Rachel Simmons

To teach their children how to show themselves grace in the face of a challenge, I coach parents to model self-compassion in the face of everyday setbacks.

All around me, I see girls forced to become rat racers in the College Application Industrial Complex, the subculture where students must craft themselves into the perfect specimens for college admission and often lose their authenticity, love of learning, and sense of self in the process.

I am a recovering rat racer.

I come from a family where happiness was seen as an 'extra,' a kind of frill to life - nice to have, but certainly not necessary and by no means paramount. Work was king. Suffering meant you were working hard. It made you worthy.

My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings - girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.

A girl's social networking profile is a persona she constructs, a photoshopped billboard on the information superhighway. It also offers a salve for the anxiety so many girls feel about relationships, providing the answers to burning social questions like, What do other people think of me? Do people like me? Am I normal? Am I popular? Am I cool?

Empathy isn't the same thing as expressing emotions. It's not about sharing your feelings - it can be really uncomfortable if a parent cries or loses strength at the moment her daughter needs it most. The message sent is that you need to be taken care of, not the other way around.

When I did the original research for 'Odd Girl Out,' I asked every bullied girl I interviewed to tell me what she needed most from her family. The answer truly surprised me. It wasn't having the best solutions, calling the school, or trying to act like everything was okay. It was empathy.

Classroom teachers can play an active role in instructing children about appropriate conduct online, even where there is no school policy on the issue. By promoting public discussion about their lives on the Internet, teachers and students can work together to share advice and develop 'rules to type by' or similar Internet-minded guidance.

Most parents would not hesitate to assume responsibility for their child's behavior on a playground, at school, or in someone else's home. What happens online should be no different. Parents should talk with their children about computer ethics, stipulate rules of conduct, and - most importantly - establish consequences.

The Internet foments outrageous behavior in part because it is a 'gray area' for social interactions.

The Internet has transformed the landscape of children's social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards and intensifying their reach and power.

If more students use self-compassion to reframe their failures, they may discover more nourishing sources of motivation and healthier strategies to pursue their goals.

Happiness doesn't just happen. It must be pursued. And if the pursuit of the 'ultimate currency' of happiness helps us choose occupations that confer present and future benefit, and these choices, in turn, motivate us to succeed, this strikes me as perhaps the most powerful non-cognitive skill of all.

Self-compassion encourages mindfulness, or noticing your feelings without judgment; self-kindness, or talking to yourself in a soothing way; and common humanity, or thinking about how others might be suffering similarly.

In the so-called age of girl power, we have failed to cut loose our most regressive standards of female success - like pleasing others and looking sexy - and to replace them with something more progressive - like valuing intelligence and hard work.

To defer to someone else's definition of a life well-lived is a Faustian bargain.

When I went to prom in the early 1990s, I seesawed between my wish to get asked by the right guy and ride in the cool kids' limousine with the burgeoning realization that I was gay. I had a fun night, but I was far from my authentic, assertive self that night. Prom felt mostly like a job I had to do to maintain my position in the social hierarchy.

Prom culture is now painstakingly documented on sites such as Instagram and Facebook, exacerbating the angst of the uninvited.

Prom drops girls squarely into the beauty spending pipeline.

Isn't prom just a fun dance that hardworking students deserve? Sure, but it's also an event where girls internalize damaging cultural messages.

From childhood to adolescence, girls face mixed messages about displaying power and authority.

Girls must understand not only their moral obligation but their power to be allies to each other at parties and other potentially unsafe spaces for girls.

Many of us endure pain in the service of beauty every single day. We rip off our hair with hot wax, jam our soft skin into modern-day corsets, and burn our scalps with dyes.

No matter how much you urge them to relax and how much you mean it, your child probably grapples with highly stressful environments away from home, whether it's where they go to school, the teams they play on, or the peers in their social circle. Most teenagers I know long for empathy from their parents about their struggle.

Jealousy is unavoidable - it's part of the price we pay for intimacy.

There's no question that aggression can be learned through modeling. When a child sees her parent behave in a particular way, she may be tempted or even rewarded for being that way.

We have to teach girls communication skills.

Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.

Knowing that your parents are okay makes you feel secure in the world.

Sometimes comparing can be a good thing: it can inspire us to work harder and reach farther. But for the most part, excessive measuring yourself up against others - especially when it becomes a way to put yourself down - is a colossal waste of time. It's a dead end. It won't make you do anything except feel horrible.

Most of us are destined to be unhappy if we can't accept that we will have moments - or a waist size - that don't match our perfect vision of how things should be.

Real body satisfaction starts when you learn to see yourself for more than your weight.

Small changes lead to big ones. But big changes - trying to become a different person overnight - usually lead to defeat.

Self-knowledge is the foundation of real success.

I realized that I wanted a Rhodes Scholarship, not because I wanted to go to graduate school but because I wanted to win a famous award. Quitting forced me to realize I was on the wrong track and that I had lost touch with who I was and what I cared about.

When I was 24, I won a Rhodes Scholarship.

Oversharing online can make you feel connected to someone in the moment, but when the moment is over, the only thing that has really changed is that you just gave a piece of yourself away.

Ours is not a culture that cares much for the work of care.

Being jealous of a friend doesn't mean you hate her or wish her ill.

Our friends are barometers of our own lives: We look to our BFFs to better understand how we're doing ourselves. Our friends help us make sense of what we have, what we aspire to, and what we truly long for.

Feeling jealous doesn't make you a terrible person.

Girls who use jokes to be nasty are often hiding other feelings they are struggling to express.

Teasing is often healthy and fun, not to mention an important part of interpersonal and individual development. But when it's abused, 'just kidding' contains a disturbing logic: If I didn't mean it, it didn't happen.

You might be thinking that some people are just naturally good at speaking up, and others just aren't - game over. Not true. Speaking up is a skill that you have to learn like any other, whether it's speaking Spanish or doing calculus or changing a tire.

Raising your hand when you're not sure you have the right answer helps you take risks with your ideas and put yourself out there.

It's not easy to let our kids be less than perfect.

Instagram rocks. I love it, and so do the youth I work with and study.

As girls grow up and download what it means to be a culturally acceptable 'good girl,' they learn to please others at the expense of themselves. They worry about protecting relationships - and what people think of them - at all costs.

When you're motivated by external rewards, it's often because you're trying to accomplish goals you didn't create yourself.