What Parents of Teen Girls Should Be Talking to Them About

Imagine your daughter walking into high school. She is excited about the freedom ahead of her, beginning to think about college and careers, joining clubs, playing sports and slowly discovering the person she wants to become. We tell her to work hard, speak up, take opportunities, manage her time and distinguish herself, because these are the years when the world begins asking more of her and when some of the choices she makes start shaping what comes next.

At almost exactly the same time, something else enters her life that we talk about surprisingly little: her body begins asking something different of her too. For some girls, menstruation is relatively uneventful. For others, several days of the month may include cramps, headaches, fatigue, disrupted sleep, or difficulty concentrating. A systematic review involving more than 21,000 young women found menstrual pain to be very common, with about one in five reporting school or university absence because of it and roughly four in ten reporting that it negatively affected classroom concentration or performance.

Yet the world does not rearrange itself around those days. The chemistry test still happens, the soccer game is still played, the speech still needs to be delivered, and the college application will eventually record the grade without revealing what was happening in her body that day, how it may have affected her energy, concentration or emotions, or whether any of those changes influenced the way she prepared, responded or made decisions. This means that some girls begin navigating an invisible variable in their lives at almost exactly the same time we begin measuring their performance more seriously. I am not sure we ever explain that to them in quite those words.

Then Life Changes Again: Career, Family and Motherhood

Now move that girl forward ten or fifteen years. She has finished college, begun building a career and is finally starting to see where her work might take her. For women who want children, this may also be when pregnancy, childbirth and the first years of motherhood enter the picture, bringing physical recovery, caregiving and deeply personal decisions at the same time their professional lives are gaining momentum.

Research on the “child penalty” shows that men’s and women’s employment and earnings often begin to diverge after children arrive, with a larger and more persistent effect on women. Biology is only part of that story; caregiving patterns, workplace structures, family decisions and social expectations matter too. Behind those statistics are women making very human choices about whether to step back, keep working, or find something in between, often after discovering that motherhood has changed what they value more than they expected.

What matters is not which choice a woman makes, but whether she recognizes that family decisions can also become decisions about time, identity, money, professional momentum and opportunity. The more consciously she understands those tradeoffs, the more intentionally she can choose the life she wants.

Years Later: Menopause Meets the Leadership Years

Move her forward another twenty years. She is now in her forties or fifties, and professionally she may possess what she could never have possessed at twenty-five: decades of experience, judgment, confidence, relationships and knowledge accumulated through actually doing the work. This may be precisely the period when bigger leadership opportunities finally become realistic.

Then perimenopause and menopause may begin. For some women, the transition is mild, while for others it can bring significant changes in sleep, energy, concentration and physical comfort. ACOG notes that mood symptoms during perimenopause can include low energy, irritability and difficulty concentrating, while disrupted sleep can affect memory, decision-making and everyday functioning.

The part that fascinates me is the timing: just as she may finally have accumulated the experience to take on her most consequential professional roles, her body can introduce another transition she may never have been taught to expect.

When I place these three stages beside one another, that is what I cannot stop thinking about. During adolescence, the body changes while a girl is learning how to compete. During the family-building years, it may change again while she is establishing a career and deciding what kind of life she wants. Later, another transition may arrive during the years when her experience could position her to lead at the highest level. We talk about each of these things separately, but rarely as part of one woman's life.

Thinking about these three stages has made me wonder whether preparing girls for the future should include not only telling them they can achieve anything, but also helping them understand themselves well enough to recognize how their bodies, relationships, ambitions and choices may intersect along the way.

What I Want Parents of Teen Girls to Understand

There is something extraordinarily empowering about understanding what may lie ahead before you encounter it for the first time.

One of the most important qualities we teach in leadership is self-awareness, and I think its value reaches far beyond understanding personality or emotions. Self-awareness means noticing yourself closely enough to recognize patterns, understanding what influences the way you feel and make decisions, and being able to separate what is happening around you from the story you immediately tell yourself about it.

For a teenage girl, that might simply mean noticing whether there are patterns in her energy, mood or concentration rather than deciding that a difficult day means she is emotional or incapable. Years later, it might mean recognizing that a decision about motherhood is also touching her ambitions, identity and priorities, and giving herself permission to think honestly about those tradeoffs. Later still, it might mean recognizing a physical or emotional change as something worth understanding rather than immediately interpreting it as evidence that she is losing her edge.

There is something almost magical about awareness because it creates a small space between what happens to us and what we decide to do about it. We cannot choose when a period arrives, predict exactly how motherhood will affect us, or know decades in advance what menopause will feel like, but we can become increasingly skilled at noticing ourselves and making choices with intention rather than simply reacting to circumstances we do not understand.

That may be the message I most want parents of teenage girls to carry from this. We can let them know that their bodies, ambitions, relationships and choices may intersect at different stages of their lives, and that understanding those intersections gives them more agency.

We spend enormous energy preparing girls for the world they are entering, from the classes they should take to the colleges they should consider and the careers they might pursue. Perhaps another part of preparing them is teaching them to become deeply curious about themselves, because while many circumstances along the road will remain outside their control, the awareness with which they make their choices does not have to be.