Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers –.

I’ve come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.

The most successful people I know do their best work under any conditions, for anyone.

More than we realize, girls understand us to be saying that they must always be utterly and completely forthright. That’s a problem, especially when we combine it with the cultural injunction to be agreeable. A girl can’t actually accomplish both because, like any other human, every girl contains a world of complicated thoughts and feelings. She cannot possibly be simultaneously see-through and utterly pleasing to others.

As one of my friends put it, “My daughter has five different, extreme emotions before eight in the morning.

Thanks so much for letting me know. I am really confident that the girls will find a way to come to their own resolution.

Party parents figure that if their daughter is going to do risky things when with her friends, she’ll be safer if she and her friends do those risky things right under their noses. But party parents rob their daughter of one of the best protections she has: the ability to blame her good behavior on them.

When girls come into my office in a panic... and I can tell that they they’re just a wreck, I get out my glitter jar and I do this.” She picked up the jar and shook it fiercely the way one shakes a snow globe. The placid water immediately became a sparkling purple tempest. “And then I say to the girl, ‘Right now, this is what it’s like in your brain. So first, let’s settle your glitter.

It’s bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter – it’s worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.

You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she’s watching to help her build those skills. Swing by the couch or lean over her laptop and say, “I’m all for mindless entertainment, but you know that I’m not a big fan of shows that celebrate women for being sexy and stupid.” Your daughter may roll her eyes, but do it anyway. Girls can listen and roll their eyes at the same time.