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.
Self-knowledge is the foundation of real success.
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.
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.
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.
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 you're motivated by external rewards, it's often because you're trying to accomplish goals you didn't create yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can give them the opportunity to thrive, but when it comes to finding happiness or success, kids are really on their own.
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.
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.
We have to teach girls communication skills.
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.'
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.
