‘I think the VERY VERY WORST term is the ‘front bibs’. How do you come up with that!’
Patricia van Liemt is a radio presenter, writer and mother of Maria (13) and Phaedra (10). Every Friday she writes striking, honest, funny and above all recognizable columns about her life and motherhood.
‘Do you have to do a bah?’, I hear a parent say to her child next to me in the cafe. Something inside me wanted to shout at her very loudly: “Jesus, talk to your child normally!”
But what is ‘normal’?
I’ll never forget that one episode of Oprah where a psychologist told us to use common medical terms with our children. This psychologist emphasized that emphatically, because other terms ‘get rid of you’.
Front Bibs
Yet most parents tend to use separate child-friendly, non-medical terms. The genitals suffer the most from this. For example, there are a number of variants for the vagina such as slit, foefoe, pipi, box, poenie. pussy, hat, flamoes, pussy or bottom. But the VERY VERY WORST I think are the front bibs. How do you come up with that!
Better connection
Well, the reason that you have to give these kinds of body parts the correct name, according to this psychologist, was that you will have a better connection with them later on. And it is especially important for girls to have a good relationship with their vagina. Ok, this sounds weird, but I understood what she meant by this. And the same applies to poop and pee.
Discussion
Of course you can now argue that poop is really dirty, but actually it’s perfectly normal and something we all do. In fact; over the years, numerous scientific studies have been conducted on the importance of looking back from time to time. Our stool says about our health. Ok, we digress.
Read also – From yellow to black: everything you need to know about your baby’s stool >
Weird names
The advice is therefore not to come up with strange names, because then you will send a message that it is also a strange thing! And ‘vagina’ is not a dirty word, but a perfectly normal term for a body part, just like a toe. To be fair, I have to say that I like my vagina better than my toes. But you know what I mean…
Would you rather listen to Patricia’s column? Which can. Every Sunday between 4 and 6 pm she reads it on Wild FM.
