Introduction

WE NEED A NEW WAY TO TALK ABOUT TEENAGE GIRLS, BECAUSE the way people do it now isn’t fair to girls or helpful to their parents. If you’re reading this book, someone has probably already remarked about your daughter, “Oh, justwait till she’s a teenager!” (And parents who say this never mean it in a good way.) If you’ve read other books about teenage girls, you may have noticed that they tilt toward the dark side of adolescence— how girls suffer or cause suffering in their parents and peers. It’s certainly true that girls can be hard on themselves and others, and even when they are at their best, they’re often unpredictable and intense. But too often we talk about adolescence as if it’s bound to be a harrowing, turbulent time for teenagers and their parents. We make raising a teenage girl sound like a roller-coaster ride: the whole family hops on, white-knuckles their way through, and the parents hope that after all the ups and downs their daughter steps off at the end as a healthy, happy adult.

I’m here to tell you that life with your teenage daughter doesn’t have to feel like a tangled mess. There is apredictable pattern to teenage development, a blueprint for how girls grow. When you understand what makes your daughter tick, she suddenly makes a lot more sense. When you have a map of adolescent development, it’s a lot easier to guide your daughter toward becoming the grounded young woman you want her to be.

To give us a new and helpful way to talk about teenage girls, I’ve taken the journey through adolescence and organized it into seven distinct developmental strands that I introduce, one per chapter, in this book. These developmental strands make plain the specific achievements that transform girls into thriving adults and help parents appreciate that much of their daughter’s behavior—however strange or challenging it may seem—is not only normal but evidence of her excellent forward progress.

The early chapters in this book describe the developmental strands that tend to be most salient in Years 7 to 9 (ages eleven to thirteen for most girls) and the later chapters address the strands that usually become prominent as girls move through Years 10 to 13. Normally developing teenagers move along each of these strands at different rates, and girls are always growing on several fronts at once, a fact that helps us appreciate why the teenage years can be so stressful for girls and the adults who love them.

I’m one of those adults who care deeply about teenage girls and I have built my professional life around them. Every week I meet with girls and their parents in my private psychotherapy practice, instruct graduate students in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University as they learn to work with teenagers, and advise students in my office at Laurel School, an independent all-girls school that runs from a toddler program to Year 13, where I work as a consulting psychologist and direct the school’s Center for Research on Girls. And, as the proud mother of two daughters, I’m lucky enough to have girls at the heart of my personal life, too.

Seeing girls through so many different lenses inspired me to appreciate that the work of becoming an adult sorted itself into meaningful categories and I realized that we could use those categories—those strands—to measure how girls were coming along in their growth. The concept of developmental strands isn’t new; it was first proposed in 1965 b