Our Daughters Might Know More About Their Periods Than We Did

I have a feeling my daughter is going to know more about her menstrual cycle at thirteen than I knew at thirty-three. Probably because she was born into a completely different world than I grew up in.

I grew up in a time (the 90s) when periods were something you learned about briefly, usually from your mother or in a classroom, and then quietly carried on with, as invisibly as possible. There were pads tucked into bathroom cabinets and discreet trips to the store. You knew you might get cramps or feel emotional, but there wasn't much conversation beyond that. We simply understood that having a period was something women were annoyed by and just had to deal with.

Now our daughters can learn about their bodies almost instantly. They have access to information about ovulation, cervical mucus, hormones, cycle phases, PCOS, endometriosis, PMS, birth control and so much more. Things that were once whispered about are now openly discussed online. I think that's wonderful. The silence and lack of research around women's bodies needed to change.

But I also wonder if we're moving from one extreme into another, so fast we might not even notice that the flood of information can consume us.

We went from barely talking about our cycles to tracking them constantly. Your period can become an app notification, a graph, a temperature reading, a collection of symptoms and predictions. Technology can certainly be useful, but I wonder if we've confused collecting information about our bodies with actually knowing them.

This is where I think mothers that can remember a time before smart phones and AI have an interesting role to play. We remember the silence our daughters may never know, but we've also watched the internet completely transform the way women learn about their bodies. Our daughters may know the vocabulary before we did. They may even teach us things. And I think we should let them.

But perhaps we have something to teach them, too.

We can show them that they don't need a screen to pay attention to themselves. That their cycle can be something they become familiar with rather than something they constantly optimize. We can talk about how different parts of the month feel, share stories, mark a calendar, notice patterns, and make space for questions that don't have to immediately become data.

Our daughters don't have to choose between ignorance and surveillance. They can have information without giving everything away. They can use technology when it serves them and still develop a private, intuitive relationship with their own bodies.

Maybe that's part of the inheritance we can give them. We don't have to go back to the silence we grew up with. We can move forward without turning every intimate part of being a woman into information that needs to be collected, analyzed or optimized.

We can give them knowledge, and teach them how to listen.