On Innocence and Growing Up Too Soon
There’s a question many adults avoid asking children, especially girls. It’s tagged as too personal, sometimes even framed as an invasion of privacy. But yesterday, out of fear and deep care, I found myself asking my thirteen-year-old niece that very question.
I had just come across a post where countless women shared stories of becoming pregnant at fourteen, fifteen, they shared their stories too casually for something so life-altering. Almost all of them were teenage pregnancies and honestly, it made my chest tighten. Society keeps redefining “too young,” but our bodies haven’t caught up with these expectations. Growth still takes time, no matter how fast the world is moving.
So I asked her. I asked when she thought she’d stop being a virgin. I also asked if she had a crush on anyone. Not because I wanted to police her thoughts, but because I wanted her to know there was someone she could talk to, someone who wouldn’t judge, panic(maybe a little), or shut her down. But her answer caught me off guard.
“Thirty,” she said.
I laughed. Her mother laughed too. The laughter kinda eased the tension in the room as well. Then she reconsidered, shrugged, and said, since we were laughing, maybe thirty was too soon, so she pushed it to forty. At that point, I was hollering. But when the laughter settled, the conversation softened.
I told her it was okay to have male friends. That curiosity wasn’t a crime. But I also told her, gently and firmly, that getting pregnant as a teenager wasn’t something she deserved to experience. That her life was bigger than that kind of interruption.
I asked her if she had painted a picture of the life she wanted to live. She said yes and it felt like I dipped in a river of ecstasy. She spoke about her dreams with such certainty, places she wanted to go, things she wanted to become, the kind of woman she imagined herself growing into. As she spoke, my eyes burned and I just listened, silently wishing that nothing would steal her softness too early. Wishing that no one would mistake her innocence for something disposable. Wishing that love, when it finally finds her, would be kind enough to wait until she is ready.
I was somehow scared to have that conversation with her, thinking she’d shut me out but my girl is still too innocent and it made me realize that sometimes the hardest conversations are the most necessary ones. Not to frighten children, but to protect them. Not to pry, but to prepare them. And I suppose it is to remind ourselves that growing up shouldn’t be rushed to avoid regrets later in life.