Rachel Simmons

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.

Small changes lead to big ones. But big changes - trying to become a different person overnight - usually lead to defeat.

Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.

There's no question that aggression can be learned through modeling. When a child sees her parent behave in a particular way, she may be tempted or even rewarded for being that way.

I realized that I wanted a Rhodes Scholarship, not because I wanted to go to graduate school but because I wanted to win a famous award. Quitting forced me to realize I was on the wrong track and that I had lost touch with who I was and what I cared about.

Being jealous of a friend doesn't mean you hate her or wish her ill.

Feeling jealous doesn't make you a terrible person.

Girls who use jokes to be nasty are often hiding other feelings they are struggling to express.

At the end of the day, most parents have more in common with their teens than they realize. Let's retire the bootstrap mentality and stop telling our teens that their stress is self-imposed.

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.

If smart phones had been around for women in the 1950s, 'The Feminine Mystique' might never have been written. The depression and ennui of housewives would have been blunted by Pinterest and Facebook.

I run skills-building programs focused on healthy risk taking, failure resilience, and self-care for undergraduates around the country.