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. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
When you’re motivated by external rewards, it’s often because you’re trying to accomplish goals you didn’t create yourself. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
In our million-mile-an-hour culture of never enough, working less is interpreted as working less well. This isn’t always the case. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
Launching a kid into college is about more than having the money to pay for it. Parents invest so much of their time and identities in the process that it can feel like a part time job. For many parents, the college your child ends up attending becomes a parenting grade. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
You can give them the opportunity to thrive, but when it comes to finding happiness or success, kids are really on their own. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
Taking full advantage of all that college offers can be tough for teens facing a major life transition under pressure to perform. Perhaps we should all lower our expectations and let kids find their way. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
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.’ Rachel Simmons Read Quote
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. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
I’ve spent years in therapy excavating my endless, often fruitless drive to overachieve. I have learned that being successful hasn’t made me happy. It’s just made me successful. I even call myself a recovering overachiever. Rachel Simmons Read Quote
