Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.

In all the years I've been a therapist, I've yet to meet one girl who likes her body.

Teenage girls are extremists who see the world in black-and- white terms, missing shades of gray. Life is either marvelous or notworth living. School is either pure torment or is going fantastically. Other people are either great or horrible, and they themselves are wonderful or pathetic failures. One day a girl will refer to herself as "the goddess of social life" and the next day she'll regret that she's the "ultimate in nerdosity.

One important reason to stay calm is that calm parents hear more. Low-key, accepting parents are the ones whose children keep talking.

With meditation I found a ledge above the waterfall of my thoughts.

Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s: One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence, most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying to develop intimate relations with them.