Mary Pipher wrote Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls based on her own experience helping troubled teenage girls. Some of the girls had just entered puberty while some are already far from it. Nevertheless, they all face the same trouble.
The problems faced by teen girls now compared to 50 years ago are utterly different. Now, girls are driven into starving themselves so that they will look thin and attract boys and be popular. They have to smoke or take drugs to be cool. Girls will also be laughed at if they are still virgins.
Their parents are there for them but adolescent girls think their parents don’t understand them and are only controlling their lives. Girls now are influenced by the media to be thin and beautiful. They are influenced into consuming alcohol. They are pressured to have premarital sex.
In order for them to survive the stormy adolescent years, they need to understand themselves, to understand what they really want, who they really are, then only can they make it safely to shore.
I borrowed this book from my school’s library and read it in 2004.