This piece is anonymous for obvious reasons. While all details have been changed, every account is based on a real encounter with a young person, or a real experience, past or present.

2019

Our 14-year-old son - let’s call him Ben - is dancing around the living room, making loud squelching sounds and gesticulating wildly. He’s chanting: “She’s a woman now,” repeatedly. 

Our 12-year-old - let’s say Sara - is blushing furiously. I wonder whether I should reconsider Ben’s chances of surviving until bedtime. 

But the punch she gives him doesn’t come near to inflicting the kind of damage of which she is capable (thank you, kick-boxing classes), and she breaks into a giggle before running off. 

There’s a tilt to her shoulders, a bounce in her gait which conveys real pride and pleasure. Our daughter has started her period, and she’s chuffed to bits.

1984

I didn’t tell anyone when my period started. The gush of black goo, arriving during a family camping holiday, terrified me. 

I knew what it was - not because of any conversations I’d had at home, but thanks to clues pieced together from science lessons and Judy Blume novels. 

I also, on some visceral level, knew it was something to be ashamed of. The smell, the stains, the dirtiness of it all had to be hidden at all costs. 

Brought up in an otherwise liberal, stable and happy family, I remain bemused as to why it had to be that way. But there was no doubt in my confused and volatile adolescent mind that so it must be. 

I did what seemed entirely sensible: wadded myself with cheap toilet paper and tried to manage the sharp shards of dried-up blood and constant leakage that ensued. 

Inevitably, I was found out. Three days later, my mum is (as far as I can see) angry and disappointed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

2019

“Grandpa! I got my period today!” The glee is audible from down the stairs. 

A longish silence. “Yes, it’s brilliant, isn’t it!” 

She passes the phone to me, and the conversation moves on to holiday plans and updates on the neighbour’s children, without further mention of the P-word.

1984

It was quite simple in my mind. I just had to pretend it wasn’t happening. 

Those awful thick and bunched-up sanitary towels, which never did the job. The inept attempts to use the washing machine in the middle of the night. The mortification of creeping past family members to dispose of rubbish in the bin. All of this meant I often resorted to flushing - though I knew this was forbidden. 

My uncle is up to his elbows in the drain pipes, trying to unblock them. “Please don’t flush other things down the toilet,” my mum entreats in a whisper. The P-word is not mentioned.

2019

A car journey to stock up on sanitary supplies. All of hers have been distributed to friends over the months. 

Sara: “I thought it was poo…Is that colour normal?...There were lumps, and I was worried, but I looked it up and it’s just the lining of my uterus…Will I bleed on the chair?...My friends look out for each other near the toilets so the boys won’t see…Mariam said she woke up in a pool of blood…It’s kind of gloopy…do you want to see?”

Me: “I love you dearly, but no thanks, darling.”

1984

A girls’ changing room after cross-country. On the back of Emily’s grey skirt is a blood stain the size of a dinner plate. Nobody says a word. 

We all feel nauseating embarrassment on her behalf, but nobody does a thing.

2019

A classroom. “Miss? Miiiiisss! My pad is leaking and I really need to change it. PLEASE can I go to the toilet?”

“Too much information, my dear. But yes. Here’s your pass. You’ve got five minutes.”

Dinner. Sara is complaining of aches, and telling us all that she feels “furious and like crying”, but that she doesn’t know why. Ben says it gets his friend Salma in just the same way.

Bedtime. A shadow crosses Ben’s face. In response to his father’s questioning look, I hear him say, “It’s OK, Dad. I’m getting ready to sleep. It’s just that Ahmed dumped Ray because he thinks he might be bi and he just needed me to listen for a few minutes.”

There is so much that is difficult and fragmented about being a young person today. 

The statistics and stories tell us so many painful things about the state of many young people’s mental health. There is so much that is inescapable and invasive in their lives. 

I wish my daughter didn’t understand concepts like rape and masochism and incest and suicide, but she does. 

I wish I could tell her she’d never again be sent a penis shot on her phone, but I can’t. 

I can, however, feel relief and genuine pride that she - in between her furious expressions of injustice - is still talking, still asking, rather than secretly passing copies of Forever and Flowers in the Attic around the classroom. 

She and her friends talk openly about cramps and irregular cycles and messy accidents. 

What I can do is support her - and overcome some of my own ingrained repression - in the grand job she’s doing of staying open, maintaining perspective and overcoming the kinds of nonsense taboos we put up with through the 1980s and beyond. 

In this volatile world, I feel such a surge of hope when I look at her, at my son and at their peers. This is a generation that has a voice - which seems in so many ways unshockable, which calls out bullshit and bluster and nonsense, and dares to ask the most difficult and stomach-turning of questions. 

Frankly, the sooner this lot is in charge, the better. 

The author is a secondary teacher in London