Teaching Your Adolescent When Conception Occurs
If you have adolescents who are 15+ years old, they have likely reached sexual maturity. Now it is time to keep the teaching going, but at a new level. This age group is often more challenging to get their support for your teaching attempts, but the topics will definitely be of interest to them.
I plan to introduce new topics every month for parents who have sexually mature adolescents. In this blog, I am providing information about when conception can happen. This content is not to encourage sexual activity, but to make sure that your adolescent understands the biology of reproduction.
Most people think that conception can only happen on one specific day. They believe that if they avoid that day, there is little chance of conception. That concept is actually not accurate. As you can see from this illustration from my books “I’m a Boy, Sexual Maturity” and “I’m a Girl, Sexual Maturity, there are potentially several days when a sperm and egg can meet.
It is true that it is only on the day that the egg is released from the ovary at ovulation that it can be joined by a sperm. After that one day, the egg is on its way to the uterus and it will disappear when it gets there.
There are three challenges to consider:
- Ovulation does not always happen on the same day in each menstrual cycle. For convenience, we usually say ovulation is on day 14, but that is probably not the case for most girls every month. In the examples in this illustration, there are three different days that ovulation has happened.
- Sperm can live for about four days in the fallopian tube waiting for the egg to arrive.
This doesn’t need to be a “big talk.” It is best to keep is brief, but it will go better if you use the illustration. This talk will hopefully lead to more teaching opportunities in the future.
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