Rachel Simmons

Parents of all girls must simultaneously explain overt and covert sexism, name it whenever they see it, and teach their daughters to do the same.

Reacting to every slight or letdown is neither realistic nor fair; it sends the message that we expect the other person to be flawless in relationship. But no one is perfect, and no one relationship can ever meet all our needs.

In the age of girl power, we're loath to send a message of surrender to our girls. To the contrary: we've doubled down on giving them permission to speak up and fight for their rights. This is a good thing.

It never hurts to tell your teen they matter more than their looks.

The meteoric rise of the 'wellness' industry online has launched an entire industry of fitness celebrities on social media. Millions of followers embrace their regimens for diet and exercise, but increasingly, the drive for 'wellness' and 'clean eating' has become stealthy cover for more dieting and deprivation.

What teens share online is dwarfed by what they consume. Pre-Internet, you had to hoof it to the grocery store to find a magazine with celebrity bodies - or at least filch your mother's copy from the bathroom. Now the pictures are as endless as they are available.

If the Internet has been called a great democratizer, perhaps what social media has done is let anyone enter the beauty pageant. Teens can cover up pimples, whiten teeth, and even airbrush with the swipe of a finger, curating their own image to become prettier, thinner, and hotter.

Girlhood is often marred by schoolgirl cruelty, a grim rite of passage in which parents sometimes cruelly collude. Mothers and fathers must take a stand against petty or protracted hostility between girls.

Despite girls' sparkling resumes - including rates of college enrollment and high school grades that outstrip boys - sexism is a barrier that still leaves girls ambivalent about power. Opening doors has not amounted to ambition to lead for many of them, even those with options, networks, and resources.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.

Social media forces girls to bear witness to painful realities of relationship that were previously hidden from view. It is a new kind of TMI, or 'too much information': publicly posted photographs of an outing or party you did not attend, or a personal web page like Formspring, can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief.

Having a baby on my own is a dream come true, but in my world, there's no sheepish spouse on his way home from a work trip to offer me a stretch of alone time.

Whether you chose a passive-aggressive husband, workaholic wife, or life of single motherhood, we are all officially allowed - and uniquely qualified - to critique our own life experience. Please don't pretend you're living mine.

Just like people date and break up, friends break up, too. 'Best friends forever' rarely ever happens; it's just that no one talks about it.

As parents, we must be mindful that our actions are matching our words.

At the end of the day, most parents have more in common with their teens than they realize. Let's retire the bootstrap mentality and stop telling our teens that their stress is self-imposed.

For the self-conscious or insecure girl, technology can become a crippling addiction, an insatiable hunger not just for connection but the elusive promise of being liked by everyone.

Classroom discussion is where you learn how to debate an idea and stick with an opinion, even when others don't agree - and not take it personally, either.

Many girls aspire to a version of selfhood that puts a psychological glass ceiling on their potential to succeed. They suffer from what I call the Curse of the Good Girl: the pressure to be liked by everyone, generous to a fault, and flawless at everything you do.

There are many ways to be the odd girl out. Your pain can brief or lasting, visible to all or none, with one or many. One of the longest, quietest ways to be the odd girl out is to be friends with two girls who are closer to each other than to you.

Harassment is one of puberty's darkest, most unreported rites of passage.

Sometimes true girl power means accepting that we are actually vulnerable and even powerless - then figuring out how to adapt and have our needs met in other ways.

I've spent years in therapy excavating my endless, often fruitless drive to overachieve. I have learned that being successful hasn't made me happy. It's just made me successful. I even call myself a recovering overachiever.

I was a single mom by choice at 37, and if my love life hadn't quite panned out, most everything else had. I was a classic 'amazing girl' - driven, social, and relentlessly well-rounded - reveling in the fruits of post-Title IX America: an all-metro athlete in high school, Rhodes Scholar at 24, best-selling author by 27.

If we want to end a culture rampant with harassment, we must listen to the adult women who are speaking out courageously. We must also make room for girls to speak: If we listened, we'd find that many middle schoolers are trying to tell us, 'Me too.'

Taking full advantage of all that college offers can be tough for teens facing a major life transition under pressure to perform. Perhaps we should all lower our expectations and let kids find their way.

You can give them the opportunity to thrive, but when it comes to finding happiness or success, kids are really on their own.

I run skills-building programs focused on healthy risk taking, failure resilience, and self-care for undergraduates around the country.

In our million-mile-an-hour culture of never enough, working less is interpreted as working less well. This isn't always the case.

When we frame women's choices in terms of extreme work or extreme mothering, women think they have to define themselves in terms of a single goal, everything else be damned.

Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.

If smart phones had been around for women in the 1950s, 'The Feminine Mystique' might never have been written. The depression and ennui of housewives would have been blunted by Pinterest and Facebook.

Teaching girls to agitate over every problem implies that relationships, and people, can bend to our will.

Painful breakups can have profound effects on the body and mind.

Parents are teachers as much as caregivers, and our children learn to navigate life's challenges by watching us. Kids can get a road map for how to handle painful emotions.

If parents shield their children from real feelings, kids falsely imagine their parents are in constant control of themselves - and may try to emulate them.

When your child believes you really respect what he's feeling, he'll be much more likely to trust you.

We learn best when we're intrinsically motivated - that is, when we try something new for the sheer enjoyment of the experience.

Intrinsic motivation is one of learning's most precious resources. It bolsters us to stick out the tough moments of a challenge and pursue what we love to do.

Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.

Secrecy is hardly new on Planet Girl: as many an eye-rolling boy will tell you, girls excel at eluding the prying questions of grown ups. And who can blame them? From an early age, young women learn that to be a 'good girl,' they must be nice, avoid conflict, and make friends with everyone.

Launching a kid into college is about more than having the money to pay for it. Parents invest so much of their time and identities in the process that it can feel like a part time job. For many parents, the college your child ends up attending becomes a parenting grade.

Somebody once told me I treated my smart phone like Wilson, the volleyball Tom Hanks turns into a friend when he's stranded on a desert island in that movie 'Castaway.' It's an apt comparison: parenting a toddler occasionally feels like being marooned, and your phone is your only connection to the rest of the world.

Sadness, irritability, fatigue, and distractedness are among the most common side effects of grief while parenting.

Girls may love movies about fairytale princes, but their most captivating romance is with their friends.

If you want to stand with me as a single mom - and I know so many of my friends and colleagues do - please don't appropriate my burden as a way to validate your own. To suggest that you are single-parenting when you are simply solo for the weekend devalues what real single mothers do.

A healthy friendship is one where you share your true feelings without fearing the end of the relationship. It's also one where you sometimes have to let things that bug you slide. The tough moments will make you wiser about yourself and each other. They will also make you stronger and closer as friends.

There are no shortcuts to genuine friendship. Relationships are built over time.

There are times in every friendship when you or your friend are too busy to call or are more focused on other relationships. It will hurt, but it's rarely personal. Making it personal usually makes things worse, and being too clingy or demanding can drive a friend even further away. Like people, friendships can get 'overworked' and need to rest.

When girls can be honest with each other, they can make mistakes on their own terms and discover through experience - and not through knee-jerk adult intervention - what a healthy friendship should look like.