Dr. Caris Chambers still remembers her mother telling her to keep her period a secret the first time she experienced bleeding as a teenager. “No one should know you’re on your period,” she recalls.
Now, Chambers has spent her entire career not only talking about periods online, but talking about generally taboo topics like periods, puberty, and sex.
Chambers is an adolescent gynecologist who tells readers about one of the most difficult conversations she’s had with a patient in her recently published book, “The Period and Adolescent Parenting Revolution.” The patient was only 12 years old and pregnant, she wrote.
“The mother told her daughter to stay away from boys, but they never talked about sex. Last year, when she started her period, the mother told her to use pads, but she never talked about how she would get pregnant,” Chambers wrote. “She didn’t think it was necessary. Her daughter wasn’t even interested in dating. She couldn’t understand how something like this could happen.”
Explaining sex and adolescence to your adult children has long been considered one of the most uncomfortable moments as a parent. But what if you don’t need to? Mr. Chambers has created an entire platform to help parents have stress-free and important conversations with their children. The aim is to ensure that children have safe and shame-free experiences in the future.
“Kids are talking about it. Conversations are happening,” Chambers recently told USA TODAY. “The question is, do parents choose to be a voice in that conversation, or do they leave it to chance? So the conversation is filled with pornography, it’s filled with social media, it’s filled with friends, siblings, people who are fine talking about the topic but don’t have the precision or intent that parents would have.”
Her advice to parents? Let go of your own prejudices and fluctuating emotions about sex and periods. It probably stemmed from an uncomfortable conversation you yourself had with a parent decades ago.
“One of the general principles I try to convey or impress upon parents is to really question what they’re telling you and throw away scripts that don’t work,” Chambers said. “We have to stop borrowing incomplete and inappropriate scripts and deviating from what we actually want.”
Honesty is the best policy to prevent shame and promote safety
The key is to have honest and accurate communication with children, depending on their age, Chambers said. She encourages approaching conversations about bodies “early and often,” starting when children are potty trained.
For example, by using anatomical names for body parts, parents can eliminate body shame and stigma early on and give children the vocabulary they need to advocate for themselves, she said. Explaining how bodies are different and need to be taken care of in different ways is appropriate, she said, and then encourages kids to have more mature conversations about puberty and sex.
If your child asks a question, it’s best to be honest, she said.
“The basics are simplicity and precision,” Chambers says. “It’s as simple as saying, ‘Your period is when you bleed. It happens every month. It’s normal. It may be a little painful, but there are many good ways to manage it. And, moms have periods, too.'”
Some parents worry that talking about puberty and periods will rob their children of their innocence.
“We want to protect the joy of childhood, but we also have to be realistic about what it looks like to protect our children,” she says. “We can strike a balance between preserving the joys of childhood while giving them the tools to navigate the risks and dangers of real childhood.”
Help your child understand where touching is and isn’t appropriate, and go further by discussing welcome and unwanted touching. Children should know to immediately notify a trusted adult if they are touched in a “no-go” area.
“We have to have those conversations,” Chambers said. “Because not having those conversations doesn’t make children safer. It makes them more vulnerable.”
And it’s not just about mothers, she said. Chambers said there is a long history of changes and rifts in relationships between fathers and daughters around the onset of puberty and menstruation, which can lead girls to believe that menstruation makes them difficult to be around or understood. “That’s a problem,” she said.
By cutting off conversations or not answering children’s questions, parents can unintentionally send the message that periods and puberty are something to be ashamed of, Chambers said. She found that parents who were more open about these topics gave their children a sense of confidence and self-efficacy.
“You’re raising children who are going to grow up and have to make decisions in a world full of risk and trauma,” she said. “All you can do is prepare them for it.”
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the care economy for USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Contact Madeline at: memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ At X.
