Jessica Biel Explained How She's Teaching Her Two Sons About Periods

Becoming a parent can be overwhelming for a lot of reasons. Not least of which because you are now responsible to teach another human being literally everything. Some things are easy enough — ABCs and not to hit — but other things can be tricky. For example, how do you explain what a period is to a small child, especially a small boy? Well, Jessica Biel has some thoughts about explaining periods to her sons, and took to Instagram to share her personal experience on it so far.

Biel has written a book, out next month, called A Kids Book About Periods, which she created in collaboration with Period.org to demystify and destigmatize periods for children. “I wrote this book because I had questions when I was 30-something and thinking about wanting to start a family,” she said in a video on her Instagram Story on Thursday. “I didn’t know all the things going on with my cycle and I thought that was really crazy, because I should know these things I should know these things! I should know them in and out by the time I’m in my 30s. And then I started asking my friends and they didn’t know them either. I started thinking about ‘OK, what about parents?’ Now I’m a parent: how do I talk to my kids about all of these interesting issues that are going to come up as they grow and evolve?”

How indeed? Biel explained in a pinned post on IG that A Kids Book About Periods, available May 7, is meant to be a “conversation starter” to help kids, and their parents, understand this bodily function that about half of the population of the world will have to deal with. But even so, knowing where to begin, especially when it comes to boys, who statistically won’t personally be affected by menstruation, can be daunting. How do you explain “blood comes out of the vagina” when they might not even know exactly what a vagina is? Still, Biel is determined that her sons — Silas, 8 and Phineas, 3 — will be well educated when it comes to women’s bodies.

“My way is I just tell them the truth about what’s going on with me and how I’m feeling, what’s happening for me, and I try to do it in a way that is giving them truthful, real, biological, anatomically correct information but also something that isn’t going to feel too overwhelming for them,” she explained on her Instagram Story. “So I’m taking it slow but I’m telling them the truth and I’m not hiding it from them ... I’m just telling it like it is.”

Honestly? A+ advice — no notes!