How teaching high school students about healthy relationships taught me that teens need fertility awareness education

teaching teens fertility awareness, why teach teens fertility awareness, teaching teen girls body literacy, teaching teens about periods

Around the time I got married, I had been working the evening shift as a medical lab assistant. Only being able to spend time with my husband on the weekends got pretty old, so I hunted for a new job. I found an open position with a local non-profit teaching social/emotional skills in Denver area high schools. At the heart of the course I taught was a multi-part series on healthy relationships and helping teens to make well-informed, thoughtful decisions about sex. Even if I hadn’t been desperate to get off the night shift, I love working with teens and am passionate about reproductive health, so I was legitimately thrilled at the opportunity to go into high schools and talk about sex. Through my work, I learned that there is a very real need for teen fertility education and that this education has to start at home.

Here are five assumptions that may be standing in the way of you teaching your teen about fertility awareness, and how I discovered that they are myths.

Myth 1: Schools will teach your teen what they need to know about reproductive health.

The truth is, your teen may be lucky to learn anything about reproductive health in class. Health classes are not always a graduation requirement, and I’ve talked to students who never studied the reproductive system in their biology classes.

Because the program I taught through had a number of different health topics we were required to talk about, we had just 10-30 minutes each for big concepts like relationship red flags, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), consent, an overview of reproduction, and the benefits of waiting until marriage to have sex. What’s more, without a working knowledge of how the male and female body are designed, teens lack a proper context for understanding the little information about reproductive health that they may hear in school anyway.

Myth 2: Teaching teens about fertility is awkward.

Our program had sessions on a variety of social and emotional topics, including stress management, goal setting, and conflict resolution. Our sessions about sex and relationships felt no different than these other topics. In my experience, teens were happy to have an open conversation about a subject that often feels taboo, and the vast majority of students I worked with reported that they had never even talked to their parents about relationships or sex.

However, if you find it awkward to talk about reproductive health, your teen will probably feel awkward, too. Allow me to let you in on the secret to being able to talk about human reproduction without awkwardness… practice. If you’ve never talked about cervical mucus before, it will probably feel weird to bring up. Some of our new instructors did feel uncomfortable talking about reproductive health with teens, so we would hold practice teaching sessions with each other to become more familiar with the material, and we encouraged instructors to practice talking about reproduction at home with family or friends.

Myth 3: You’re not an expert.

One thing that you definitely are an expert on is your teen. When I would get up to teach a classroom full of students, I had no idea which teens were ignorant about where babies came from, which teens already knew too much about sex but not enough about fertility, and which teens had experienced sexual trauma. You know your teen best and you know how to broach the subject of fertility in an appropriate way. Additionally, you are in a great position to continue to guide your teen and answer questions as they come up.

If you don’t feel that you are an expert in fertility awareness, it’s never too late to become one! There are a variety of in-person and virtual classes available on different fertility awareness methods. Another thing to keep in mind is that whoever else is talking to your teen about sexual health may not be an expert either, and it may be up to you to set the record straight. My fellow instructors shared stories from their own experiences with high school sex-ed, which tends to focus mainly on STIs, and included misinformation like “chlamydia comes from sharing drinks” or “you can get HIV from a toilet seat” and, of course, “without birth control, your only other option for avoiding pregnancy is to try your luck with the rhythm method.”

Myth 4: Teens just need “the puberty talk”

Once while at a conference, I was talking to a friend about my experiences teaching teens in schools. I was lamenting how little teens learn at home about their bodies, and how schools simply aren’t equipped to fill that gap. My friend’s mother happened to be nearby and mentioned how glad she was to have taught her daughter all she needed to know about reproductive health. My friend looked shocked and said, “You did?” The mother looked equally surprised and answered, “Of course, I did! I distinctly remember telling you what a period is and how tampons work!” My friend had clearly considered this one-time period overview to be a rather negligible piece of information compared to everything she wanted to know about reproductive health.

As with all of the important things you want to impart on your children, such as religion, education, nutrition, honored traditions, and values and morals, discussing sex and fertility should be an ongoing process. This process involves direct education from you, as well as modeling behaviors you want them to adopt, encouraging conversations and answering questions, explaining the “why” behind what you believe, and supporting them as they start using this information in their own lives. With fertility education, this may look like teaching young children the correct names for their body parts. For pre-pubescent youth, it may involve being open about mom’s menstrual cycle and answering questions that come up. For teens, you may want to sign them up for a teen FAM class or teach them yourself, while continuing to answer questions and provide support.

Myth 5: Reproductive health is separate from other aspects of health.

The thing I loved most about the program I taught was the whole-person approach we took to every topic. We were always looking for ways to ask, “How does this choice affect me in terms of my physical, mental/emotional, social, spiritual, and financial well-being? And how will this choice affect me right now and in the future?” Consider how helping your teen learn fertility awareness can help her not only look after her physical health, but also to understand how her hormones impact her emotions at different times in her cycle. Additionally, fertility awareness can help her feel more confident with her body and practice executive skills like organization and planning ahead. Oh, and here’s why it makes sense to teach your teen son about fertility awareness too!

My biggest takeaway for parents

On a positive note, you are probably supporting your child’s ability to make healthy choices about their reproductive health without even realizing it! It’s difficult to be healthy in any area of life without being able to manage stress, resolve conflict, seek help from a supportive person, and set hopeful goals for the future. The overall support you offer your teen everyday is a benefit to every area of their life, and introducing your teen to fertility awareness is just another aspect of support and education you can offer them above and beyond what their schools are able to teach.

Additional Reading:

3 Myths about Teaching Teens about Fertility Awareness

Cycle mindfulness: what happens when you teach fertility awareness to teen girls

Should you teach your teen boy about fertility awareness?

Natural Womanhood Book Review: The Happy Girl’s Guide to Being Whole

Cycle syncing: how to hack the natural hormonal shifts of your menstrual cycle

What can charting your menstrual cycle teach you about your hormonal health?

Total
0
Shares

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Prev
Can you monitor your fertility during chemotherapy with fertility awareness methods, and will it return after chemo?
fertility awareness for birth control during chemo, nonhormonal birth control on chemo, hormonal birth control alternatives during chemo, when will fertility return after chemo, can fertility return after chemo

Can you monitor your fertility during chemotherapy with fertility awareness methods, and will it return after chemo?

When the unthinkable happens and a woman of childbearing age receives a cancer

Next
FAM-friendly apps to help your teen understand her cycle and learn basic charting
teen fertility tracker app, teen fertility tracking app, teen period tracker app, period tracker app, fertility awareness app, fertility awareness app for teen, teaching teens fertility awareness

FAM-friendly apps to help your teen understand her cycle and learn basic charting

If there’s ever an easy decade to be a woman, the teenage years are not it

You May Also Like