Transition To Adulthood Quotes

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

Transitioning to adulthood is hard enough. Having your friends judge your progress doesn't make it any easier.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—

Teenagers often manage their feelings by dumping the uncomfortable ones on their parents,

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.

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

People make choices, choices have consequences.

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

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.

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.

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

sharing one’s true feelings at home makes it a lot easier to be charming out in public.

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

heavy social demands can undermine what cultural anthropologists call “sustainable routines,” the predictable patterns of daily life that go a long way toward reducing stress.

If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting.

Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another’s lives?

if you feel you must criticize your daughter’s friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.

I’d had a less tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood, but somewhere in my twenties I feel like I got stalled in the process and now I’m drifting, marking time without any great passion to move forward.

Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve- if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew. And yet, for the Count, when the doors to Anna's bedroom opened and Sofia stepped forward in her gown, at that very moment she crossed the threshold into adulthood. On one side of that divide was a girl of five or ten or twenty with a quiet demeanor and a whimsical imagination who relied upon him for companionship and counsel; while on the other side was a young woman of discernment and grace who need rely on no one but herself.

under the sway of social influence, teenagers don’t disregard the issue of rules completely. In my experience they still think about it, but in the wrong way. Instead of reflecting on why we have rules, teens focus on trying not to get caught while breaking them.

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.' I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself.

while it was to be expected that any child would lose this sparkle little by little in the inevitable transition to adulthood, Simonopio lost it suddenly, like a light going out, without giving them the opportunity to gradually get used to the new person who emerged in the blink of an eye.

While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves. —ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence

we learned that girls are much more likely to seek help for a suffering friend if they can count on adults to respect their tribal loyalties.

Girls will often set aside their own wishes to help a needy friend.

Your daughter works hard every day to harness powerful and unpredictable emotions so that she can get on with doing everything else she means to do.

Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should.

researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked.

People don’t do nice things for people who are mean to them. Better for your daughter to learn this lesson before she leaves your home than after she is out on her own.

When teens are trapped with parents who would rather flaunt their power than negotiate on even minor points, it doesn’t always end so well.

A person stops maturing at the age that they start abusing substances,

girls know when they’re stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—

So if your teenage daughter is developing normally, you are living with someone who secretly worries that she is crazy and who might have the psychological assessment results of a psychotic adult.

In the United States, thirteen-year-old Jewish boys often mark the transition to adulthood with a bar mitzvah, involving a rather elaborate ceremony that includes singing a passage from the ancient Torah, followed by a celebration of dancing to hip-hop music and gorging on dessert. Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea mark the same transition by participating in the Flute Ceremony, which includes playing ritual flutes and performing fellatio on older boys and elders of their tribe. Imagine if the Sambian and American Jewish boy suddenly changed places. We’d witness how a momentous source of pride to members of one culture could be a totally meaningless or humiliating experience to members of another, because the behaviors and achievements that confer self-esteem do so only to the extent that we embrace a cultural worldview that deems them worthy.

There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.” Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should. Parents of teenagers need supportive partners and friends to prop them up when they feel that they just can’t take one more push-off. Knowing that you can serve as a reliable, safe base allows your daughter to venture out into the world; having the strength to stay in place when your daughter clings to and rejects you in short order usually requires the loving support of adult allies.

One explanation is that popularity brings hard work, regardless of how girls come by it. Girls who are at the center of large tribes have a lot of social connections to maintain and often run into loyalty conflicts.

Personal discretion, respect for our daughters’ privacy, or even competitive feelings within tight communities make it hard for parents to talk with one another about the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers.

By some definitions I am a millennial. I was born in 1980 and entered adulthood in the early 2000s, and my transition from child to adult lasted over a decade. However, I don’t identify as a millennial. If I had been born five months earlier I would have been branded Generation X, a label I don’t feel a strong connection to either. And no brand savvy sociologist came up with a term catchy enough to enter the zeitgeist for the in-betweeners born on the cusp.

We don’t enter adulthood as fully formed adults, nor do we enter adulthood as fully formed readers. When I graduated, I knew I still had a lot of growing up to do, but nobody told me I had to grow up as a reader too. Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself.

Girls also use online environments to try on personas that don’t really match their actual personalities. By posting risqué comments or images that suggest sophistication, girls sometimes conduct digital experiments in parting with childhood.

The sense of adventure and curiosity to see what the future holds is the other side of serenity. It, too, is a spiritual state most attractive in people in transition, whether entering adulthood or preparing for death. -Sexuality and Spiritual Growth

Other cultures make a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood; there are rites of passages and initiation ceremonies to mark these transitions. People expect and are willing to expose young people to hardship and pain, because it helps them grow.

In good marriages, partners can help their children appreciate what they should and shouldn’t take personally in the other parent’s behavior. My husband has told our daughters that I’ve been clean crazy for as long as he’s known me and that he stopped taking it personally years ago.

shame is one of the last places we, as parents, want to land with our kids. Indeed, the capacity to shame a child is one of the most dangerous weapons in our parenting arsenal. Shame goes after a girl’s character, not her actions. It goes after who she is, not what she did. Shame has toxic, lasting effects and no real benefits. Once shamed, teens are left two terrible options: a girl can agree with the shaming parent and conclude that she is, indeed, the bad one, or she can keep her self-esteem intact by concluding that the parent is the bad one. Either way, someone loses.

Having used you as their emotional dumping ground, they are prepared to return to school and play the part of the good citizen. Indeed, they may be able to act as a good citizen at school precisely because they are spending some of their time imagining the colorful complaints they will share once their school day has ended.

So far, here’s the picture I’ve painted of adolescent girls: aloof, withdrawn, and, sometimes, surprisingly mean. There’s truth to this picture, but for parents it’s not the whole story. Being pushed away is only the half of it. Raising a teenage girl becomes that much more stressful when she interrupts days of distance with moments of intense warmth and intimacy.

I think you grow up twice, The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don't get to choose when it happens. But if the triumph of this weight over wonder makes the first passage into adulthood, the second is the rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering-despite everything. And this second passage doesn't happen on its own. It's a choice, not an inevitability. It is something you have to deliberately find, and value, and protect.And you can't just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.

girls told us that they would be open to telling an adult if a friend showed signs of an eating disorder, except for one thing: they didn’t want to be seen as disloyal. They were fiercely committed to supporting one another and keeping one another’s secrets, and they worried that telling an adult about a troubling change in a peer’s eating would be a social transgression.

Raising a young woman will be one of the most vexing, delightful, exhausting, and fulfilling things you will ever do. Sometimes all on the same day. The job is hard enough even under the best conditions, and anyone doing a hard job deserves support. When we get that support, when we understand the developmental tour de force that is adolescence, we can truly enjoy and empower our girls.

As we know, when teens say that a girl is popular, they’re usually saying that she’s powerful. And when she’s powerful, it’s usually because she’s willing to be mean and everyone knows it. If your daughter mentions that a girl is popular, ask, “Is she popular or just powerful? Do kids like her, or are they scared of her?” Give your daughter a good reason to take popularity off of its pedestal.

There’s no excuse for either girl’s behavior, but there’s an explanation: as a culture, we do a terrible job of helping girls figure out what to do when they are mad. As far as girls know, they can either be a total doormat—think Cinderella—or flat-out cruel like Cinderella’s stepsisters. We rarely help girls master assertion—the art of standing up for oneself while respecting the rights of others.

For some people, the transition to adulthood happens almost overnight. It certainly did with me. I’ve met other orphans. We are kids who can’t even pinpoint when this change happened. We have felt like old people since our fathers died. Our mothers looked to us for big decisions. They relied on us. Before we ever went out on our first date, we were already acting like a retired father of four. All our paychecks went toward rent. All our spare time went toward helping to keep a home fire burning. We got so good at pretending we were older than our age that we started to believe it. We begin to hate our own reflections because they betray how we see ourselves. The mirror portrays us too young. We are not children; we are ancient. We’re fifty years old thirty-five years before our fiftieth birthday.

Few moments in life spark more maturation than when a young person recognizes that her parents have strengths and limitations that were in place long before she came along and that will be there long after she moves out. In letting go of the dream of turning you into the perfect parent, your daughter recovers a lot of energy that has been devoted to being angry with you, feeling hurt by you, or trying to change you.

As a society and as parents we face a challenge without precedent. We have to help girls and boys make a transition to a gendered adulthood, to adult life as women and men in a culture in which women can do anything, including being rocket scientists, and men can do anything, including staying home to raise a baby. We have to find ways to value and cherish gender differences without restricting freedom of opportunity.

You should start by allowing your daughter more privacy than she had as a child. Interestingly, findings from a research study that examined how much parents seek to know about their teenagers—and how much teenagers choose to share—suggest that we grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters. We are more likely to ask girls what they’re up to behind closed doors, and our daughters, more than our sons, answer our questions.

Teens are physically safer than ever and are making less risky choices than generations past. It’s part of a larger picture of growing up more slowly rather than an overall shift toward responsibility, but it is still undeniably good that they are safer. Other trends are more troubling: How can we protect our kids from anxiety, depression, and loneliness in our digital age? What can parents and colleges do to ease the transition from high school to college when fewer students have experienced independence

Offering to help with carpooling will come at the cost of your time, gas budget, and likely your sleep, but you will learn more about what is going on in your daughter’s personal life in the time it takes to drop off her friends and get back to your home than you will in three weeks of asking about how things are going. Wise chauffeurs know it’s best to really play the part; trying to join the conversation or ask questions usually breaks the spell and ends the chatter or—even worse—gets the girls to take the conversation to their phones.

The major first point to understand in making sense of the moral reasoning of emerging adults, then, is that most do not appeal to a moral philosophy, tradition, or ethic as an external guide by which to think and live in moral terms. Few emerging adults even seem aware that such external, coherent approaches or resources for moral reasoning exist. Instead, for most emerging adults, the world consists of so many individuals, and each individual decides for themselves what is and isn’t moral and immoral. Morality is ultimately a matter of personal opinion.

In practice, most teens spent a few years transitioning to adulthood living away from home as apprentices. In the Middle Ages, some spent those years training to be a knight, as did, I will note, my D&D-playing nerd friends seven hundred years later. But the difference was that my friends and I weren’t spending all our time with adults. Until the twentieth century, teens lived very much in the adult world as they trained and worked. They didn’t have the opportunity to develop their own unique identity and culture. By the twentieth century, they did. Adolescence was born, and D&D quickly followed.

The quarter century following World War II was a ‘golden age’ for most workers and their families…, even for men with a high school education or less…. Well-paying manufacturing jobs allowed many men to support a family on a single income” (Danziger and Ratner 2010, 134). This working-class success story characterized black diaspora labor as well (Gregory 2005, chapter 3; Sugrue 2004), though not in equal measure. African Americans working on the docks, in the steel mills, and on the auto-assembly shop floor were excluded from the skilled unions and relegated to the “dirtiest and least desirable jobs” (Durr 2003,

Don’t hesitate to validate your daughter’s experience when she complains to you about another adult. Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, her description is likely accurate; teenagers are particularly clear-eyed and can provide descriptions of adults’ characters that would put a Brontë sister to shame. If your daughter has been lucky enough to spend her childhood surrounded by reasonable grown-ups, she may be confused when a less-than-impressive one first crosses her path. Spare her the trouble of doubting her perceptions while calmly acknowledging that she will need to learn to deal with all sorts of people.

counterparts. Although the lower-SES average is higher overall, higher-SES white men have the highest reported levels of binge drinking, of any drug use, and of drug use other than marijuana, followed in each instance by lower-SES white men. In fact, within SES levels, white averages exceed the African American: 3.8 versus 2.9 for those of lower-SES origins; 3.0 versus 1.6 for those of higher origins. This pattern hardly squares with the popular perception of lower-SES African Americans as the face of urban disadvantage, fueled by the media's racialized portrayal of inner-city drug abuse, dealing, and violence (see, for example, Alexander 2010). The

Study Questions Define the terms deaf and hard of hearing. Why is it important to know the age of onset, type, and degree of hearing loss? What is the primary difference between prelingual and postlingual hearing impairments? List the four major types of hearing loss. Describe three different types of audiological evaluations. What are some major areas of development that are usually affected by a hearing impairment? List three major causes of hearing impairment. What issues are central to the debate over manual and oral approaches? Define the concept of a Deaf culture. What is total communication, and how can it be used in the classroom? Describe the bilingual-bicultural approach to educating pupils with hearing impairments. In what two academic areas do students with hearing impairments usually lag behind their classmates? Why is early identification of a hearing impairment critical? Why do professionals assess the language and speech abilities of individuals with hearing impairments? List five indicators of a possible hearing loss in the classroom. What are three indicators in children that may predict success with a cochlear implant? Identify five strategies a classroom teacher can use to promote communicative skills and enhance independence in the transition to adulthood. Describe how to check a hearing aid. How can technology benefit individuals with a hearing impairment?

All relationships come with ambivalence. Knowing someone well means that we enjoy the best of what he or she has to offer and must reconcile ourselves to being frustrated and disappointed at times, too. Acknowledging your own crazy spots (and, perhaps, your partner’s) welcomes your daughter to these facts of life. Don’t hesitate to extend this same lesson to adults beyond your home as well. When we help girls let go of the idea that there are perfect people or perfect relationships, they move into a vastly more mature way of dealing with people as they are and the world as it is. And on your end, too, remembering how to hold on to good feelings when we are angry or disappointed will come in handy because sometimes your daughter will do things she’s not supposed to do.

There’s something to be said for detaching from others. When we are alone and disconnected from technology, we can reflect on our feelings, vent silently to ourselves or our diaries, and imagine what we might say or do while considering the impact of any real action. Everyone who grew up without digital technology recalls having written a letter we’re glad we never sent or having a rant we’re glad no one heard. Using private time to express and get to know a feeling lets the feeling come down to size, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and acquaints us with our internal resources for managing distress. Social disconnection also allows time to develop a considered plan about how (or if!) we want to act on hard feelings. In other words, we have time to keep our thoughts and our feelings separate from our actions.

Talking about your crazy spots not only saves your daughter the work of trying to change your fully formed personality, it also builds her emotional intelligence. In its more basic form, your daughter’s emotional intelligence will help her to consider competing mental states. But when you teach her about your crazy spots, you are taking her emotional intelligence up several notches: you are inviting her to think about your motivations in a broad perspective that includes past experiences and relationships. By encouraging her to expand her insight beyond what’s happening in the moment, you’ll advance your daughter from varsity level emotional intelligence (“Why does Mom act psychotic when I track mud through the house?”) to the pros (“Mom acts psychotic because she didn’t have to share her space when she was growing up, so she doesn’t always handle it well now”).

When the subjects arrived at the psychology lab, they were sent into individual dressing rooms with full-length mirrors. Half of the dressing rooms contained bathing suits (one-piece for the women, trunks for the men) and half contained sweaters, all of which were available in a wide range of sizes. Once the subjects put on the assigned clothing, they were told to hang out in the dressing room for fifteen minutes before they filled out a questionnaire about whether or not they would want to purchase the item. While they waited, they were asked, in order to help the researchers use the time efficiently, to complete a math test “for an experimenter in the Department of Education.” As you’ve already guessed, the psychologists weren’t helping their colleagues in the Department of Education. They were measuring whether taking a math test while wearing a bathing suit would affect the women’s scores.

The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions. When you leave home, if you had one, when you start out on your own, you're someone who was a child for most of her life, though even what it means to be a child is ill-defined. Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did. Still, out on your own, you're a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange: you're learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination.

On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and sex. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care. And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life. As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive (that’s in chapter 3).

Researchers who study peer relationships have found that there are actually two different kinds of peer popularity. Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates. These two distinct groups emerge in studies that employ a simple peer-nomination method to examine social dynamics in school settings. Girls are given lists naming all the girls in their class (and boys are given lists naming all the boys) and asked to circle the names of the three girls they like the most, the three girls they like the least, and the girls who are considered to be popular. With this technique, researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked. In fact, the disliked-but-popular girls are described by their classmates as domineering, aggressive, and stuck up, while the liked-but-unpopular girls are described as kind and trustworthy. A third group also emerges: well-liked girls who are identified by peers as being popular. They are amiable and faithful but differ from their liked-but-unpopular peers in that they aren’t easy to push around. In other words, the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master and to which we’ll return soon. So we know from the research that when teens use the term popular, they’re likely to be describing girls with perceived popularity—girls who use cruelty to gain social power. Adults would like to think that girls who are mean would be shunned by their peers, but unfortunately, the opposite tends to occur. A girl who allows herself to be mean enjoys many “friends” who are eager to stay on her good side, and she is often

It’s important to remember that teenagers form tribes with the express purpose of creating a group that doesn’t include adults, so going outside of their group to get help from an adult—even for life-threatening behavior—can feel like a huge betrayal.

OK, so in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, I’ve already pushed a few of the markers over to the other side of the line: Financially independent. College diploma, coming up. Career opportunities, plenty. Still on this side of the line: No driver’s license. No girl. Still live at home.

First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.

What is the transition from adolescence to adulthood when some of us will experience the effects of puberty twice: once against our will when we are younger and a second time with our consent when we are older? And whether or not we choose to pursue transition by a medical means, how are we served by a narrative of maturity equivalent to a reduction in risk when simply being trans in a transphobic culture is risky behavior?

From the outside, looking at a woman objectively, there’s no obvious single transition point which marks the beginning of this odyssey. Menarche, the first occurrence of menstruation and a gateway to adulthood, is easily identifiable; pregnancy, a gateway to motherhood, is even more visible. But the features of menopause — that final, great biological upheaval in a woman’s life — aren’t nearly so obvious from the outside and are often deliberately concealed. To add to the complexity, the passage lasts for a much longer period of time. Usually, it starts during our “midlife” years. Perimenopause, sometimes called “menopause transition,” kicks off several years before menopause itself, and is defined as the time during which our ovaries gradually begin to make less estrogen. This usually happens in our forties, but in some instances it can begin in our thirties or, in rare cases, even earlier. During perimenopause, the ovaries are effectively winding down, and irregularities are common. Some months women continue to ovulate — sometimes even twice in the same cycle — while in other months no egg is released. Though four to six years is the average span, perimenopause can last for as little as a year or it can go on for more than ten. Menopause is usually declared after twelve months have passed without a period. In the US, the average age at which menopause is recorded is fifty-one years, though around one in a hundred women reach this point before the age of forty. Four years is the typical duration of menopause, but around one in ten women experiences physical and psychological challenges that last for up to twelve years — challenges which include depression, anxiety, insomnia, hot flashes, night sweats, and reduced libido. Sometimes, these challenges are significant; at their most severe they can present as risks to physical or mental health, and women need help to manage them.

There's plenty of advice we can give to our youth, but to me the most important is to start now to live a healthy lifestyle. As you age, it won't matter how important, wealthy or powerful you are; you will not enjoy life unless you have your health.

research shows that intense use of digital technology can impair young girls’ social skills and interfere with their healthy, face-to-face relationships.

In the words of my wise colleague, psychologist Renée Spencer, girls are “exquisitely attuned” to the adults they know well. And at times, they use their insider’s knowledge to be surprisingly mean. Your daughter may already give you the cold shoulder as part of moving on from her generally pleasant but, as far as she’s concerned, childish relationship with you. Being mean allows your daughter to take her departure from childhood a step further; she’s not just shutting you out, she’s actively pushing you away.

Should your daughter cross a line with you, or catch you feeling vulnerable and unable to take her teasing in stride, you don’t just have to sit back and take it. If you can gather your wits in the moment, you might respond with “Ouch” or “Wow, that’s mean” or “That’s not how we talk to one another in this family.” If she gets defensive, looks at you blankly, or stomps off in a huff, commend yourself for doing your job. What job is this? The one where you remind your daughter that no self-respecting person will enjoy her company when she treats people the way she just treated you.

I’ve only been able to identify one clear pattern when it comes to the areas where girls seem much less capable than we’d expect: they can be especially wary of tasks that involve dealing with adults outside the family. For example, some girls become paralyzed when they are expected to manage payment at a salon or call to reschedule an orthodontic appointment.

you tense up every time you try to interact with your daughter because you expect her to be prickly, you should consider the possibility that something’s really wrong.

If you tense up every time you try to interact with your daughter because you expect her to be prickly, you should consider the possibility that something’s really wrong.

Unfortunately, it is not widely known that the symptoms of depression in teenagers are rarely the same as the symptoms in adults. Instead of being sad and gloomy, depressed teens are more likely to be highly irritable with most people, most of the time.

Teenagers and toddlers have a lot in common—I’ve heard some parents refer to their teens as “toddlers on hormones”—with a key commonality being their need to establish that they are an independent state while still submitting to the laws of the reigning government. When your daughter was a toddler, this took the form of loudly refusing to take a bath while simultaneously stripping down and heading toward the tub. As a teenager, she rolls her eyes or takes a tone while doing what you asked her to do. Though your daughter’s resistance will almost certainly irritate you, consider letting it slide. More than that, you could silently admire the impressive defying-while-complying solution that allows her to be a good kid even as she expresses her opposition.

Periodically, your daughter’s eye rolling or tone might strike you as provocative and rude—designed to jerk your chain more than solve a dilemma. At these times, you might ask her to communicate her dissent in a more mature way. You could say, “I can’t stop you from rolling your eyes at me, but I think it’s rude. If you can tell me what’s wrong, we could talk about it,” or “I’m not okay with your tone—try again,” or “I’m open to negotiating, but not when you’re acting like that.” Your daughter is letting you know that she disagrees with you, and that is certainly her right. And it’s your right to expect that she will be civil while objecting.

As we know, it takes girls time to learn to be assertive. Don’t miss the opportunity to invite your daughter to practice her assertiveness skills on you.

When your daughter questions your authority, take her seriously and offer an explanation, a compromise, or your agreement.

Why do teenagers move on to risky business when they don’t meet resistance on the small stuff? Because teens want to know where the lines are and that they’ll be called out of bounds if they cross them. It’s daunting to be a teenager and have access to tempting but dangerous attractions; it’s terrifying to think that no one is watching. As one of my clinical colleagues commented, when teens like Veronica act out, they are posing the question, “So what does a girl have to do around here to get the grown-ups to act like grown-ups?

Indeed, research has long established that teens whose parents are highly permissive—whether they are indulgent, neglectful, or just reluctant to step in—are more likely to abuse substances and misbehave at school than teens whose parents articulate and enforce limits.

Three-year-olds specialize in having “mean fun”—gleefully doing things that they know will annoy their parents—but most children age out of this type of low-grade sadism.

Given that teenagers are parting with childhood and driven by the wish to be seen as mature, parents can sometimes change behavior by pointing out its immaturity. For instance, you could say, “We know that you like to tease your friends—it may seem funny now, but it probably won’t fly in high school.” Be cautious when calling a teenager’s behavior immature. Doing so can be an effective way to help girls grow up, but it can also be received as a powerful insult. There’s no upside in insulting teens (or anyone else, for that matter), so be sure you’re coming from a warm and loving place if you try this approach.

You can make it possible for your daughter to blame her good behavior on you by being warm and accessible with her in the privacy of your home and utterly grown-up (even to the point of being remote) when her friends are around. Feel free to be as kind and hospitable as your daughter can stand when her friends are around, but stay firmly in your role of boring middle-aged parent so that she can paint you as the bad guy when needed. Teens sometimes push for their parents to lighten up, but they actually count on us to act like adults.

We mostly just talk about who has crushes on who. When my friends come over, it’s really weird if my mom and dad know all that.” She and her parents came up with the solution of having her levelheaded seventeen-year-old cousin keep an eye on her digital activity. The thirteen-year-old didn’t care if her cousin knew about her pack members’ crushes.

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight her impulses and accept them; to love her parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge her mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of others while searching unceasingly for her own identity; to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than she will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations and extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge, that the individual in question does not cease to experiment and is in no hurry to close down on possibilities.

Parents tell me about it every day. They describe how a minor annoyance—such as when a girl finds out that the jeans she wants are still riding out the rinse cycle—can turn into an emotional earthquake that knocks everyone in the house off balance. They describe how their formerly mild-mannered daughter now actually screams when excited, and how their girl who was resilient at age eleven has meltdowns over small disappointments at age fourteen. And it’s not just that teenagers’ feelings are potent, they’re also erratic. I hear about how the “worst day in the history of the universe” can suddenly become the “best day, ever!” if a crush-worthy peer sends a flirty text. As one of my friends put it, “My daughter has five different, extreme emotions before eight in the morning.

Though we used to assume that the brain stopped developing somewhere around age twelve, we now know that the brain remodels dramatically during the teenage years. The renovation project follows the pattern in which the brain grew in the womb.

You must work with the assumption that every teenager secretly worries that she’s crazy.

What difficulty does this girl have?” but instead, “What girl has this difficulty?