Cope with hormonal chaos when mom is going through menopause and kids are going through puberty
If you’re in your 40s or 50s and you have kids in the house, you’re probably familiar with what I like to call “dueling hormones.”
This is that ever-so-special time when mom is going through perimenopause and menopause, and her kids are going through puberty, all under the same roof. With all these hormonal fluctuations happening at once, things can get more than a little hectic!
In a time before the internet, Judy Blume was all the sex education we needed.
As a young girl—ovaries yet to ripen and hymen still in intact—reading Judy Blume books were like porn for me … educational porn. These were the pre-internet days, before I could Google "funny feeling down there" or "penis, hard-on." All I had was my imagination and my canon of Judy Blume books to aid my highly curious pre-teen mind. They were a permanent Sharpie mark on my burgeoning deviant mind.
Youngish to middle-aged men owe a lot to both Sports Illustrated and Kathy Ireland.
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has been rocking newsstands since 1964. Back in the day, it was the only place for a good, clean, young fella to have a look at a wildly out-of-his league woman in a bathing suit and pretend he was there for the articles. Unfortunately, since the Internet has come around, the magazine means less and less to youngsters and more to advertisers and old-timers.
Women are choosing to have kids later, but studies show puberty is starting earlier.
Many women today embrace the notion of being an independent woman. Women everywhere are saying "screw you" to society’s once norm idea of being a spinster if you aren't married in your 20s, and instead aren't walking down the aisle until they are good and ready.
Dr. Laura Berman has eyebrow raising views on kids and sex eduction.
Oprah Winfrey's resident sex doctor, Dr. Laura Berman encourages parents to embrace their children's sexuality and even encourage it. A stoic-faced Berman told the rows of moms sitting in the audience yesterday, where the topic was How To Talk To Your Kids About Sex, that the ripe, old age of 13 or 14 is way too late to have the "big sex talk." Instead she guesses around 9 or 10 is appropriate. She even suggests mothers buy their teenage daughter a vibrator. To empower them, of course. "You're teaching them about their own body and pleasuring themselves and taking the reins of their own sexuality so that they don't ever have to depend on any other teenage boy to do it for them," Dr. Berman says. We saw that grimace you just gave the computer screen. We feel you, reader. The thought of our mothers gifting us a pocket rocket isnt anything that would've made us any more sexually balanced as a teen. In fact, we probably would've been less likely to use it, but Berman is intent that parents evolve with the times and strip away anytaboo when it comes to sex. Specifically sex toys.
