Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.

Intelligent resistance keeps the true self alive

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.

Parents wrongly assume that their daughters live in a world similar to the one they experienced as adolescents. They are dead wrong. Their daughters live in a media-drenched world floded with junk values. As girls turn from their parents, they turn to this world for guidance about how to be an adult.

I'm a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I'm carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.

The two most radical things you can do in America are to slow down, and to talk to each other. If you do these things, you will improve your country.

Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.