theChat.scot

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Talking about pregnancy and birth

A pregnancy in the family – or when an important person in your child’s life like their teacher is pregnant – can be a time when there are many questions and opportunities for talking and learning together. At school, your child may have had some lessons about human reproduction, you can ask the school what they cover and how, so that you can support at home if your child has questions or might benefit from something being talked about more.

In the section of The Chat called Questions Children and Young People Ask you will find some suggestions as to how to answer these questions; they might seem quite childlike when you think about your 11 or 12 year old, but sometimes children need to refresh their understanding of such things:

• How did the baby get in your tummy? Where did I come from?
• Does the baby grow in your tummy?
• How does the baby get born? Does it hurt?

In this Talking About topic, we go beyond those initial answers to these questions, to think about the conversations we can have that help our child understand more about the importance of pregnancy for mother and child, and about how a baby is born. There are other topics for 11-12-year-oldsthat you might be interested in: Talking about how human life begins and Talking about how people have sex.

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Talking about pregnancy and birth

When you talk about pregnancy you can share the main points as follows. We have provided some pictures here to go with the words you can use.You can go back to the pictures and text again and tell the story of pregnancy and being born. As always, there are book suggestions later.

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Books

You might like to read these books together. Your library might have them, or you can ask them if they will order a book for you.

An exploration of the inner workings of all the major systems of the human body, with hands-on learning lab experiments, colourful diagrams and infographics, model building, and challenging games.

Helps answer questions children ask about how they began. For the child who will benefit from a book designed for children up to 10 years old.