To be disturbed at the lack of knowledge of periods among DD's friends?

[FortunesFave]

They're all 12-13 and attend a small school in Australia. They do have sex education but separately...so they've had lessons with the girls and lessons with the boys but never together.

yesterday DD said she and her friends were talking together about periods and a boy from a nearby group (they're friends with these boys...all lovely lads) came over and asked what a tampon was.

Wtf? Why wouldn't they know? It seems his friends...3 of them and him didn't know.

DD said they definitely didn't know...they then all discussed periods together and one of the girls thought that "A clump of eggs comes out sometimes when you have your period"

DD worked out that she thought that the occasional blood clot was 'a clump of eggs"

My DD knows all about the workings of the female body...because I've told her...do people really not discuss these things with kids this age?

I’ve met more than one male my age, who had the separate sex Ed lesson, who thought tampons were a plug rather than absorbent. So they knew they were for periods and they were a tube that went up the vagina but had misunderstood. Especially when the 8 hour limit came in.

I remember my first period being shocked they lasted for days, that had somehow been skimmed over.

When i started dating my now DH (then 25) he thought periods were like a few days of cramping and then a the blood came out in one go. He went to an all boys school and had never lived with a girl other than his mother til me. I was on the coil so didn't have periods. was very funny. I've never let him live it down.

He did go to an all boys school though.

Saying that I am 32 and married and have no clue how to put a condom on. always just let the guy do it

I think they maybe just don't get it during their lessons and also forget stuff. My funniest story was I was telling my m'n'law about our soon to have IVF and I reallised she thought the sperm was like a tapole which grew legs and arms and that's how babies were created. I thought this was hilarious and was retelling the story to my hubby who I quickly realised also thought sperm grew like tadpoles! I guess I know where he got it from!

Wasn’t there a boy a few years ago who went viral because he thought girls could “hold in” a period and wait until they found a loo.?

I remember my younger sisters friends, both male and female asking me all sorts of sex Ed questions when they were 11+ and as we are an open and honest family they got the correct answers from me. There were about 8 of them and no one was ever embarrassed to ask me.
Most of these kids had parents who didn't discuss things with them and the majority of what they knew came from misinformed peers.
What I think was lovely was that the boys were just as interested in learning about periods and the girls were happy to be open and honest with them.
It's sad that so many people are misinformed, especially nowadays with Internet access and reliable websites. I'd love to teach sex Ed to teens as I've found it to be very interesting but I think parents/educators need to help remove the stigma and awkwardness so these young people can learn the facts

I had to guide one of my friends at secondary school through her first period because her mum refused to discuss it.

I've been talking to DD about periods since she was four (and came into the bathroom while I was putting a tampon in!)

I blame the demise of magazines like J17.

I had a horrifying conversation with some yr10 girls a few years ago (inspired by poem, I 🤔) where they told me you can't get pregnant if it's your first time and that doubling up the condoms is better.

I was like, wtf do you lot DO in your Biology lessons? I thought this shit had gone when in was I'm school. They were bright girls too.

I explained to a 30 yo male colleague last year that women don’t have to take their tampon out to wee. Utterly bizarre.

People are so weird about periods. I don’t find anything about them gross or embarrassing so it’s odd to me that people don’t like to talk about it.

Parents are incredibly squeamish about this sort of thing...i remember one mum crying as her 9 year old dd had learned the word ' penis.'...i mean crying!!

In though this was all covered at biology GCSE?!

Thought*

Course it's bad. Parents can't be that different in Australia as they are here. It gets outsourced to schools by parents and that one hygiene lecture has to be aimed at the lowest common denominator. I dont know what literature and online stuff is available in Australia but here we seem.to be slowly wiping the word woman or girl from alot of the information so it stands to reason if the same thing is happening there that the girls would have much idea it even applies to them.

Certainly in.science class its probably the one part kids never ask questions about because there's always a few idiots who get stupid when discussing reproductive body parts...

My mum was terribly embarrassed talking to me about this kind of stuff. I picked up the idea that it was very shameful, and tbh, my knowledge is still a bit sketchy in places. I don't blame my mum for this, I don't think her mum even spoke to her about periods at all.

I have tried to be much more open with my dd, normalizing periods from when she was tiny. Her knowledge of biology is much better than mine! As a teenager, she is totally open about periods, doesn't feel the need to hold sanitary products "discreetly" and has encouraged her friends to be open about it as well. She has given short shrift to boys who have sniggered about pads or tampons, but she has also helped to educate some of her male friends by answering their questions about periods. I love that she just sees it as a normal bodily function. I was so awkward about it at that age.

I remember a girl at school when we were 13 brought in a packet of SanPro and said that her mum gave them to her with the instruction to ask the girls at school what she should do with them (mid 80’s).

At one school aged 10 we had a good level of instruction in periods but this didn’t cover boys at all; at a Catholic school aged 17/18 we had to have written permission from our parents that we were allowed to attend a session about periods. Like we didn’t know already having already had them for severe years already - utterly ridiculous and a waste of time.

It sounds like the level of ignorance hasn’t progressed much across the decades since!

My DD’s didn’t realise they had a separate’hole’ for urine 🤦🏼‍♀️

I dated a guy (he was early 30’s) who said to me ‘when you have a period an egg is released right? So is there not eggshell that comes out?’ I shit you not. He was not joking. I was flabbergasted.

I remember all the girls, not the boys, in the first year of my comprehensive school (1979) had a talk on periods. It was explained that your womb lining would fill with blood in readiness for a baby and if an egg was not fertilized by sperm then the lining of the womb would come away and that would be your monthly bleed. We were told that it would happen every month, unless we were having a baby and would stop when we were around 50. They told that our eggs would not run out but we would be too old to have a baby.

Sanitary pads were given as freebies but not tampons. I got further information from a Tampax leaflet.

My dd11 is covering this in class now but we have already talked about it at home extensively. I was really surprised at how many other mums of kids in her class said they just leave it to the school and it's too embarrassing to talk about. I mean it's going to happen pretty soon for all of them - what if they missed that lesson?

I had to give DS a rather more detailed facts of life talk than I anticipated when he was six or so... because he was getting anxious about where his "special spade" was to plant the seed when the time came to make a baby

I find that children forget things that aren't immediately relevant to them, hence us having to have a number of discussions with DD, who despite access to and availability of information exactly the same as DS seemed to be completely oblivious as to how babies get made in Y8. She had known (first time round) aged three, because I was pg with her brother!
She'd also had highly detailed sex-ed lessons in Y6 (something DS missed out on due to covid lockdown) Never mind the fact that pretty much every time DS asked questions she would be there for the answers
Bizarre!

She was pretty hot on period information though, because lots of her friends started in Y4 or Y5, and I really have never kept things like that from them. She did say how weird some classmates mums' were about the handling of periods. When she did finally start, she just got on with it.
The pain surprised her though- her's are far more painful than mine ever were
Hopefully that will improve.

I don't think they know about ectopics though, so I need to think about how to discuss that. They know about miscarriage, due to family circumstances, which I think is important.

It's not that weird tbh

There's a contingent who think that telling kids about sex and puberty causes a loss of innocence.

Not everyone lives with a mother. My sons know because they've seen sanpro in the toilet and I told them when they took some to play with. My son happily told the young boy on the till that the tampons that he was scanning was going into my body to stop the blood.

If you read threads on Twitter about period poverty, there will be grown men that argue that sanpro shouldn't be free in schools and prisons. Their reasoning? Women are lazy not holding in the blood until they go to the loo 🤦🏻‍♀️ and when corrected they insist that they are right.

As some schools are now telling pupils that ‘people with a uterus’ will have periods, they might need a bit more anatomy teaching so they will understand who exactly is going to start bleeding without needing urgent medical attention.

@Providora

As a mother of 2 teenage boys I'd put money on the 12-13yos feigning ignorance as a joke.

Tampons are in shops, on TV ads - boys of this age have been talking about anything sex related for years, of course they know! And if they didn't know, they wouldn't interrupt a group of girls to ask.

Lots of teenagers don't watch tv. They watch Netflix or YouTube where you can pay to avoid adverts.

This kind of thing is not that uncommon I don't think. Some schools are getting better but boys and girls are separated for a lot of it, and while I see the value in that its easier to be open with just girls/just boys, I think schools have to be careful about not then accidentally focusing only on one or the other.

Also parents are weird about this, especially parents of boys. DS' best friend is one of two boys. His mum was quite shocked when it came out in casual conversation that DS, 8 at the time, has long had a vague idea of what a period is. I pointed out that he lives with a woman - when he was little he would be in the bathroom with me if I had to change a pad/tampon. Then there's always the odd moment later when there's blood in the toilet or whatever. It has always just come up naturally. It became clear that she's been tying herself in knots for nearly 10 years to make sure that her boys are never exposed to this in any way whatsoever.

She is very liberal and not at all conservative overall. But I notice that her son is often the one in school saying silly things like, "that's so gay" or whatever and I'm absolutely convinced it's related to her being so uncomfortable talking to her DC. (In her defence, I do know that over the last year she's been really trying to shift the way she talks to her sons).

Its not just ignorant teenage boys that don't know enough about periods. DD (at an all girls school) was having a heavy period and her male teacher told her to hold it in till break time.....

london

I'm afraid I'd find that all a bit suspicious... how u can make it through school, high school, university and then wok at an all girls school and not know.... sure he wasn't just being a controlling dick?