FIVE

Planning for the Future

Most children and tweens don’t think too far ahead—and they don’t need to. At ages eleven and twelve, we expect girls to look no farther into the future than their next book reports or the guest lists for their birthday parties. But by the time they approach the end of adolescence, however, girls should have real goals and should be making plans in pursuit of them. Some teens race along this developmental strand. They have an unusually clear view of what they want for themselves—perhaps taking steps at sixteen and seventeen to get into an accelerated pre-med track in college—but they are more the exception than the rule. Usually, girls are unsure of their future plans or often change their minds about what they want to do next. Shifting interests aren’t a problem so long as our daughters arrive at young adulthood with hopes for the future and the basic skills they’ll need to go after them.

No one feels more invested in your daughter’s future than you do. You love her and want to smooth her path toward a fulfilling life. But you may have already found that when you try to help her think ahead, she can be indifferent, if not downright resistant, to your sensible guidance. On top of that, some girls seem to lose interest in a goal the minute their parents get behind it. Why wouldn’t a girl take well-meaning advice from the people who care about her most? Why would she give up her dream to become an artist just when her parents present her with a gift of painting classes? Because, for most teenagers, the drive toward autonomy trumps everything else.

The craving for autonomy—for independence and self-determination—kicks in hard during adolescence. This is a good thing and a sign of normal, healthy development. But in the day-to-day of raising a teenager, the adolescent drive toward autonomy can take the form of a teenager refusing to do something, even something that she should do and might even have been about to do, simply because a parent has suggested it. I remember the exact moment in my private practice when a teenager taught me just how powerful the drive toward autonomy can be. Every Friday for several months I met with an insightful, levelheaded high school junior who arrived, one day, in a particularly sour mood. When I asked what was wrong, she explained: “My schoolwork is all over our dining room table and I had time before this appointment to organize it and put it away. I’ve been looking forward to dealing with it all week because it’s been driving me crazy, but I’ve been too busy. I came home from school and was walking toward the dining room when my mother told me that I had to get my stuff off the table. So I got in a fight with her about how I didn’t want to put my work away, and the fight took up all of the time that I was planning to spend picking up. Now I’m here, and my work’s still a mess, and I’m really mad about it.”

She smiled as she got to the end of the story. It was pretty funny and she knew it. Yet, in a testament to the power of the teen drive toward independence, my client truly believed that the frustrating outcome was inevitable from the moment her mother told her to move her schoolwork. Even having her own plans to do exactly what her mother ordered could not override the urge to rebuff her parent’s request.

Your daughter’s need to plan for her future presents you with a unique challenge: you want to guide and support her as she moves along this developmental strand, but you don’t want your input to cause her to do the very opposite of what you suggest. This chapter will help you channel your daughter’s press for independence toward meaningful future plans. We’ll start with how you can leverage your daughter’s own goals to help manage her online behavior.

Impulses, Meet the Internet

Parents rightfully worry about how teenagers conduct themselves online. With today’s technology, a teenager can make, record, and broadly transmit evidence of impulsive misjudgment that can harm her at some point in the future. Anyone who spends time with teenagers knows that they routinely use technology to share things that they would not, ultimately, want a future boss or college admissions officer to see. For example, sexting—the practice of sending or receiving racy texts and pictures—is surprisingly common among teens: roughly 12 to 15 percent of teenagers report having sent sexts, while 15 to 35 percent (depending on the study) say they’ve received them. Research consistently finds that girls are more likely than boys to be asked (often pressured) to send sexts, though it is not clear that girls actually sext more than boys do. It’s easy to vilify any teen who uses her phone to transmit bedroom content, but doing so points our attention in the wrong direction. Teenagers are and always have been impulsive. And really great teenagers sometimes do really dumb things. Unfortunately, digital technology makes it possible for teenagers to act on their impulses in ways that are immediate, public, and permanent.

Let’s put it another way. If a popular eighth-grade boy had asked me to share a titillating photo when I was in the seventh grade, I probably would have given the request some consideration. Had I decided to go through with it, I would have had to find the family camera, make sure that it had film, take the photo, shoot off the rest of the roll, figure out what to do with the photos already on the roll, make sure I had money to replace the roll and pay to develop the photos, get myself to a one-hour photo developer (for speed and efficiency, of course!), wait for the pictures, and then figure out how to get my picture to the boy. Somewhere along the way I like to think that I would have reconsidered the wisdom of my plan and concluded that I was acting like an idiot. Today’s teens exist without the benefit of the many behavioral speed bumps we had when we were teenagers. Not only can they act on their impulses with ease, they can create a sharable record in the process.

From this perspective we see that the issue isn’t the impulses that come with adolescence, it’s the potential that digital technology gives to them. Adolescent girls have always wondered about their power to draw attention, but they haven’t always been able to send sexy photos or connect with strangers from their bedrooms. Teenagers have long experimented with illegal behaviors such as underage drinking, but they haven’t always been able to post a photograph of their behavior where almost anyone can see it. Looking back on their own teenage years, most adults feel grateful that there’s no easy-to-access document of all the dumb things they did.

It takes time to grow up, and making mistakes comes with the process. We couldn’t whitewash adolescence and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to because the vibrancy of adolescence serves some developmental purposes. But still, we should aim to have girls arrive at adulthood without a damaging record of their youthful behavior hanging around their necks. The best way to address your daughter’s online behavior will be to frame your concerns in terms of protecting her own long-term plans. We must help our daughters appreciate the real implications of a permanently recorded and readily shared adolescence.

Conveniently, the news is replete with stories of how regrettable emails, photos, or posts ultimately cost people their reputations or their jobs, so you’ll have plenty of conversation starters on hand when your daughter gains regular access to digital technology. While you’re at it, look up the sexting laws in your state. The legislation on this topic is changing rapidly. You and your daughter should be aware of the legal consequences of creating, sending, requesting, or even receiving a sexually explicit image of a minor.

When the time comes, talk with your daughter about the fact that she’s about to create a record of her adolescence, sympathize with the unfortunate outcomes made possible by digital technology, and share with her how lucky the generations before her were to have tech-free teenage years. Be clear that you do not expect her to be an angel throughout her adolescence, but you are hoping—for her sake—that she doesn’t make a digital record of any of her less-than-angelic impulses. By framing the conversation this way, you put the emphasis where it belongs, namely on your role as her ally in the effort to ensure that none of her regrettable impulses follow her indefinitely.

In addition to talking with your daughter about the importance of keeping her impulses away from the Internet, you’ll want to put some digital speed bumps in place. When your daughter first gets regular access to a phone or computer, you can, as I’ve already suggested, make her use of digital technology contingent upon your right to monitor her activity and have her passwords. If your daughter balks at this, remind her that you are doing so to reduce the chance that she’ll act impulsively online. Let her know that if she’d like privacy, you’re glad to leave her alone while she makes phone calls or to give her plenty of space to interact with friends in person.

Some parents think that they can better monitor their daughter’s online activity if they do so in secret. Of course it’s possible for girls to delete out-of-bounds content if they know you’ll be checking their technology, but there are two good reasons why you should be honest about the fact that you are keeping an eye on your daughter’s digital activity. First, knowing that you’ll be checking not only gives your daughter an important speed bump, it provides her with a convenient excuse for bowing out of some digital naughtiness (“Guys, stop posting that junk on my page—my mom checks my account!”). Second, if you come across troublesome content while secretly monitoring your daughter’s use, you’re stuck. You can’t confront your daughter without owning up to your sly behavior, and you may fear that if you admit to your snooping, you’ll miss out on future valuable information. I’ve seen too many parents struggle with this exact dilemma while their daughter digs herself deeper into a bad situation.

Trustworthy older adolescents who are willing to talk with your daughter about her online persona may be one of the best speed bumps of all. Teenagers are quick to dismiss most adult perspectives on digital technology—they feel that we don’t understand their technological world (I’m not sure they’re wrong) and that the threats we point to (“You know, someone looking to hire you might check to see what you’ve been doing online”) are too far in the future to be meaningful to most teens. But young teenagers take very seriously the perspectives shared by older teenagers they respect. High school students occupy a future that seventh graders daydream about, and they can use their influence to shape your daughter’s online activity. If you have access to trustworthy older cousins, neighbors, or beloved babysitters, ask them to talk with your daughter about the digital mistakes they regret making and their seasoned policies for technology use.

As your daughter ages, you’ll need to renegotiate how, and how often, you supervise her technology use. The path forward depends heavily on how responsibly she’s used technology so far. There are few truisms in psychology—humans are too complex to be reduced to one-liners—but here’s one: the best predictor of future behavior is always, always, past behavior. If you want to know what someone is going to do, look at what she has done. If your daughter has handled technology well and hardly needed your monitoring, you’re probably safe to let her proceed into late adolescence with minimal supervision and perhaps a simple warning that you’ll revisit your loosened policy if news of any digital naughtiness comes your way. If your daughter’s impulses routinely get the best of her online, continue to keep a close eye on her technology use or recruit the help of a trustworthy relative or young adult until she establishes a track record of responsible online behavior.

The Road to the Future: Who Drives?

The most immediate road to your daughter’s future runs through her life at school, and by nearly every available measure girls, as a group, do well academically. They get better grades than boys, are less likely than boys to repeat a grade or drop out of school, consistently outperform boys in reading and writing, do as well as boys in mathematics, are more likely than boys to enroll in college immediately after graduating from high school, outnumber male college students, and are more likely than boys to complete college.

Girls’ academic advantage seems to arise from a combination of nature and nurture. Fine motor skills develop faster in girls than in boys and these promote written and verbal abilities by enabling girls to use pens and pencils and articulate words. Young girls seek one another out as playmates and together they talk, make up stories, and favor other language-heavy activities that reinforce their verbal skills. Further, the areas of the brain associated with self-control develop more rapidly in girls than in boys and make it easier for girls to sit quietly and build early literacy skills. Indeed, many girls begin their academic careers as attentive, persistent, and eager students and continue on that trajectory. Despite all this good news, along the way most girls run into some sort of difficulty at school. And when a teenager hits an academic snag, parents can be unsure of their role in helping her address the challenge.

Trina, a visibly angry tenth grader, and her mother, Michelle, sat beside each other on my couch in my office the first time we met. Trina refused to speak. She had been dragged to the appointment and, frankly, I hadn’t expected that she’d be joining us. In setting up the appointment over the phone, Michelle indicated that she was coming in for some guidance regarding Trina’s schoolwork, so I was surprised when I went to my waiting room to find Trina sitting opposite Michelle, a casually dressed woman holding a large, worn purse on her lap. Standing in the doorway of my waiting room, I nodded to Michelle before turning to Trina.

“Hi,” I said, in a tone that expressed my surprise to see her. “I’m Dr. Damour. You must be Trina.” She raised one eyebrow, pursed her lips, gave me a wry “no shit, Sherlock” look, and said, “Yeah.” Hoping to make it clear that I did not have a dog in Trina’s fight with her mother, I asked, “Will you be joining my meeting with your mom?” Though I was offering Trina a choice about attending our appointment, her mom clearly wasn’t. Trina looked at her mother, looked at me, did the mental math, groaned, “Okay, fine,” then stood up and trailed behind her mother and me as we went to my office.

This is another reason why many talented clinicians won’t work with adolescents: they don’t want to get pulled into a fight between a parent and a teenager. One advantage of working with adults is that they come to psychotherapy under their own steam and they, or their benefits, pay for it. Those of us who work with teenagers routinely juggle competing agendas and the fact that the wishes of the client we are retained to serve (the teen) may not line up with the wishes of those who are footing our bill (the parents). Like any practiced clinician who works with adolescents, I have a developed choreography for the tricky dance of aligning myself with, and only with, the teen’s best interest. The dance step I used that day was the one where I never insist that a teen come into my office. But I’ll allow a parent to require it while being clear that I’m hoping to be useful to both parties.

Once situated in my office, Michelle spoke first. She began despairingly. “As I mentioned on the phone, Trina was a good student up until last year, when she started high school and joined up with a party crowd that doesn’t care about school. She did okay in ninth grade but not great. This year, her first semester grades were two B’s, two C’s, and a D in math—and she’s a really smart girl. I tried to help by making her do her homework in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on her while I cooked dinner and answered email. That didn’t work, so I started checking her homework to see that it was done, and done right, before she took it to school. I even stood there and made sure that it went into the right folders in her binder so she would remember to give it to her teachers. I called you right after I got a message from Trina’s tenth-grade advisor. Apparently Trina stopped turning in her work and might fail two of her classes.”

When I think of teenagers and their schoolwork, I’m reminded of the delightful movie The Princess Bride and Vizzini’s great line, “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’ ” Michelle fell victim to a treacherous parenting blunder: never get into a power struggle with a teenager in an area where she holds all the power. When it comes to their schoolwork, teenagers have almost total control and you have none. If your daughter chooses to take responsibility for her schoolwork, chances are that it will go well. If she chooses not to, she cannot be overridden by parental force. Unless your daughter has a diagnosis that prevents her from doing well in school, such as a learning or attention-deficit disorder, by adolescence she is in the driver’s seat when it comes to how she handles her academics. As the driver, she may request or accept your help or the support of others who have her best interests in mind. But, as Michelle learned, if a teenager does not want things to go well at school, she can easily get her way.

Why would a teenager sabotage herself? Trina was clearly annoyed by Michelle’s efforts to help her with her homework, but why can’t Trina see that her own plans for the future might benefit from her academic success? Unfortunately, some teenagers lack the maturity to see it this way, especially if they feel that doing well in school compromises their drive toward autonomy. Michelle’s efforts to improve Trina’s grades inspired Trina’s need to prove that her mother didn’t have that kind of power. Trina was willing to torpedo her own GPA to make her point. Not a mature move, but definitely one I’ve seen teenagers make.

Trina sat sullenly through our meeting and alternated between giving me a dead-eyed stare and looking out the window behind me. After Michelle explained why they had come, I asked Trina if she had anything she wanted to add. I wasn’t surprised when all I got back was a flat “No.” It was abundantly clear that they were playing out in front of me the exact dynamic that brought them to my office in the first place. Michelle could make Trina do her homework, but she couldn’t make her turn it in. Michelle could drag Trina to psychotherapy, but she couldn’t make her talk.

Autonomy. For the win.

I struck a pragmatic tone (because teens cannot stand any sort of “therapisty” speak) and shared what I was thinking. “Clearly, you’re in a standoff. Michelle, you can’t figure out how to get Trina to improve at school, and Trina, you don’t want to be controlled by your mom. I think we can find our way through this, but I’m not sure it makes sense for Trina to join our meetings. Trina, if you ever feel that I can be of help to you, my door is open. I’d be happy to meet with you on your own or with your folks. Michelle, I’m wondering if you and your husband would be willing to meet with me to see if we can find our way out of this impasse. You want what’s best for Trina, but what you’re doing right now isn’t working.” Trina was clearly relieved to be uninvited to our future meetings and Michelle accepted my offer to return with Trina’s dad so that we could figure out how to use Trina’s drive toward autonomy to encourage her to take school more seriously.

Making the Grade

It wasn’t long into my first meeting with Michelle and her husband before I could see that they didn’t enjoy pressing Trina and they didn’t care if she went to a name-brand college—they were simply worried that, at fifteen, she had started to close off options that she might want to have available at eighteen. Not knowing what else to do, Michelle had tried to micromanage Trina’s homework.

I only have time to teach graduate students now, but before I had two children I also taught college courses in psychology. My classes were huge (swelling to more than four hundred in an auditorium at the University of Michigan), so I was always acquainting myself with some new form of undergraduate misbehavior: the student who didn’t come to class for three weeks and was wondering how to get the notes, the student who plagiarized a paper but then felt really sorry, and so on. My colleagues and I would confer in the Psychology Department’s faculty lounge about how to handle these situations, and when the conversation went on too long, someone would always end it with the six smartest words: “People make choices, choices have consequences.” Trina’s parents understood this, and they needed to help Trina understand it, too.

For Trina, the distance between the choices she was making now (to turn in her homework or not) and the consequences she’d face later on (college options) was too big for her to take seriously. On top of that, Michelle had unwittingly set up a power struggle in which Trina felt that holding on to her autonomy meant letting go of her schoolwork. Trina’s parents and I needed to shorten the distance between Trina’s daily choices and the consequences she faced, and we needed to move Michelle out of the role of homework supervisor. We had to work with, not against, Trina’s drive for autonomy.

Predictably, Trina received disappointing midsemester grades. After her parents and I met to craft a new game plan, they said to her: “We hate to see you shutting down options that you may want to have at the end of high school. You’ll probably have interests then that you’re not aware of now. And there’s something else. We know that you want to go to parties and concerts with your friends, but those come with risks that require maturity and good judgment on your part. You’re not showing us maturity and good judgment at school, so we’re not doing our job as parents if we let you go into risky situations without any proof you have the judgment needed to handle those situations well. Show us your maturity at school and we’ll let you exercise that maturity when you spend time with your friends.”

We worked carefully on the language Trina’s parents would use to spell out their new approach, but much more important than their words was the spirit in which they were spoken. In order for our plan to have a shot at success, I coached Michelle and her husband to use a tone that conveyed that they were feeling hopeful, not hostile, and that they were comfortable with the fact that Trina held all the power when it came to her schoolwork. They needed to communicate that they wanted Trina to be able to go out with her friends but that it was up to her to choose that option.

Trina thought the new plan was ridiculous and told them so. Her parents proceeded anyway and suspended any risky socializing until they received her end-of-semester grades in December. In the spirit of not putting her under house arrest without warning, they allowed her to have friends over and go to friends’ houses if the parents were home. They also asked Trina to propose the grades that she thought she could get if she were to apply herself until the end of the semester. She projected that she could pull B’s in most of her classes but doubted that she could get above a C in math. Her parents accepted her proposal and said that she should let them know if she needed any tutoring support. They told her that she could go to parties and concerts if she got the promised grades and that she could keep those privileges at the start of the second semester with the understanding that they would again be revoked if her grades fell below projections in the next marking period.

We might have considered other consequences for Trina’s low grades, such as docking her allowance or increasing her chores. But many teenagers would choose poverty or laundry duty over doing their homework, and only a few would sacrifice their independence. And linking Trina’s grades to her social life makes sense because Trina needs to demonstrate maturity for her parents to feel comfortable with her expanding social activity. Trina’s grades provide an objective, if imperfect, measure of her ability to act responsibly. When Trina pushed back, I urged her parents to impassively point out that their new plan simply mirrored the realities of life beyond their home. When people are irresponsible (doing shoddy work, not paying speeding tickets) they tend to lose privileges (professional autonomy, their right to drive). Our plan wasn’t a diabolical scheme to persecute Trina. It was a small-scale version of how the rest of the world works.

We proceeded in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back fashion. Trina did better at school from October to December to regain her privileges, then faltered in February and posted subpar grades in March. Trina was furious when her parents cut back her socializing pending her June grades. They made it clear that they were neither pleased nor angry about her backsliding and reminded Trina that, when it came to how she spent her summer, she was the one in the driver’s seat. Trina tried to pull Michelle into a fight by pointing out that her friends’ parents allowed them to attend parties and concerts regardless of their grades, but Michelle warmly joked back that her friends’ parents must not love their daughters as vigorously as they themselves loved Trina and reminded her that they had her best interests in mind.

Trina’s parents did an impressive job of maintaining their neutrality in the face of her struggle. They calmly pointed out that their rules were designed to keep her safe and her options open. In the privacy of my office, they fretted over whether our plan was working, but in front of Trina, they maintained a united, practically indifferent front. To keep them on board (while I also worried that our plan wouldn’t work), I shared my experience that girls who are struggling usually improve in the same way that spring comes to Cleveland. The temperature doesn’t rise a degree or two each day as we move out of our dreadful winter into our glorious spring. Instead, the ratio of crummy days to decent days gradually shifts. No matter what, March and April bring at least one ferocious ice storm, but that doesn’t put us back in January. I encouraged Michelle and her husband to stay the course, to see the lapse in Trina’s grades as an unfortunate ice storm, and to work with the assumption that her spring would still come.

Trina put her folks through a fickle academic spring, but by the end of the school year, she eked out the grades she’d promised and was rewarded with a summer of fun. I later learned that when Trina thanked her mom for dropping her off at a concert, Michelle took the opportunity to say, “Don’t thank me, you’re the one who made this happen. I’m happy that you get to do the things you want to do.” Trina had gotten in gear to change the direction her life was going.

If your teenager runs off the academic road (because I might as well, ahem, “exhaust” this metaphor), start by eliminating the possibility that her difficulties, unlike Trina’s, are out of her control. At times, girls have learning or attention disorders that go undiagnosed until adolescence because the diagnosis is mild enough to have been missed or because the girl’s strategies for managing her limitations have been equal to the schoolwork faced in the early grades. You might suspect that your daughter has a learning disorder if her efforts don’t yield expectable levels of academic success, if her grades are surprisingly uneven from one class to another, or if her teachers report gaps in her learning.

Some girls with an undiagnosed learning or attention disorder look as though they have a bad attitude because they feel discouraged and struggle to maintain their motivation. But their frustration is understandable. Most of us would want to give up if our hard work didn’t bring good grades and if school seemed to come so much more easily to everyone else. Should your daughter’s school raise the possibility that she might have a learning or attention disorder, work with the school counselor or psychologist to pursue an evaluation to rule out a disorder or to provide clarity if one exists.

You do not need to wait for your daughter’s difficulties to be flagged at school to consider a diagnostic assessment. Schools may fail to alert parents that a child may be struggling with a learning or attention disorder for any number of reasons: teachers sometimes worry that parents will be hurt or offended by their observations, the school may be reluctant to take on the costs associated with assessing and supporting a student with this type of diagnosis or may lack the resources needed to collect and share specific, timely, and helpful feedback about how individual students are doing. In some cases, a girl will perform adequately or even quite well during the school day while only her parents know how overwhelmed and confused she feels in class or how many painful hours she spends on her homework each night.

If you suspect your daughter has a problem with learning or attention (or if someone in your family already has such a diagnosis and your daughter’s patterns are starting to look very familiar) raise your concerns with her teachers or, if it makes you more comfortable, with your pediatrician or family doctor. Should a professional assessment yield a diagnosis, you will have critical information about the academic support your daughter needs. If nothing’s amiss, you will have a clear picture of her intellectual profile and an objective measure of what expectations you can reasonably hold.

What if you don’t think your daughter has a learning or attention disorder, but you’re still concerned about her grades? Start by considering the possibility that your expectations are unrealistic. Some parents who were academic heavyweights themselves assume that their children will be whiz kids as well. But genes are complicated, and “normal” covers a wide range of students. Does your daughter take responsibility for her work, exert reasonable levels of effort, and maintain a positive attitude toward school? If so, she may be getting exactly the right grades. If you doubt your ability to take a neutral view of your daughter’s capabilities—and who among us can be neutral when it comes to our own children?—ask your daughter’s teachers for their take on her academic performance. Be clear that you want an honest appraisal and that you are making sure that your expectations are fair and realistic. Educators know more about teenagers and their schoolwork than anyone. Most teachers have their students’ best interests in mind and will provide an accurate read on your daughter’s efforts and abilities if you ask for it.

If you have ruled out a learning or attention disorder, weighed the fairness of your expectations, and still have concerns about your daughter’s underperformance, it may be time to let her know, from the passenger seat, that you’re worried about where she’s headed. Point out the long-term consequences of low grades, and if that doesn’t work, you, like Trina’s parents, may need to find ways to capitalize on your daughter’s drive for autonomy to help her feel motivated about school.

Tense About Tests

Girls who are planning ahead sometimes feel that their futures ride on every quiz and test they take, so it’s no surprise that they can experience intense test anxiety even if they usually do well in class, on their homework, and on the actual tests. Girls, more than boys, feel threatened by evaluative situations. Accordingly, research demonstrates that they suffer more test anxiety than boys do and that their test anxiety hurts their scores. Anxiety influences how girls feel (nervous), what they think (“I’m going to bomb this test!”), and their physical state (racing heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth). Under these conditions, a girl’s mind goes blank because her working memory shuts down and stops retrieving and applying the information she knew right before the test. From there, girls tend to have one of two reactions. They give up and start filling in answers randomly, or they expend too much energy on the test and fretfully double-check and change responses. Either way, their scores go down.

Though it’s not a recognized diagnosis, girls often talk about having test anxiety the same way that they talk about their eye color—as if it were a factory setting that can’t be changed. But psychologists understand a lot about anxiety, and we know that there are many ways to help students address it. If your daughter has test anxiety, a first step will be to normalize her feelings, because our culture’s discomfort with psychological distress has given anxiety (and other hard feelings) an unnecessarily bad name. While too much anxiety can become crippling, we know that some degree of anxiety can serve as a signal that it’s time to be on your toes. Research shows that moderate levels of anxiety actually energize test takers (and athletes, actors, and other performers) and contribute to their success. Performance only suffers when anxiety becomes too intense. Help your daughter appreciate that she should feel some tension on the way into a test because girls who aim for Zen-master levels of tranquillity freak out at the first whiff of nerves. It’s a short step from there to feeling that the anxiety has won and all hope is lost.

More often than you might suspect, girls experience test anxiety simply because they haven’t studied. If your daughter feels anxious and you know that she has yet to buckle down, say, in a nice way, “Of course you’re nervous for the test—you’re not ready. It’s as if you’re showing up for opening night without knowing your lines or having gone to rehearsal. When you study, your anxiety will go down.”

Even girls who study can arrive at tests underprepared because, overwhelmingly, students get ready for tests by reviewing their notes, highlighting passages, or rereading material. While reviewing the material constitutes a good first step in studying, it should only be considered a first step because research finds that highlighting and rereading are among the most ineffective study strategies of all. To return to the theater analogy, reviewing the material is the equivalent of learning one’s lines—you can’t have a play without the actors knowing their lines—but memorizing lines doesn’t make an actor ready for the play. Next, the actor needs to practice delivering her lines under playlike conditions—hence rehearsals. For test takers, this means applying their knowledge in conditions like the ones they’ll face during actual tests, such as being quizzed at home or, best of all, writing and answering their own test questions. Some of the best students I know search online for sample tests on the topics they’re studying and routinely find tests like the ones they’ll be taking. When girls actively engage with test material under testlike conditions, studies find that they learn the material more thoroughly and get better scores than students who use passive review techniques.

Another recipe for test anxiety is believing that a test measures much more than it actually does. Some girls face tests thinking their scores will reflect their overall intelligence, likelihood of professional success, or worthiness to take up space on the planet. One bright girl in my practice approached every test as an opportunity to compete with her older brother, a superstar at their high school. She worried that her test scores might prove that she didn’t measure up. Not surprisingly, she became anxious during exams and got lower scores than she should have.

Girls aren’t always aware of what they are loading onto a test, and the outstanding research on the phenomenon of stereotype threat has demonstrated that students who are negatively stereotyped (e.g., “African Americans aren’t as smart as whites,” “Girls are bad at math”) tend to underperform in testing situations where they fear they might confirm the stereotype. In other words, a girl might bomb a math test precisely because she is worried that a low score will reinforce the wrongheaded belief that girls are bad at math. Interestingly, research suggests that the girls most eager to disprove the stereotype—girls who are proud of their female identity—may also be the most likely to suffer from the effects of stereotype threat. Tests take on awesome proportions for teens who feel charged with defending their sex with their math scores. As you’d expect, anxiety sets in and hurts performance.

To study the phenomenon of stereotype threat, researchers subtly remind students of the stereotype and then see what happens. In one study, a team of psychologists put together two groups of undergraduate research subjects; both comprised men and women with strong math records (they had all received at least a B in calculus and scored above the eighty-fifth percentile on the SAT math subsection), and both were given the same challenging math test. The groups differed in only one way. Before the test began, the first group was told that they were taking a test that had yielded gender differences in the past and the second group was told that no gender differences had been found on the test they were taking. When mentioning gender differences, the researchers didn’t even say that men had outperformed women, and yet here’s what they found: in the first group, the men got much better scores than the women, and in the second group, the men and women performed equally well. The mere mention of a gendered pattern on the math test was enough to trigger stereotype threat and suppress the performance of strong female mathematicians.

Amazingly, research on stereotype threat shows that the phenomenon occurs entirely outside of the test taker’s awareness. The girl doesn’t realize that her anxiety arises from carrying the weight of her sex (and, for some girls, her negatively stereotyped racial or ethnic group) on her shoulders. All she knows is that she feels nervous and then, naturally, starts to link her anxiety to the test. She thinks, “Yikes…I’m sweating. These questions must be really hard” or “I must not be as ready as I thought I was!”

Help your daughter combat stereotype threat and manage text anxiety by limiting what she believes to be at stake on any one test. Remind her that a test only measures her mastery of the material on the day of the assessment. It does not reflect her value as a girl, daughter, or person. It doesn’t even measure her promise in the subject being tested. If she worries that a test will determine her future, encourage her simply to focus on each test item, forget about everything else, and ask herself, “What do I know that will help me answer this question?”

We already know that adults do a great job of encouraging girls to be nice, but we don’t always help them make good use of their angry or aggressive feelings. Our failure to help girls channel what psychologists call “healthy aggression” not only keeps them from standing up for themselves, it also gets in the way of their ability to attack tests because healthy aggression fuels the capacity to compete with gusto and show off hard-won skills.

Unfortunately, popular depictions of aggressive girls invariably feature the ones who specialize in unhealthy aggression, girls who put the mean in “mean girls.” Examples of tough but kind girls aren’t always easy to find in popular culture (with the important exceptions of Disney’s Mulan and The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen), a fact that might contribute to girls’ belief that they should stay away from aggression in any form. Some girls actually fear tests because they are uncomfortable employing the scrappiness that helps people to do well in competitive situations. In the same vein, many coaches of girls’ teams complain that the girls are too worried about hurting their opponents’ feelings to steal the ball, strike them out, or beat them on the field or in the water.

If you suspect that your daughter may be taking the “nice girl” thing too far, help her find her inner warrior at test time. Tell her to “get in there and show that test who’s boss” and “kick those questions around a bit.” When she does well on a test, commend her for being a go-getter and encourage her to keep fighting the good fight. If you watch sports together, comment on how the same athlete can be kind and humble off the field yet go for the gold at game time. With the right support, girls can learn to be fierce when it’s time to compete or take tests and compassionate souls the rest of the time.

Practicing relaxation techniques serves as a final, excellent option for helping girls manage test anxiety. With the support of a therapist or, more conveniently, a quick online search, your daughter can learn about techniques including diaphragmatic breathing, progressive relaxation, and visualization. She should practice her preferred relaxation technique at home under low-anxiety conditions and call on it before her anxiety becomes too intense. Once she has a reliable tactic for managing her nerves, your daughter will be able to take a thirty-second test break to turn down the dial on her anxiety if needed.

Test anxiety happens when a girl’s nerves take on an unhelpful life of their own. In contrast, procrastination—our next topic—happens when the healthy tension that helps girls stay on top of their work seems to be missing. If your daughter is a procrastinator, you might find yourself in the unpleasant and untenable position of feeling more worried about her work than she is.

Planning for Next Week

There are plenty of teens who care about school but fail to link what they do today with the grades they’ll get next week. Teenage girls should be dreaming big about their futures, but they should also use incremental planning to tackle their immediate goals. Adults, who have the perspective and experience to link daily choices with short- and long-term outcomes, can come into conflict with girls who haven’t figured out how to stay up-to-date on their schoolwork.

If you surveyed a large group of parents about their daughters’ worst academic habit, the most common complaint would be that they procrastinate. Teenagers procrastinate, sometimes for the same reasons as adults and sometimes for other reasons. Like many adults, some teens struggle to delay gratification and would prefer to do fun things—and even not-so-fun things—before getting down to work they really don’t want to do. Some teenagers (and adults) are under the impression that they turn in their best performance at the last minute when their fear of missing a deadline finally outmatches their wish to avoid the work to be done. And some teenagers procrastinate because they truly do not appreciate the amount of time their work will really take. Regardless of why your daughter procrastinates, your job will be to make sure that she sees the problem as hers, not yours.

Maya and I met less frequently after Camille’s freshman year. By the end of ninth grade Camille’s relationship with Maya had warmed up, the drama of Camille’s middle school social life had cooled down, and Camille had devoted herself to her friends, her growing interest in her science classes, and her place in the school’s marching band. I didn’t see Maya again until the end of Camille’s sophomore year, when she made an appointment to check in about a tough night they’d had the week before.

Maya explained that Camille tended to wait until the eleventh hour to get things done and, though she usually managed to pull off good grades, did so at the price of a lot of last-minute stress. Knowing that Camille had a major term paper coming up, Maya encouraged her to get going on the paper well before the deadline but was met with prickly resistance. True to form, Camille found herself looking at an all-nighter right before the paper was due. Panicked, she became testy over dinner, then tearful about the long night ahead, then insistent that Maya stay up with her as late as possible to keep her company while she hammered out the paper. Maya reluctantly agreed to stay up for much of the night—drinking coffee and attending to her own work while Camille typed away. Unhappy with (and exhausted by) the way things were going, Maya wanted to address her daughter’s procrastination before Camille headed off to college but wasn’t sure how to step in.

When teenagers are in conflict with themselves, they often seek out conflict with their parents. Procrastinators tend to be of two minds. Part of them would like to enjoy the benefits of getting their work done in a timely fashion, and part of them would prefer to watch reruns. Rather than wrestling with an uncomfortable internal struggle, teenagers will—unconsciously—look for an external fight with their parents. In other words, Camille dallied and let her mother take up the work of nagging her to start writing the paper. It’s not particularly pleasant for most teenagers to be at odds with their parents, but they generally prefer it to being at odds with themselves. This dynamic doesn’t limit itself to schoolwork—it’s a recurrent theme in parenting a teenager. You’ll know that you’ve been drawn into your daughter’s internal conflict when you find yourself nagging her to do something that she knows full well she should do, such as get in shape before her basketball season starts or return an employer’s call.

People only make changes when they are uncomfortable, and it’s most uncomfortable for Camille to be at odds with herself. To help Camille stop procrastinating, I encouraged Maya to decline Camille’s invitations to bug her about her schoolwork. Not surprisingly, soon after that Camille left a paper to the last minute and then wanted Maya’s support through the night. Maya later told me that she said, “I’m sorry that you put yourself in this position. I have a long day tomorrow so I’m headed off to bed. Perhaps next time you’ll get started earlier.” Maya’s response might seem harsh, but I could tell from her recounting that it was said in a loving way. In fact, it almost killed Maya to turn Camille down, but she knew that staying up with her would send the wrong message: that Maya had a hand in a predicament that Camille, alone, had created. Several weeks later, Maya called me to share that Camille had decided to join an after-school study group to help her get started on her schoolwork. Left to deal with her discomfort, Camille had come up with a smart solution that, happily, didn’t involve Maya.

Some girls are quite at ease with putting off schoolwork and don’t mind operating under the gun. If this is the case in your home, you may need to wait until your daughter is upset about her habits to comment on them. If your daughter feels disappointed with her grades or if they don’t meet some agreed-upon standard, if she’s tired from staying up too late to do her work the night before it’s due, or if she misses out on a fun opportunity because she waited until the last minute to do an assignment, you might be in a position to say, “I don’t have to tell you that getting started earlier would have solved this problem. Next time, you may want to do things differently.”

Of course, girls procrastinate about things besides schoolwork. They put off taking out the trash, drag their feet when they should be finding summer jobs, or fail to turn in necessary forms to get paid for work they’ve already done. If your daughter’s procrastination poses a problem only for her, stand back and let the natural consequences do their work. If it’s a problem for you, create a logical repercussion. Let her know that you won’t be giving her a ride to her friend’s house if you end up having to take out the trash; give her a deadline for securing a job of her choosing while letting her know that you’ll find her a job of your choosing if that deadline passes. Procrastination is no fun for anyone, but it’s a common affliction among teenagers and one that many outgrow, especially if they are allowed to feel the impact of their choices.

Procrastinating isn’t the only way girls struggle to manage their daily obligations. They may have trouble keeping track of due dates, lose their homework assignments, or study ineffectively. Unfortunately, schools that give parents an easy way to keep daily tabs on their daughters’ assignments have opened up a new way for girls to recruit their parents’ help with what should actually be each girl’s own responsibility. Digital grade books have been a godsend for the parents whose daughters have real problems with executive functioning (shorthand for the capacity to plan, organize, and strategize) and cannot learn from their own academic mishaps. But for everyone else, monitoring a girl’s daily work can interfere with her ability to plan for the future.

Girls who learn from small failures are more likely to avoid big ones. We don’t like to let our teenagers falter, but stepping in to help with the small stuff and never stepping out keeps girls from growing. Parents who get into the habit of closely monitoring assignments can unwittingly involve themselves in a conflict that should have stayed between the part of their daughter that’s being irresponsible and the part that wants to improve. If your daughter is frustrated with her grades, consider saying, “We know that you’re disappointed about your marks. And you know that you’re not taking charge of your schoolwork. We’re happy to offer any support you’d like or help you connect to resources at school, but we trust that you’ll figure out what you need to do differently to get the grades you want.” If your daughter isn’t disappointed, but you are, consider tying her freedom to her schoolwork as Trina’s parents did. Though it might take a few grading periods, or even semesters, to straighten things out, she’ll start learning how to plan for the future, even if that future is only several days away.

Dealing with Disappointment

The arrival of adolescence coincides with new ways to be ranked and sorted. Adults measure teenagers against one another in very public ways. Some teens make varsity, some win academic awards, some take honors classes, and only one or two are picked for lead roles in the school play. Adolescents often craft ambitious—even grandiose—plans for the future and can become painfully disappointed when things start not to pan out or when they themselves don’t measure up to their peers.

Girls, more than boys, may be derailed by disappointment because research shows that they explain failure differently than boys do, especially in traditionally male subjects such as mathematics. When a boy fails a test, doesn’t get the lead in the play, or faces some other hitch in his plans, he’s likely to attribute his difficulties to external or temporary factors. He’ll say, “It was a dumb test,” “The drama teacher doesn’t like me,” or “I didn’t prepare enough.” Right or wrong, a boy’s explanations can help him to feel that he’s still in the running. Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to explain failures in terms of internal, permanent factors: she’s broken and can’t be fixed. When faced with disappointment, a girl might say, “I’m no good at this,” despite piles of contradictory evidence. Schools are full of girls who ace the first five quizzes in physics class but declare themselves bad at science when they get a B on the sixth. Worst of all, girls’ explanations for failure take them out of the game. Once a girl decides that she’s weak in a subject, it doesn’t matter if she’s smart or talented; she’s likely to stop trying to build her skills and thus surrenders her chance at success.

Helping teens deal with disappointment is a timeworn problem that has been blown wide open by the game-changing research of psychologist Carol Dweck. Dr. Dweck identifies two kinds of people: those with a growth mindset, who believe that their talents can be expanded with effort, and those with a fixed mindset, who believe that their abilities are static and cannot be changed. Her research clearly demonstrates that people with a growth mindset outperform those whose mindset is fixed. Girls with a growth mindset embrace challenges because they know that hard work will expand their skills, welcome feedback from teachers and coaches because it provides information about where they need to aim their efforts, and feel inspired by talented peers. Girls with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, fear challenges because they worry that they’ve come to the limit of their abilities, feel threatened by feedback because it provides good or bad news about what they believe to be fixed traits, and feel humiliated by their talented peers.

When your daughter comes home in tears because she received a bad grade, lost her spot on the varsity team, or was passed over for the lead in the play, you may be compelled to offer all sorts of well-meaning but fixed-mindset reassurance. You might say, “It’s okay, honey, I was never good at math either!” (accidentally reinforcing the idea that math talent is a fixed trait) or “Maybe the coach doesn’t really understand how talented you are” or “They chose her to play lead? Well, honey, I think that you’re a way better actress than she is!” Ultimately, fixed-mindset reassurance backfires. When we support our daughters by telling them that they are special, or that they’re great at other things, we suggest that success depends on luck, not effort. In the short term, her self-esteem may be salvaged. In the long term, she’s left feeling that she’s the helpless victim of circumstance, not someone who can use her diligence to make things happen.

How do we offer growth-mindset reassurance? We celebrate effort over outcome. We say, “You have come a long way in your skills as a pianist and you’ll keep growing with practice. It’s crummy to lose a competition, but you already know what you need to do to become better.” Or, “I remember how stunned I was the day when I got put on the JV when I thought I was a really good soccer player. I wasn’t ready for how good the other players were and how much more they knew about the game. It got better when I realized that there will always be stronger players and that my job was to try to learn from them.” Words like these coupled with a reassuring tone will go a long way toward helping your daughter feel better. Don’t share her humiliation when she encounters more talented peers—focus on helping your daughter to be her best, not the best. Say (and mean it when you say it), “I’m so glad that you’re not leading the pack—it’s easier to grow when you’re surrounded by peers who can stretch and inspire you.”

Girls who are very smart, or who have been hailed as gifted, can be at heightened risk for developing a fixed mindset. When we explain success in terms of smarts, girls can worry that having to actually work at something proves that they weren’t so gifted in the first place. I’m not against telling girls that they’re bright, but balance that praise with an admiration for her work habits and effort. If your daughter succeeds without breaking a sweat, consider saying, “You’re doing well without having to work hard at all, but I also look forward to the day when you have to push yourself to understand the material. That’s when the real learning begins.”

Should your daughter falter when she meets hard work relatively late in the game, there’s still time for her to adopt a growth mindset. Plenty of girls sail through elementary and middle school and don’t face their first real challenges until adolescence. Then, not knowing what’s hit them they may give up, make excuses, or complain that they are suddenly “dumb.” If this is your girl, empathize that it’s hard to buckle down when the work has come so easily until now, but point out that many of her classmates developed their persistence years ago and she can too.

Though you may have celebrated your daughter’s smarts in the past, it’s time to remind her that talent only gets a girl so far. We all know gifted, lazy people who accomplish nothing and likewise tenacious, less gifted people who go far. Indeed, terrific new research on grit shows that the steadfast pursuit of long-term goals contributes to success over and above what can be explained by intelligence alone. Put another way, you can tell yourself and your daughter that it doesn’t matter if she’s a mental Ferrari if she won’t step on the gas. A speeding Ford Taurus will beat an idling Ferrari any day.

Dr. Dweck’s work hasn’t just influenced my thinking, it has actually warped my parenting. I started reading Dweck’s research when my older daughter was four and I became an instant convert. It’s rare that academic psychology presents such a fresh, elegant, and practical idea, and growth-mindset thinking actually accomplishes the hat trick of raising confidence, improving grades, and helping girls embrace challenges. I realized how profoundly my parenting had been influenced when my daughter came home from kindergarten to say, “Mom, I want to tell you about a really cool thing a girl in my class built, but I don’t want you to tell me that I could build something like it if I worked really hard.” Clearly, the message (which I was undoubtedly beating to death) had gotten through.

Planning for the Future: When to Worry

There are many effective ways for girls to look to the future. Some girls lay careful groundwork for distant plans. Others aren’t sure what they want to do after high school but leave the door open for unforeseen interests to come along. Still others give little thought to what’s ahead then suddenly become consumed by a worthy goal. In fact, one of my favorite things about working with teenagers is how fast they change. I regularly watch girls go from bobbing along one week to gunning an outboard motor the next. As Anna Freud noted, “The changeableness of young people is a commonplace. In their handwriting, mode of speech, way of doing their hair, their dress and all sorts of habits they are far more adaptable than at any other period of life.” The fact that teenagers transform so quickly caused one of my psychological colleagues to quip that “we get too much credit for our work with adolescents.” So how do we know when it’s time to worry? We should worry if a girl is so fixated on her future plans that she can’t enjoy herself at all, or if a girl is so indifferent to planning that she’s closing all sorts of doors.

All Plan and No Play

Some girls can make themselves, and their parents, miserable with their planning for the future. They commit themselves to multiple joyless extracurriculars with the aim of getting into the college of their dreams, practice more than their coaches recommend, or study far beyond what’s needed. They are devastated by any grade lower than an A and will stay up late to work and fret, even as their parents exhort them to relax and go to bed.

Parents of girls who are overperforming usually feel as if they don’t know what happened. Typically, they have encouraged success, but they are rarely the taskmasters one would imagine upon meeting their daughters. Somewhere along the way, their girl decided to take all of the well-meaning lessons she’d been taught by adults—to be persistent, careful, and ambitious—and pursue them to an unhealthy extreme. There are boys who match this profile, but it’s more common among girls. Research finds that girls are more likely than boys to experience school as intensely stressful (while academically outperforming boys) and also more likely to become depressed if they are having academic problems.

When a girl’s dedication to her future plans has taken on a frightening life of its own, parents can feel helpless to convince their daughter to adopt humane standards for herself. For their part, girls are often surprised when adults encourage them to take it easy because they feel that they are simply doing what has been asked of them all along and that overdoing it should be praised, not criticized. Girls will sometimes complain that their efforts aren’t sufficiently appreciated or that the adults have changed their values midstream.

If I’m describing your daughter, she might be able to hear your suggestion that she ease up when you couch your advice in forward-looking terms. Acknowledge her impressive efforts (and the results of those efforts) and that she’s doing everything she can to create a terrific array of future options. Next, consider saying, “We know that this is a demanding time and understand that it isn’t the moment to ease up. Given all that you are doing now, you can look forward to a less demanding road ahead. Before the end of high school, you should be able to bring some balance back into your life.” Put this way, most girls can tolerate the suggestion that their current intensity need not last forever.

Even girls who don’t overdo everything can tax themselves by studying inefficiently. When twenty flash cards would do, they make a hundred. When taking two practice tests would suffice, they take five. Girls who specialize in academic overkill are often reluctant to change tactics that they have seen work, but they can be receptive to advice focused on the next step in their academic success. You might say, “The way you study now has worked well for you. The next step will be to become more efficient in your approach to studying. Soon you’ll start to do what the cleverest students do: figure out how to do less while still bringing home the grades you’re used to.” Girls who overperform and overstudy often lose sight of the possibility that studying smarter might not mean studying harder.

If your daughter’s forward drive crowds out all joy in her life, persists beyond any reasonable time frame, or becomes utterly irrational, consider seeking professional support. Let her know that her approach seems to be working insofar as she’s enjoying tremendous success, but express concern that she’s not able to enjoy anything else. Try to strategize about how she might bring some fun into her life and see if she can follow through on making that happen. If your daughter won’t allow herself to relax, tell her she deserves to have some fun and that you want her to talk with someone to figure out why she can’t. Consult her primary care provider or another trustworthy source for appropriate mental health referrals.

No Plan in Sight

At the other end of the spectrum, you should worry if your daughter expresses little drive toward anything at all. Occasionally, I’ll see teenagers like this in my practice. They’re often quite pleasant, but they are totally lacking in a personal plan. They’re not serious about school because they don’t have any idea what they want to do after graduation. They don’t really care if their parents ground them over grades because they feel no burning need to be with their friends on the weekends and are content to watch movies at home. They lack all of the forward thrust and energy that typically characterize adolescence.

Teenagers who lack drive aren’t the same as teenagers with plans their parents don’t like. A girl who aims to be a punk rock drummer may exasperate her parents, but they can capitalize on her agenda if needed. For example, they could offer to buy some drums or turn their garage over for band practice on the condition that she get reasonable grades. A girl’s agenda doesn’t need to appeal to her parents, and it doesn’t even need to last. In fact, teenagers frequently change their goals but can usually advance their new plans with groundwork laid by their old plans. Long story short, every teenager needs a plan.

Be concerned if your daughter has no goals—not even goals you dislike—and if her failure to think about the future seems to be cutting off options she might, ultimately, want to pursue. Many teenagers who lack a plan find their way to goals once they grow up a bit. Your aim should be to help your daughter develop her interests and to minimize the number of doors she closes while you wait for her to mature. Keep an open mind about what constitutes a reasonable plan, and encourage—or, if necessary, require—your daughter to do things she might find appealing. Some parents insist their daughter get a job or volunteer position but remain entirely flexible about where she chooses to work. Others ask their daughter to choose among a number of summer activities while making it clear that hanging out around the house is not one of them.

You can encourage your daughter to keep her options open by helping her to stay on top of her grades. Talk to the adults at her school to see if they have insight into her lack of motivation or ideas about what might inspire her. Know that even the most apathetic teens are usually motivated by something—perhaps money, access to the car, or even access to video games. I appreciate that I’m setting a very low bar here, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The damage done by a failing year of school exceeds the damage done by paying an apathetic teen for good grades. Girls can turn things around quickly when they want to, but it’s easier for them to do so if they haven’t already shot themselves in the foot academically.

Normally developing teenagers push for independence, look ahead to the next step, and even annoy adults with their vigorous pursuit of their interests. If your daughter is stuck in a state of inertia, consult her doctor about having her evaluated for a mood or substance use disorder. Indeed, if we were to take the totally unscientific approach of asking a group of seasoned clinicians to consider the case of a chronically aimless teenager, I can tell you that they would assume that she has depression, a drug problem, or both until proven otherwise. Don’t hesitate to seek support if you see no real evidence that your daughter is planning for the future. Intractable indifference occurs rarely during adolescence and should be taken very seriously.

—

It’s easy to get behind the idea that our daughters should be planning for the future. We want them to prepare for what’s ahead. Contrast that with entering the romantic world—the developmental strand we’ll address next. Most of us feel ambivalent, if not altogether unhappy, when our daughters move into the romantic arena. We remember the intensity of our own teenage crushes, worry about all that can go wrong, and know that the bliss of romance necessarily comes with the misery of heartbreak. When we imagine our daughters’ love lives we feel more protective than ever, even as we know that our input has never been less welcome. In the next chapter, we’ll consider the nature of girls’ romantic lives today and how to make sense of, and perhaps even guide, your daughter’s growth along this developmental strand.