Rachel Simmons Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.
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Gossip harms relationships and that's why it's bad. While we all do it at times, there's a point where it crosses the line and becomes bullying if it damages friendships and causes people to dislike someone.
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Classroom teachers can play an active role in instructing children about appropriate conduct online, even where there is no school policy on the issue. By promoting public discussion about their lives on the Internet, teachers and students can work together to share advice and develop 'rules to type by' or similar Internet-minded guidance.
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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.
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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.
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Despite girls' sparkling resumes - including rates of college enrollment and high school grades that outstrip boys - sexism is a barrier that still leaves girls ambivalent about power. Opening doors has not amounted to ambition to lead for many of them, even those with options, networks, and resources. Rachel Simmons
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Sadness, irritability, fatigue, and distractedness are among the most common side effects of grief while parenting.
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If we want to end a culture rampant with harassment, we must listen to the adult women who are speaking out courageously. We must also make room for girls to speak: If we listened, we'd find that many middle schoolers are trying to tell us, 'Me too.'
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You don't learn how to say 'hey, I have a problem,' but you also don't learn how to hear it. There's a total breakdown of how females talk to one another. It's very disconcerting for leadership because it means you don't talk to each other; you talk about each other.
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Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.
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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.
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Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.
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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.
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Teaching girls to agitate over every problem implies that relationships, and people, can bend to our will.
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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.
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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.
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I was a single mom by choice at 37, and if my love life hadn't quite panned out, most everything else had. I was a classic 'amazing girl' - driven, social, and relentlessly well-rounded - reveling in the fruits of post-Title IX America: an all-metro athlete in high school, Rhodes Scholar at 24, best-selling author by 27.
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When kindness comes at the expense of truth, it is not a kindness worth having. And when generosity leads to silence or abuse, it is not a generosity worth giving.
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These days, the selfie and its main outlet, Instagram, generally come in for much adult loathing. But consider this: The selfie is a tiny pulse of girl pride—a shout-out to the self. … The selfie suggests something in picture form—I think I look [beautiful] [happy] [funny] [sexy]. Do you?—that a girl could never get away with saying. It puts the gaze of the camera squarely in a girl’s hands, and along with it, the power to influence the photo’s interpretation.
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Sometimes comparing can be a good thing: it can inspire us to work harder and reach farther. But for the most part, excessive measuring yourself up against others - especially when it becomes a way to put yourself down - is a colossal waste of time. It's a dead end. It won't make you do anything except feel horrible.
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All around me, I see girls forced to become rat racers in the College Application Industrial Complex, the subculture where students must craft themselves into the perfect specimens for college admission and often lose their authenticity, love of learning, and sense of self in the process.