In the next 5 weeks, we’re going to publish a series of short essays that present rarely discussed reasons why fertility awareness based methods (FABM) and natural family planning (NFP) are so important to women, families, and the world.
We’re not doing so just to pique your curiosity, but to encourage you to support our effort. You see, we need to produce and promote more quality content and be a more effective supporting voice for the FABMs/NFP industry but we can’t do it without more support. My hope is that this series will resonate with the hearts of readers like you and move you to join our forces. We need them, we need you! Here is why.
Reason # 1: Young women get more gumption when they chart!
When our daughter turned 21, she wasn’t even dating, but we paid for her to be trained in charting with an ovulation method. After two classes, she came home and told my wife: “I think I’m low in progesterone.” She was getting to know her body.
Even without such revelations, any young woman can benefit from a better understanding of the mysterious, but not unexplainable changes in her body during her cycle: What is this discharge around the middle of the cycle? Why do I feel different at certain times? When can I expect my periods?
Katy Bicknell, co-founder of the charting app Kindara shares her own experience in this video: “I spent a lot of time wondering ‘Why are my periods not coming, why are my cycles so long? What’s going on?’ A lot of women have that feeling of panic or questioning…” She says that charting was a major change for her: “that kind of knowledge has given me such a feeling of calm and confidence. I really own my life now.”
Typical sex education or Planned Parenthood classes don’t do that. They teach the basic of physiology, scare teens about sex, pregnancy, and STDs, and then tell them how to highjack their menstrual cycles with contraceptives. Instead, FABM classes tell them how to understand it. That’s revolutionary.
Cycle Mindfulness™, what happens when you teach fertility awareness to teen girls was one of our most popular articles this year. When young women who had been in and out of jail learned rudimentary charting, it showed them the relationship between their cycle and their moods. They became empowered to change their behavior.
We also discussed the evidence-based program Teen STAR, which teaches teenage girls to chart their cycles within the context of a year-long school curriculum. A third-party study showed that “this program is effective in reducing the rate of pregnancy, delaying the onset of sexual activity, decreasing sexual activity in sexually-active youth, and improving attitudes towards abstinence, compared with students in the no-treatment groups.”
Moreover, Teen STAR teachers from all over the world reported that their students become more mature and self-directed rather than victims of peer-pressure, that it moved girls from being victims of their hormones to being in control, that it encouraged students to think ahead and to make decisions ahead of a crisis.
As a father and uncle of several young women, I feel this is the ultimate gift we must to give to the next generation. Reading these reports is a major motivation for me to give an inordinate amount of time to this work, including writing to you on this beautiful Sunday afternoon (Texas weather, 80°F and sunny, love it).
How can we make that happen? We want to start with moms themselves, with them learning about charting and being empowered to practice it instead of being on the Pill. With your help, by the next generation, their cycles will no longer be a mystery to women, and these moms will teach their daughters.
Click here to support our work.
Other resources for preteen and teen fertility awareness education
Natural Womanhood’s trusted, easy-to-follow Period Genius program equips parents to become their daughters’ first and best teachers, helping them affirm her feminine dignity, foster self-respect and self-love, and prepare her for life as a woman.
The Couple to Couple League realizes that mothers are in a special position to engage their daughters about the gift of their fertility. Their Mother / Daughter program lets you choose the resources you feel would be the best to communicate with your daughter about fertility awareness.
The Cycle Show is an educational, interactive, multi-media, fertility awareness workshop for young girls.
The FEMM App helps girls understand their reproductive health in all its physical and emotional complexity.
This article was updated on March 10, 2025, to include Natural Womanhood’s Period Genius program as a resource for preteen fertility awareness education.
References:
[i] Pew Research Center: “More than a million millennials are becoming moms each year” (Jan. 2017). “While Millennials may be delaying parenthood, it’s not for a lack of interest in eventually becoming moms and dads. Members of this generation rated being a good parent as a top priority in a 2010 Pew Research Center survey. Some 52% said it was one of the most important goals in their lives, well ahead of having a successful marriage, which 30% said was one of their most important lifetime goals.”
The research about mood and color sensitivity during the cycle was striking to us, especially because we were working on DonnaMobile #myColours mood mapping feature at that time.
To spread the fertility tracking popularity we joyfully give you codes for DonnaMobile #myColours feature and other features like pdf chart generation, mucus photos and changeable wallpaper as Donna is freemium now.
DonnaMobile – fertility tracker
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