We learn best when we're intrinsically motivated - that is, when we try something new for the sheer enjoyment of the experience.
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.
In our million-mile-an-hour culture of never enough, working less is interpreted as working less well. This isn't always the case.
I run skills-building programs focused on healthy risk taking, failure resilience, and self-care for undergraduates around the country.
Harassment is one of puberty's darkest, most unreported rites of passage.
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.
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.
Ours is not a culture that cares much for the work of care.
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.
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.
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.
From childhood to adolescence, girls face mixed messages about displaying power and authority.
Prom drops girls squarely into the beauty spending pipeline.
Prom culture is now painstakingly documented on sites such as Instagram and Facebook, exacerbating the angst of the uninvited.
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.
To defer to someone else's definition of a life well-lived is a Faustian bargain.
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 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.
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.
