies in teaching. Surely it's easier to teach a group of children about reproduction when they all know the same term, than it is to have to work at replacing each term in the child's conscious thought, and erasing the subconscious thought that these terms are "rude" and "dirty". I remember half of my sex ed classes were disrupted by 11-12 year olds sniggering at the teacher's use of the words "vagina" and "penis".

DH didn't rate his all-boys school except the sex ed in secondary when the teacher actually told them about the clitoris. Well done that man

Anyway... if there have to be ads for pantyliners then of course they should use the word vagina.

At that age they aren't learning about internal structures and I for 1 would like to decide how and what I want them educated about sex and organs.

I am no prude - DD is already being taught awareness at 2 but those lessons are for me and not the school (or pg in her case).

As an aside, my husband worked at a tampon manufacturer once. All the managers were male, he had no idea to start with what they were talking about as they referred to the manufacturing line as the 'digit' line. God forbid they refer to tampons by name!

My DDs (both young) seem to be well aware of their clitorises.
The younger one in particular rarely has her hands out of her pants
Boys play with their willies and know it feels nice - also it's a warm secure sort of area in your undies. Girls (if mine are anything to go by) also instinctively do this so why shouldn't they know the names of the bits? I suspect that girls are told more forcefully not to play with themselves when they are little than boys, and teh squeamishness about girls genitals - it's all related isn't it.

Maybe there's not much of a need to explain the clitoris at that age.

Vulva, penis...not sure what the problem is with explaining that. They're learning about internal organs at that age, most of them will have started pondering and asking questions about sex, so not sure what the issue is.

I don't see a need for 6 year olds to be quite so scientific - about any part of the body tbh.

There's always a finite amount of time that you can have for asking questions in class though. I generally tell kids that I can answer 3 or whatever questions and then we have to move on.

The clitoris though, yeah, that's a tough one to explain. It's for sexual pleasure. Well, that is its only function, there's no way round it really. But you can't really explain that in a meaningful way at that age.

Are they too young to know it? I don't think that they are. They're old enough to know which parts they have - maybe not to be told the mechanics of sex, what it means, why we do it and stuff, but at 6 or 7, they are old enough to know the biology.

Why was the teacher dreading it? I think the kids might giggle a little and get on with it, but at the end of the day, a vulva's a vulva and as a teacher, part of your job is teaching that sort of stuff.

It is ridiculous SQ. There's just no equivalent to "willy". The closest is "fanny" but it's a bit slangy and coarse

Maybe we need a MN campaign for a new, non-cutesy, non-medical word to describe our vulvas.

It's a shame there isn't a "friendly" word like willy, or a word that encompasses the whole genital area.

This topic comes up on MN all the time it's ridiculous that women don't even have a cheerful casual name to refer to their genitals.

No sex Ed at all for me.

At the moment vagina is the term I use for general area- as opposed to bum. She insists she has a willy though.

But when people teach their children to say vagina, do they mean vulva, or what?

I remember a fashion for vaginal sprays some years ago. The marketing people kept trying to convince us that we smelled bad and should use these horrible things. Luckily they didn't really catch on. Hope they don't return.