Awareness Session on Puberty for Boys of Grade 6

“Puberty” is a process that every single person goes through. It is in a way a right of passage to “growing up”. While a lot of emphasis is given to physical changes that children undergo, the psychological and emotional changes that accompany puberty are less emphasized upon. The puberty awareness session focused on understanding these changes. The main aim of the session was for students to have a smooth transition and normalize the puberty process.

The session was conducted by counseling unit student advisors Pooja Rajkumar and Kavya Kaza for the boys of Grade 6. The session was divided into two parts. The first part of session focused on questions such as “What is puberty?” “What are the mental and emotional changes that you go through during puberty?” “How to deal with these changes?” etc. A video on puberty was shown to further illustrate the points.

The second part of the session focused on the influence of media and gender sensitization. As we all are aware, media has an enormous influence on the way children think and behave. It becomes important to highlight these influences during the process of “growing up” as their minds are especially impressionable.

Another common occurrence during preadolescence is that children view members of the opposite sex with a great degree of contempt. The gender sensitization session focused on bringing about healthy attitudes to members of the opposite sex whom they tend to regard as being inferior to them. It would suffice to say that the session had it moments of awkwardness which the students handled quite well. As expected, certain parts of the session were better received than others. However, the overall message that puberty is a normal process when everyone goes through varieties of predictable changes was put across to the students successfully.