Quotes from Rachel Simmons

There are no shortcuts to genuine friendship. Relationships are built over time.

As girls grow up and download what it means to be a culturally acceptable 'good girl,' they learn to please others at the expense of themselves. They worry about protecting relationships - and what people think of them - at all costs.

There are times in every friendship when you or your friend are too busy to call or are more focused on other relationships. It will hurt, but it's rarely personal. Making it personal usually makes things worse, and being too clingy or demanding can drive a friend even further away. Like people, friendships can get 'overworked' and need to rest.

Teaching girls to agitate over every problem implies that relationships, and people, can bend to our will.

I come from a family where happiness was seen as an 'extra,' a kind of frill to life - nice to have, but certainly not necessary and by no means paramount. Work was king. Suffering meant you were working hard. It made you worthy.

Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.

I run skills-building programs focused on healthy risk taking, failure resilience, and self-care for undergraduates around the country.

Instagram rocks. I love it, and so do the youth I work with and study.

In our million-mile-an-hour culture of never enough, working less is interpreted as working less well. This isn't always the case.

When girls can be honest with each other, they can make mistakes on their own terms and discover through experience - and not through knee-jerk adult intervention - what a healthy friendship should look like.

The Internet has transformed the landscape of children's social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards and intensifying their reach and power.

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.

Parents of all girls must simultaneously explain overt and covert sexism, name it whenever they see it, and teach their daughters to do the same.

Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.

Being jealous of a friend doesn't mean you hate her or wish her ill.

Feeling jealous doesn't make you a terrible person.

Reacting to every slight or letdown is neither realistic nor fair; it sends the message that we expect the other person to be flawless in relationship. But no one is perfect, and no one relationship can ever meet all our needs.

When your child believes you really respect what he's feeling, he'll be much more likely to trust you.

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.

Launching a kid into college is about more than having the money to pay for it. Parents invest so much of their time and identities in the process that it can feel like a part time job. For many parents, the college your child ends up attending becomes a parenting grade.

A healthy friendship is one where you share your true feelings without fearing the end of the relationship. It's also one where you sometimes have to let things that bug you slide. The tough moments will make you wiser about yourself and each other. They will also make you stronger and closer as friends.

Teasing is often healthy and fun, not to mention an important part of interpersonal and individual development. But when it's abused, 'just kidding' contains a disturbing logic: If I didn't mean it, it didn't happen.

As parents, we must be mindful that our actions are matching our words.

We learn best when we're intrinsically motivated - that is, when we try something new for the sheer enjoyment of the experience.