How Do I Discuss Puberty With My Daughter?

So I'm not gonna be able to give you a full complete answer just because there's a whole lot of questions that I would wanna understand. How, how, how puberty itself is influencing your daughter. I would suggest that they go to the course that we did on going through puberty on the developmental stages. Um, the on on parent guidance, it's, again, this is free to parents, but we have a whole class on, I think it's the stages 11 to 14 as as helping your child adapt to that life, change their identity going through, through puberty. Um, again, I probably don't have enough time to give you all of that content, but I, we do have content on parent guidance that is specific to that age range, so I would strongly recommend that. But let me in the meantime, just give you a couple thoughts. One of the things that we know is that any, any girl going through puberty has so much body questions like, what in the world is happening to me? They begin to develop in ways that their body is, they're not used to that. So helping them communicate about this is how your body's going to change is a really important conversation. Mom, daughter can be very helpful, especially mom who's been through it. Just helping them understand the normalcy, especially as menstruation starts, and their body is like, what is this? And why is this happening? Helping them understand, so they're educated much better to come from you than it is for school. And the reason why is it helps you have this open dialogue. Uh, because many times we feel embarrassed. The other part of it is their identity. Oh my goodness. The identity. When you're going through puberty, your body's changing. If you're ahead of your peers or behind your peers. There's a lot of emotional stuff. Like, well, I'm more advanced and, and I'm embarrassed. Girls who go through puberty earlier often feel more embarrassed by their body than those who are a little bit delayed. If you're too delayed, that's a very different thing than you get made fun of or you get mocked in different ways at school. And so there's challenges. So helping your child adapt to their body changes and the social influence that, that now coming in so they can talk with you about it. Keeping that open dialogue is really important. Uh, then the other thing that I would really want to emphasize with them is when they're going through this, they're gonna be emotional mood swings inevitably, right? And we, we know from research that I'll give you, I'll give you an example. This comes from the research of Dr. Roy Baumeister. Now it's you. This is research based, so don't shoot the, don't shoot the messenger. Okay? Um, we know that when a woman is menstruating, she eats about 20% more than when she is not menstruating. So for that period of time, leading up to menstruation, more hungry, more, that, that's just the way the body works. And so helping our children understand this is a part of your journey and you're gonna experience this. And, and you might even say, sweetheart, I'm sorry that you have to go through this. 'cause it's not easy. You're giving them love. You're giving them care. You're educating them on what's gonna happen to their body and what's actually normal. So you're helping them understand the physiological change. You, you might be hungry during this period of time. Well, here's why. Here's what's going on. Your body's actually in pain. And when it's in pain, it tries to Cope in certain ways. And so education and information can be really helpful. So get educated on how to help your child during that time so you can communicate authentically without fear and with love.