Top 60 Rachel Simmons Quotes

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.

It never hurts to tell your teen they matter more than their looks.

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.

Girls who use jokes to be nasty are often hiding other feelings they are struggling to express.

Classroom discussion is where you learn how to debate an idea and stick with an opinion, even when others don’t agree – and not take it personally, either.

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

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

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

Jealousy is unavoidable – it’s part of the price we pay for intimacy.

Prom culture is now painstakingly documented on sites such as Instagram and Facebook, exacerbating the angst of the uninvited.

Oversharing online can make you feel connected to someone in the moment, but when the moment is over, the only thing that has really changed is that you just gave a piece of yourself away.

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.

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.

Girls may love movies about fairytale princes, but their most captivating romance is with their friends.

Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.

When I did the original research for ‘Odd Girl Out,’ I asked every bullied girl I interviewed to tell me what she needed most from her family. The answer truly surprised me. It wasn’t having the best solutions, calling the school, or trying to act like everything was okay. It was empathy.

I am a recovering rat racer.

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

Knowing that your parents are okay makes you feel secure in the world.

Just like people date and break up, friends break up, too. ‘Best friends forever’ rarely ever happens; it’s just that no one talks about it.

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.

Secrecy is hardly new on Planet Girl: as many an eye-rolling boy will tell you, girls excel at eluding the prying questions of grown ups. And who can blame them? From an early age, young women learn that to be a ‘good girl,’ they must be nice, avoid conflict, and make friends with everyone.

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

Isn’t prom just a fun dance that hardworking students deserve? Sure, but it’s also an event where girls internalize damaging cultural messages.

When we frame women’s choices in terms of extreme work or extreme mothering, women think they have to define themselves in terms of a single goal, everything else be damned.

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

Somebody once told me I treated my smart phone like Wilson, the volleyball Tom Hanks turns into a friend when he’s stranded on a desert island in that movie ‘Castaway.’ It’s an apt comparison: parenting a toddler occasionally feels like being marooned, and your phone is your only connection to the rest of the world.

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.

Girls must understand not only their moral obligation but their power to be allies to each other at parties and other potentially unsafe spaces for girls.

If parents shield their children from real feelings, kids falsely imagine their parents are in constant control of themselves – and may try to emulate them.

Happiness doesn’t just happen. It must be pursued. And if the pursuit of the ‘ultimate currency’ of happiness helps us choose occupations that confer present and future benefit, and these choices, in turn, motivate us to succeed, this strikes me as perhaps the most powerful non-cognitive skill of all.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.

Real body satisfaction starts when you learn to see yourself for more than your weight.

Parents are teachers as much as caregivers, and our children learn to navigate life’s challenges by watching us. Kids can get a road map for how to handle painful emotions.

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

If the Internet has been called a great democratizer, perhaps what social media has done is let anyone enter the beauty pageant. Teens can cover up pimples, whiten teeth, and even airbrush with the swipe of a finger, curating their own image to become prettier, thinner, and hotter.

Raising your hand when you’re not sure you have the right answer helps you take risks with your ideas and put yourself out there.

Sometimes true girl power means accepting that we are actually vulnerable and even powerless – then figuring out how to adapt and have our needs met in other ways.

For the self-conscious or insecure girl, technology can become a crippling addiction, an insatiable hunger not just for connection but the elusive promise of being liked by everyone.

There are many ways to be the odd girl out. Your pain can brief or lasting, visible to all or none, with one or many. One of the longest, quietest ways to be the odd girl out is to be friends with two girls who are closer to each other than to you.

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.

You might be thinking that some people are just naturally good at speaking up, and others just aren’t – game over. Not true. Speaking up is a skill that you have to learn like any other, whether it’s speaking Spanish or doing calculus or changing a tire.

Feeling jealous doesn’t make you a terrible person.

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.

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.

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

In the so-called age of girl power, we have failed to cut loose our most regressive standards of female success – like pleasing others and looking sexy – and to replace them with something more progressive – like valuing intelligence and hard work.

Intrinsic motivation is one of learning’s most precious resources. It bolsters us to stick out the tough moments of a challenge and pursue what we love to do.

Our friends are barometers of our own lives: We look to our BFFs to better understand how we’re doing ourselves. Our friends help us make sense of what we have, what we aspire to, and what we truly long for.

Harassment is one of puberty’s darkest, most unreported rites of passage.

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

My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings – girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.

If more students use self-compassion to reframe their failures, they may discover more nourishing sources of motivation and healthier strategies to pursue their goals.

Many girls aspire to a version of selfhood that puts a psychological glass ceiling on their potential to succeed. They suffer from what I call the Curse of the Good Girl: the pressure to be liked by everyone, generous to a fault, and flawless at everything you do.