Cycles & Spirituality for our Teen Daughters

Does your teen daughter struggle with irregular cycles, premenstrual symptoms, or cycle-related emotional fluctuations? She shouldn’t have to suffer month after month but is the Pill the answer? Attempting to alleviate symptoms by loading her body with hormones isn’t without side effects – side effects she especially doesn’t need if she’s practicing abstinence.

In His infinite wisdom, God gave each girl unique signs to indicate how her hormones are changing every day. Observing and charting these clues can help a girl understand when her period will arrive (even if her cycles are irregular!), how hormones may be affecting her emotions, and how to manage symptoms. This goes beyond circling the start date of her period on a calendar and counting the number of days until the start of her next period. Cycle awareness through charting gives a girl insight into what is happening inside her body on any day of her cycle which can lead to healthier cycles physically, emotionally, and even spiritually.

The new book Cycles & Spirituality is specifically written for our teen daughters to learn cycle awareness through charting. Being in tune with her own body’s natural signs can encourage healthier eating, sleeping, and exercising habits. It can help manage cycle-related symptoms, like cramps, heavy bleeding, bloating, stress, and moodiness, more naturally leading to improved physical health. For girls with irregular cycles, being able to predict the arrival of a period can reduce anxiety and increase confidence, leading to improved emotional health. Understanding how hormones may be fluctuating on any particular day can also help girls identify when emotional reactions may be cycle-related. Cycle awareness may even help girls develop an appreciation for God’s design of their natural cycles and for all things.

Cycle awareness is not fertility awareness. Our teen daughters aren’t planning a family yet so they don’t need rules for Natural Family Planning yet! For Catholic moms and parents, the teenage and young adult years are a time to instill and reemphasize values such as purity, loving as God loves, and sexual abstinence before marriage as Saint Pope John Paul II teaches us in the Theology of the Body. Our daughters don’t need the Pill for birth control and they also may not want it to mask underlying cycle health issues, increase the risk of serious medical concerns, have adverse reactions, or interfere with romantic relationships. But they do deserve to understand how God designed their body to function and be given tools to naturally handle cycle symptoms.

Learning cycle awareness and charting the natural signs God gave each teen girl can reveal amazing things about her unique cycles. Empowering your daughter now to understand and care for her own body instead of patching problems with a Pill may even help her more easily conceive when she is ready to become a Catholic Mom herself one day.

Learn more about cycle awareness and charting for teen girls and young women at www.CyclesAndSpirituality.com.

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About the author: Alison Protz is an engineer, author, wife, and Catholic mom of four children. Learning to chart and predict her own irregular cycles had a profound impact on Alison’s life physically, emotionally, and even spiritually! Through Cycles & Spirituality she aims to share modern research and wisdom gained through experience with teen girls and young women. Her hope is that girls who are committed to abstinence before marriage will be able to understand, predict, and even appreciate their natural cycles.