[mochaccino]

I don't see why it would affect your future kids unless you become pregnant while you're still taking them and you don't realize it right away. It's always possible for you, yourself, to get side effects from anything that affects your hormones, but you might not get any. Not everyone does. I haven't gotten any unpleasant side effects from any of my herbs except for the time I accidentally took way too much hops. Even then, I only got some aches in my joints during ovulation which went away when I lowered the dose.

If you do start to get annoying side effects you can change your program or just stop taking herbs, and you should go back to normal pretty quickly.

There's no specific amount of time that you need to take the herbs for the growth to become permanent. I just think that growth and swelling are two different things. Swelling is just a side effect in my opinion. Almost all of the real growth should be permanent as long as you slowly ramp down your herbs at the end of your program. Of course, it's possible you'll still lose a little bit of the real growth when you stop, or take a long break, but if you lose absolutely everything, I would take that as a sign that the program hadn't really worked, and it only caused swelling.