(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

Not everyone who ovulates does on day 14, just like not everyone who menstruates has a 28-day cycle. There’s a lot of diversity in people’s fertility cycles, to the point where popular averages like these are close to meaningless.

We get a lot of users freaking out, mostly about pregnancy risks, because they assume they are ovulating on a given date, when in fact, they’ve never done anything to determine when they, themselves, ovulate.

Want to learn to find out when you probably do? Then you’ve got to start charting, and also get the education and information you need to interpret those charts.

You could start with these two pieces at Scarleteen:

• Get With the Flow: All About FAM

• It’s Smart to Chart

We also love Toni Weschler’s book Cycle Savvy, written expressly for young people, and it has great instructions for charting fertility cycles.