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.
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.
I am a recovering rat racer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It never hurts to tell your teen they matter more than their looks.
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.
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.
Sadness, irritability, fatigue, and distractedness are among the most common side effects of grief while parenting.
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.
When your child believes you really respect what he's feeling, he'll be much more likely to trust you.
