So, I have a question...

[conuly]

And a story or two to go along with it!

Ana yesterday fell onto a puzzle in such a way that it hurt her in, ah, a sensitive area. Yeah. Owie!

And she wanted her mom to kiss it, which wasn't happening for reasons that were difficult to explain without giving the wrong idea. Poor Ana kept going "Kiss the 'gina!"

Except, of course, it's not the vagina. That's inside. It's the vulva. So why is it that parents who work to use the correct terms with their kids (often self-righteously, but that's a common thread among all such decisions, I find) go "Well, we use the right term, it's a vagina."? It's not! Vagina! Inside! Vulva! Outside! DUH!

[Poll #639771]

Also yesterday, while we're sitting in her mom's room, Ana starts clutching her vulva and asking me what it was, so she could say "I touch 'gina!"* (I didn't want to confuse the issue by adding a new term, though I knew better). If this keeps up, we're going to have to find a way to explain about private parts without warping her for life.

*_{She does this all the time. No, not *that*, asking what something is so she can use the word. "I touch Microwave! I touch ceiling!" It's cute.}

I'm not using the normal tag for issues with the kid, because I intend to friends-lock this anyway long before she gets savvy enough to look it up and KILL ME.

Comments

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

I chose as best I could without knowing the age of the hypothetical child I was talking to -- I would have done better with checkboxes instead of radio buttons, so I could have marked more than one. With very little ones I do succumb to using baby-talk terms -- I can even imagine myself saying "Did you make a poopie?!" to an 8-month-old whose messy diaper I was in the process of changing. By the time they're 2 or 3, though, I'd be shifting away from cutesy words.

In my family of origin we "made bee'yem" -- I was much older before I understood that "BM" wasn't a word but stood for "bowel movement"! And since I was Jewish, the word for one's rear end was "tushy," the kiddie form of the Yiddish "tuchas" (pronounced tookh'ess). The only other word I remember in this context is the one my family used for fart ... =blushes with embarrassment= "boopsie" (pronounced to rhyme with book-see) .

When woofiegrrl was little we used pee and poop as a compromise between clinical terms and offensively cutesy ones. Body parts were standard terms, although in 1981 when she was born even "vagina" was fairly new for PC parents to use with little girls ... "vulva" wasn't even the horizon yet, so it wasn't an issue, we just called the whole structure her vagina.

I used to have difficulty deciding with what to call excretory functions in general until I went through the long hospitalizations with my late husband and found that all the nurses invariably used "pee" and "poop," and figured if they were good enough for the nurses they were good enough for me.