My parents never had hard conversations with me. I'm talking to my 6-year-old about periods, adoption, and death.

• I grew up in a conservative home where we didn't speak openly about topics like sex.
• I'm doing things differently, answering my kids' questions in honest, age-appropriate ways.
• I've spoken openly with my 6-year-old son about death, periods, menopause, and climate change.

When my 6-year-old son saw my tampons in the bathroom and asked what they were, I froze for a minute, with all the possible fictional explanations I could give flashing through my mind like neon lights. They were giant ear plugs. They were for stopping bleeding noses. They were for cleaning between dirty bathroom tiles.

But it seemed like a lot of effort to explain a natural part of life, and something that I thought knowing about would benefit him. So I took a deep breath and explained how a woman's body gets ready to have a baby every month, and when she doesn't have a baby, it doesn't need everything she's stored up for it, so it comes out as blood, and tampons are something a woman can use to help with that. I'm relieved I went down that path, as I think my son asked me fewer questions about it than if I had made something up, and I would have just wound myself up in a web of lies that I'd only have to undo in the future.

It also gave me a flashback of how my heart sank when, as a young girl, I found out that I'd have to bleed every month. I didn't know it was part of the reproductive cycle, as my all-important life briefing on periods didn't come from my own parents, but from one of my friends while we were playing during recess at school. My mom eventually found out that I knew about periods, so she called me in for a talk after dinner one night. She basically reiterated what my friend had already told me.

My parents didn't speak openly about many things

Being told things on a need-to-know, often too late, basis was how my parents operated. They grew up in conservative, Catholic families where parents were not to be questioned, and lines of communications were not meant to be open. I never even had a sex talk with my parents. Instead, at my Catholic high school, we had a visit from church representatives who advised a room full of 16-year-olds that the best form of contraception was to save yourself for marriage.

I recall other occasions where my parents told me significant pieces of information to do with our family well after the fact, and I remember how it made me feel — that my feelings and voice didn't count, and that I wasn't important. As a parent myself now, I want my kids to grow up feeling that they have a say in how (some) things happen in our house, and that my husband and I respect and value them as intelligent humans.

We don't hold back in my house

As a result of our beliefs, my 6-year-old is also aware of other seemingly grown-up topics like menopause and adoption. The conversation about menopause came about when he asked why his grandmother wouldn't be having any more children. I can't quite remember how we got talking about adoption, but it made sense for him to understand it as my cousin is adopted. War has come up too, especially with the current conflicts constantly being featured on the news, but admittedly, that has been a harder one to explain, and it's not something we proactively bring up.

For a while, I felt proud of my abilities as a parent to talk about these tough topics with my son, laying the foundation for more open and productive conversations as he gets older, and with his younger brother, too, although he's only 2. Then my father-in-law, his beloved Grandad, died unexpectedly this month. It took my husband and I a whole week to break the news to him. We were dreading the conversation and kept putting it off.

To our surprise, our son's response to the tragic news was calm and rational. He knew Grandad had been in hospital, but we were all expecting him to recover and return home. He asked a few questions about what happened, but overall, didn't seem too disturbed as he figured he'd see Grandad again in heaven anyway. I don't know whether to be relieved or concerned at his lack of distress, but I have to remember, he is only 6, and death is a big concept to grasp. I'm open to continuing the conversation as he processes the loss to our family.

We're open, but keep things age-appropriate

I don't want to cause anxiety by over-explaining concepts that require a certain level of maturity — for example, my son has started to learn about the environment at school, so we talk about how important it is to look after our Earth, but we haven't gone into detail about climate change.

I also don't want to impose societal norms and views on him that only perpetuate negative associations. Race has come up in our conversations, but only in terms of noticing that someone has a different skin color and talking about why that is. My philosophy is that if he sees racial difference as normal, then he's less likely to adopt racist views. We also have different races in our family background so we make a point of talking about all the interesting and fun things about those cultures.

Having these conversations with my son has made me realize what a huge responsibility parents have to explain to our kids about how the world and life works. They look to us for reassurance about what's okay, and whether they'll be okay. But we also have a duty to not impart our own views, or accepted world views, on them too. By speaking to my son openly and honestly about these grown-up topics, I'm hoping to empower him to have the curiosity to seek the knowledge to come to his own conclusions.