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.

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.

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.

Ours is not a culture that cares much for the work of care.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

You can give them the opportunity to thrive, but when it comes to finding happiness or success, kids are really on their own.