She gets her period and it's such a hush hush topic she's not allowed to talk about it. Ever. Maybe her cramps are bad. Maybe it's messy. Maybe she's had embarrassing accidents in class as her cycle regulates itself.

I'm so sorry that this is how many girls are being raised. When I got my period at age 11 in 1965, my experience was quite different. It wasn't hush hush. At all. On the contrary, my father announced it at the dinner table and opened champagne so the whole family could make a toast to me and celebrate this passage in my life and the fact that I was one major step closer to adulthood. As I'm sure you can imagine, this was embarrassing in its own way.

In my family - perhaps because it was a large one with lots of daughters and my parents were Roman Catholics - there was no shame or queasiness about periods. There was no taboo about talking of them. Nor was there any pressure to hide them. My father used to quip that if our family were to have a coat of arms, it would consist of two Kotex pads criss-crossed rather than swords. He was sent to the drugstore so many times to get sanpro for us he'd say he might as well hang a Kotex from the car antennae (this was a long time ago, before adhesive pads and wings - so the pads had long pieces of cloth on each end to hook 'em to a sanitary belt, and cars still had metal antennae sticking up off the hood).

Still, even if there is no period shaming or taboos about period talk, periods are a huge change in a girls' life. For all the reasons you cite. And coz even when a girl or woman feels comfortable talking about her period pains and problems, and no one tries to shut her up, the fact is that the world - and the medical profession in particular - do not take girls and women's accounts of period pain seriously. I personally had horrible cramps my whole life, but no one took my reports seriously until after I gave birth and went through a rough labor and delivery in my 30s. Once I said the pain I experienced for 5-7s days every few weeks was as bad as the labor my ob-gyn considered extremely difficult, she finally started taking my complaints about menstrual cramps more seriously.